not able to write? just put away your laundry.

Tonight I got a Wix ad on Youtube, preceding a video titled “a day in my life in paris,” which felt a bit like the universe (or my laptop) was calling me out for not having written recently. I’ve been home for about three and a half weeks now, and I have only written a couple times. Each time has turned out to be nothing; stray ideas of missing Paris or finding a rhythm at home have come and gone, but never turned up more than a paragraph or two. I’m not sure why I can’t find the mental capacity to write, but I can tell that my fingers want to type. Typing this right now feels to them as going to the gym after a couple missed workouts feel to your body. Good. Familiar. Unpracticed. 

My fingers are not the only ones that feel out of practice. My brain does, too. Every time I open my Notes app on my phone I see this little thread I created for blog post ideas. I even have a thread that maps out the things I would want to talk about, but the filler words won’t come to me. In the span of a few weeks, since I last posted, I have done few things I deem worthy of a full post, but even those evade me when I sit down to write. Is it because I’m tired, or a procrastinator (which I am), or because I feel like I just experienced the best three months of my life, and now I am back home in a sleepy town? 

I think that of all the things I could write about, being able to only write about not being able to write seems ridiculous. Does that make sense? I feel like I used the too many words but said nothing. It’s hard to be a word-person and be hit with feeling of lulls like this. Despite my own ill-feelings towards this experience, I don’t think I’m alone in it. I don’t mean this is exclusive to those who write, but instead I think it pertains to people of all walks of life, all jobs, all hobbies. 

Oftentimes, people are struck with the feeling that they need to continue with what they had been doing, but they can’t. They have to take a break from it, and sometimes they come back to it, sometimes they don’t. 

When I was 10, a family moved in next door. Their son was in my class, the daughter three years above us. There was a large tree up in their backyard, one that had long, thick branches and a strong, sturdy trunk. For a while we climbed the tree. We would pull ourselves up onto the lowest branch, its width larger than my torso, and we would sit on it, walk on it, jump from it (I wouldn’t jump—I was too scared). One day, I’m not sure how it happened but we decided to build a tree house. 

My dad was in construction for the first half of my life, so we had scrap wood, extra boxes of nails, and hammers in the garage. I would load up our old Red Flyer wagon with wood and nails, then carry two hammers while I wheeled the wagon next door. We set to work, first nailing little boards into the trunk as a makeshift ladder, then trying to nail some into that trusty branch we had been using a jungle gym. 

We made it our own project, no help from our dads. We also never made it past this point. We got busy with other things, lost interest in the idea of a treehouse, never walked into that part of the woods again. I think about that tree sometimes; when I go up to our barn and look west, I can still see the branches reaching and growing, but I know that it didn’t have a treehouse like the one we wanted. Heck, it might have our old wagon though. 

I’m not saying my writing is like that could-have-been-treehouse. I mean, if we’re comparing progress between the two, my writing is like a complete treehouse always looking for additions, whereas it stands just-started in the woods. My writing does ebb and flow, though. All it takes is one look at my blog page to see that I have been anything but consistent in when I post. 

So where do I go with that? How do I fix it? I have no idea. I wasn’t even going to write about this for my next post—it was going to be something else entirely. It wasn’t until I was putting away the laundry that has been sitting on the corner of my bed for three days watching Youtube that I opened a new doc to start typing in. I might not exactly feel motivated to write the next post or journal entry, or to read the dozens of novels I have lined up for break (I definitely won’t read them all), or to finish the puzzle I’ve been working on for a week, but it does feel like a bit of an accomplishment to write a post. Even if I’m just going to post without editing (I say this because I have doubtlessly made mistakes) because I simply don’t feel like it. 

So there. A thrown-together post that I wrote in less than 20 minutes, full of sentences that I honestly blacked-out on. And yes, it’s a post that I won’t reread until tomorrow, the next day, or tonight at 2 AM because I can’t sleep because I just posted something on the internet that has no proof-reading whatsoever. But maybe that answers my question I asked last paragraph. Maybe this is how I fix it. Maybe instead of putting pressure on my writing and my word-choice and my editing I can just get back to writing to write. We’ll see what happens, though. 

Thank you for reading, dear reader. Can I call you that? Does it sound a bit too Bridgerton or Taylor Swift? Oh well, what can you do? I’ll talk to you next time. Happy holidays if I don’t post again before then!