I am sitting in a library by large windows that look out at several trees being blown by the wind.
Writing on Diaryland at the library makes me feel nostalgic for the early days writing on here before I had internet at home.
I loved the ritual of it. I would show up to the library right as it opened at 10 am and make a beeline for the same computer where I always sat to pour out my feelings to this blank white box.
I have been having a hard time writing. I almost ended that sentence with "lately" but it has been a problem for a long time. Longer than my big nervous breakdown in 2019 and my several smaller breakdowns since. Longer than the inertia of covid and what feels like the collapse of civilization.
I have been not writing for long before that.
I don't have a lot of excuses for it. Just the same few that keep getting recirculated.
Part of it, I am sure, has to do with both poverty and pain. Two things that have only increased for me with time.
I am in pain now, sitting here in this comfortable library chair. I am in pain always. I never really talk about it because I can sometimes ignore it. But it is there all the time. It distracts. It keeps me from sitting still for even short periods of time.
And I am in poverty now. After my van broke down in Cincinnati, I was given an old car by a wizened old forest woman who was going to donate it to charity and compassionately deemed me charitable enough. And while it got me to Oklahoma, it started having troubles and then more troubles.
I just got it out of the shop and it is running great. It only cost me a good chunk of the little money I have left.
And it seems rather plain to me that my best money-making resource is my writing (and editing and researching) skills. It is what I have poured most of my energy into the last two decades or so.
But I am frozen in paralysis at the thought of it. Perhaps it is the stress of knowing my survival depends on it. Maybe it is something else. I don't know. Either way, I spend my time applying for jobs that pay nothing and destroy my body just so that I can eat sometimes. All the while torturing myself for not using the abilities that I already possess and will pay me a living wage.
But I have been poor since I moved at 17 and I used to write voraciously. It was my bread. It was what made everything tolerable.
So maybe it's an issue of space and time?
I have been re-reading Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and he talks extensively about the necessary components for a writer being hours of uninterrupted solitude.
I certainly feel that's true. I think routine is a huge aspect of that as well. I think it was Tom Waits (and surely several hundred other writers and creatives) that said to write at the same time everyday.
Which is why I am here at the library. Trying to find a space and a time where I will be uninterrupted and can focus. The library isn't the perfect spot for it, but it seems adequate. I am going to try to come here (or a place similar) every day for at least a few hours. Maybe it'll help.
So far though, I have watched a few YouTube videos and read a lot of irrelevant news articles and think pieces. But am now at least writing on here. It's a start, I suppose.
Somewhere in Maryland, there is a private room for me to write. It awaits me even now. I can't afford to get there quite yet, but that's okay. Because I wasn't writing when I stayed there last winter and feel I wouldn't write there right now either.
By the time I do arrive, I hope to be in better shape, discipline-wise.
Right now, I feel tired and depressed and overwhelmed and so incredibly unsure of my abilities and the future.
Maybe that, more than anything, is what keeps me from my work at hand.
I don't know. More than anything, I just want to reignite my first love. The passion that I had, the energy I felt, smoking cigarettes outside the library doors at 9:56 am, counting down the minutes until the doors opened and I was once again given the blessed chance to bear my soul with the world.
12:53 p.m. - 2022-06-15
Recent entries:
Lot of feelings, lack of words - 2022-08-09
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Nihilism for Fun and Profit - 2022-07-08
Everything and Nothing All at Once - 2022-07-05
Summer Solstice - 2022-06-21
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