When the Words Do Not Come
It’s getting near the end of the semester. Birds have started chirping again in central Illinois. My birthday has come and gone, thankfully without me having to teach on my birthday this year. I’ve turned on my air conditioner and then my heat and now my air is probably coming back on later this week. The dishes pile up. The laundry stays unfolded.
And I’ve barely read or written in two weeks.
Every semester in May and December, there comes a period when the writing and the reading falls by the wayside in favor of endless grading, meeting with students, events for the kid, and lots of TV watching to decompress (made my way through Star Trek: TNG and now, slowly, through DS9). Every semester the rush comes and every semester I have to tell myself it’s okay, that it’ll pass. I’ll emerge again, probably crying but more or less the same.
I started writing later than most writers I meet. I never was a writer as a kid, or at least, didn’t identify as one. It wasn’t until high school that I thought writing was something I was interested in and not until my second year of college that I found poetry. It wasn’t until freshman year of college that I actively started finishing books rather than stopping about 20 to 50 pages until the end and starting a new one. I’ve still spent better than half my life not thinking of myself as a “good” reader or even a reader at all.
When in college classes, set up against all these students who had been writing since childhood or who tore through books like my kid tears through books (oh the complaints that Hoopla doesn’t give them more borrows or that there isn’t enough time before bed to read), I felt less than. Like I had missed a whole lot of memos and cultural moments that all these other writers understood. I felt like I had to catch up. To what, I wasn’t sure, but I knew it was in the distance. There wasn’t time to rest or break or stop. I needed to keep pushing. Read another book, get another poem finished, write another 1,000 words.
And even now, a few days past 37, I still feel this aching, this yearning, this need to have more behind me. To fill pages of my notebook with new lines, ideas that I may never come back to. To put more books in the read parts of my bookshelves rather than the ever growing to be read. I want to read more, write more, share more, be…more. It’s never enough to be where I’m at. I always need to be better. To be further along.
I haven’t told my therapist about this website and thank the prophets because she would definitely have words for me about that last paragraph. She’d ask me what it means to be “further along” and I have not good answer but if I shared this with you, over a drink at a writer’s conference I imagine you’d have an idea. Maybe not my exact idea but an idea similar to mine. That’s why I’m sharing it with you and not my therapist this time around.
But, it’s the work that I’ve been doing during therapy and through the years of meeting decent, good people, who also happen to write and read, that has helped me take deep breaths and let the fear of not being enough start to wash away. It helps that I’ve been keeping track of all the writing I’ve done this year instead of listing out what I want to “get done”. It helps that I have over a decade of semesters behind me that have taught me that focusing on how little writing and reading I’m doing just makes the grading take longer. Each semester gets a little better. This semester it’s been a bit better. This year I go to sleep without beating myself up too much about it all.
This is all to say that I haven’t been writing and I haven’t been reading (well I’ve technically been doing tons of both just for students not my own projects) and that’s okay. My worth is not based in how many books I knock out of my impressively large to be read list or how many poems I can edit, though that sentence was much harder to write than I thought it would be. Still going to have to repeat this in the mirror a few more times tonight.
I hope you too can love yourself through the interruptions and through the hard times and through the much needed breaks. The books always wait for you to come back. The blank page will stay blank for you. “Do what you need to first and then return when you’re ready,” I say to myself and it brings me a small amount of relief.
I look forward to returning soon.
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