Oh, blech

I've been trying to write a little. For reasons that remain mysterious, I have been riddled with anxieties yesterday and today, and as is often the case for me, anxiety and feeling down/depressed often go together. And I do feel down. I hoped that trying to write would bring me out of it, as being productive in one way or another often does. I also tried a little grading of student assignments until I realized that--since everything for this week is due tomorrow--it's rather pointless to embark on that enterprise until more students have done the work.

I shoveled the driveway.

I'd have cleaned the house, but that's what I did yesterday to try to combat the anxiety/blues.

And I should have known better about trying to write in this state of mind: I'm forcing it, and consequently, I absolutely loathe and despise what I've written, even as I'm writing it.

This is why I don't think I'm a writer, only a person who occasionally writes. When I write well enough that I like the result, it happens because the story, the words, come to me and won't shut up. My dear friend the playwright Jane Shepard said of one of her plays that it woke her up in the night and wouldn't let her sleep. It kept saying, "Write this down. You have to get up and write this down"--and that the process was, she said, like taking dictation. And I've had stories like that. The one that's been published, "Birds in the Head," was like that. All the stories in that story suite were like that, in fact. And parts of the historical novel have been, too--and as soon as I start trying to make a scene happen that I know needs to happen to get the plot across the arc I know it needs to take, the result is, to me, nauseating.

Yes, yes, yes. As I've said: I know the received wisdom, that our task is to just write anyway and know that the shit can be dealt with--revised, reworked, or even thrown out wholesale--but must be gone through in order to get to the stuff that sings. I know I am too hard on myself, and that I'd be a lot more productive it I could turn the volume down on the judgmental voice inside me that sneers in disdain at my own work.

I also know I don't have to write on any specific thing: if this project isn't "speaking" to me, then I can try that one instead--and generally speaking, my essays don't require the same kind of "channeling the muse" feeling that my fiction or poems need. But a while back I wrote a post that I wasn't "feeling" it, and that is the case in spades today.

But it's too early to go to bed, in hope that tomorrow might turn out to be a better day. This whole "being retired" gig is a hell of a challenge for those of us who are not terribly driven to do much of anything but who also don't want to simply allow the devolution into killing time until it kills us.

Ach, I annoy myself. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself, but something other than wallow in my own uselessness, which is apparently what I'm doing here.