People are telling me to chill, but I’m having a moment about turning 30
I did not get a lot of writing done last week. I did, however, get pretty grumpy about it. (Except for my morning pages - my dedication to this part of my morning routine is still going strong.)
“I’m still surprised you’re trying so hard to write so consistently during this time,” my partner told me when I complained. He knows my plate is full – job stress, wedding planning, social commitments, therapy that’s taking extra emotional energy.
Friends have told me to go easy on myself. “It’s a busy time; you’ll get back to it soon.”
I want to feel reassured, but I only feel an uneasiness that grows each day I don’t find time or energy to spend time with my work. It’s not that I think my loved ones are wrong. I know that life ebs and flows. Some months are crazier and more chaotic than others. Sometimes taking a break to survive a rough patch with your brain or a particularly busy week is all you can expect of yourself.
And. In the nearly-three years since I finished my MFA, writing has been a ball that I only try to juggle when the rest of my life is smooth sailing - no major stressors, maybe I’m even a little bored. Then, as soon as juggling everything becomes too much, it’s the first ball I drop.
In the past few years, I have experienced a dozen moments that made it understandable, justifiable that I wasn’t writing – starting a new job, moving to NYC, surviving the 4:30pm sunsets of my first winter in NYC, mental health lows, starting or switching medications, job lows, job interviews, chronic middle-insomnia, travel, ring shopping, planning a courthouse wedding, planning another wedding. All of these take extra time and energy, all understandably contribute to writing time scarcity. But it gets to a point where there is always a reason why it’s hard to carve out writing time. When writing is the first ball to get dropped, it gets dropped a lot.
I told a good writer friend last week that I was terrified to wake up and realize I’m on the cusp of forty with no more writing to show for it than I have now. Hear me when I say that I know that thirty isn’t too late to get serious about creating a life that includes a consistent writing practice. I know forty and fifty aren’t too late either. I’m not saying that I’m running out of time.
But I am saying that I know what it’s like to spend year after year with my writing at the bottom of my priority list, letting it be the first and always victim of life’s busyness. I know what it’s like to spend all that time letting my insecurities get in the way of really, truly trying. I’m saying that I know it can be easy to let time pass in a gentle rut of status quo. I’m saying that at some point, whether that be when I am thirty or forty or fifty, I will have to adjust course in order to see a different outcome.
I have felt a shift in myself this year. Maybe it is my looming thirtieth birthday. Maybe it’s The Artist’s Way. Maybe it’s the slow accumulation of disappointment that I feel when I continue to put off writing, continue to feel sad that I’m not writing. Maybe it’s because as the years slip by, life has only ever gotten faster and fuller. Maybe I’ve simply had the realization enough times to make it stick – the change that gets me to finish my book or find an agent won’t be a change in my life or a change of job, it will be a change in how I interact with my work.