The work

 

“Should I stab my own eye out with a knitting needle instead of writing?” says the 14 year old sitting so close to me on the couch, I am reminded of the time when she lived inside my uterus.

I mean, I understand the question.

She reads this over my shoulder as I type it and murmurs. “Mmm hmm. There’s two. Now we can share” as she hands me my own knitting needle.

She’s writing a novel. She’s 2% into it and so far the characters have laughed 18 times and haven’t made it past breakfast. It’s the end of the world.

As she decides that maybe - MAYBE - someone will come to the door before they even have a chance to START eating breakfast and she’s back off and running, I stare at the google doc on my screen and think about how I too would like to write a novel. Or a memoir. Or a single blog post really. But it’s hard and it’s scary, and the knitting needle is looking surprisingly tempting right now.




All day I’ve felt on edge, tired and wired, certain that I want to be doing SOMETHING but that I have no idea what that is, that I am somehow falling behind, that I will never accomplish anything in my life. And the more I think about that, the more I freeze, the more I sink, the less motivated I feel to even do a single thing.

I want to write a book. I want to write articles and get them published somewhere. I want to find my voice again. I want to create things that people find meaningful. I created this human who has informed me that there’s no doorbell because OBVIOUSLY these are medieval teenage friends having breakfast together, so clearly I can create ANYTHING.

I just have to put the knitting needle down and get back to work.