Good afternoon friends,
I’m thinking about how I can’t separate doing from being. You are what you do, not what you think. So what have I been doing? I’ve been trying to stick to the productivity routine I had before the pandemic. Writing at least 3 pages a day, plus editing, plus typing up. At least 3 hours of work per day, on top of my day job. I have a writing system that I use to keep me accountable, whose products I’ve reviewed here. What am I supposed to do with myself if I don’t write? I don’t know who I would be without writing.
But wowee, I need some lightness in my life. I couldn’t bear to drop [the 3 pages] while working from home, so the journals I wrote in shrank, from Muji B5 Plantation Paper notebooks to the palm-sized Field Notes. I also largely stopped writing fiction, except in telegraph-like bursts on index cards. Instead I kept a strict diary. I felt like it was necessary, urgent, and important to pay attention to these historic, unprecedented, and interesting times.
Except, I paid attention to myself. My diary whines and wallows about my job, writing, money, thoughts on writing. I berated myself for not being productive and was resentful and suspicious of people who could be. I would set habits and almost immediately break them. I would then beat myself up for not sticking to them. And then, paradoxically, horribly, if I did keep them, I felt constrained. I would roll out of bed into t-shirt and yoga pants into work then out of work to lunch and a brisk walk and then back to work and then out of work to dinner and then slump into recliner to read my old favorites and remember that I had been trying to make something like this. This being that something that gives books the flavor of life. And then I’d sit at my desk and try to scratch out something that had that flavor. But what is that flavor? My writing was rotten, un-imaginative, un-fun. I questioned what I wrote. Was it needed? Was it wanted? I knew the pandemic would end, as all things do, but when? Would I be okay? What about my family, friends? When was the last time I had loved someone? These were the questions pinned to my brain as I fell asleep. Sleep rinsed away the anxious lather of the day. But then I would roll out of bed….
And now here we are at the other end (I hope). People are dying, and I’m still wrestling with writing: writing, the activity that nobody is asking you to do. I could harness every FBI and NSA satellite orbiting the Earth and peep at every living human on the planet and will never find who asked. I’m wondering if my obsession with productivity is designed to give some rigor, some flavor of responsibility, to this thing that I spend my time on Earth doing. When the rental period on my body ends and I’m filling out the customer review sheet in front of the pearly gates, will I write, “I got a lot done”? Will St. Peter’s notes in my file say, “Product not used as intended”?
The paradox of writing productivity is thus: Writing takes you out of life, which you need to stay attentive to and involved in, to have something to write about. But, if you don’t write, when you have something worth writing about, you’re not going to have the chops to pull it off.
Yet I think that if I weren’t disappointed with real life in some way, missing some essential connection from people, I wouldn’t be a writer. I have no choice LOL!
The irony of loneliness is that it is shared. It propagates when people turn inward. They may turn inward because they have no choice. Because being a friend, being a family, being a neighbor and a citizen takes work, and we could all use a nap. We share loneliness now with millions of people around the world, whose loneliness manifests as unanswered texts, seeing the future like an unlit road, hoping someone will welcome us at our destination.
But remember: loneliness thaws when you learn to look others in the ‘I’. To write things that matter to others, I go deeply inward until find something that everyone was thinking, feeling, but didn’t have the words to say. Because writing, luckily, is one way to love people from a distance.
With love,
E. C. Fuller