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Wednesday, July 16, 2014

When Impatience Becomes My Friend

Same song, umpteenth verse. I sit down to write, and fight to put one word after the next. Crafting any kind of sentence is torture. (and then my inner editor harps yet again about how I write in a passive tone, with too many gerunds and when am I going to step up to the plate and write something good "blah blah blah")
The two combine and equal too many pieces of half finished writing. Story plots scattered in multiple files, 15 unfinished (read: barely started) blog posts. This is the point at which it would be easy for me to quit. To declare that I'm not a writer and walk away from it all. But I'm not going to do that.

One of my major character defects is my impatience with myself. There's little compassion or grace for this to be a journey - whether that this is healing and recovery or coming alive or finding myself and my voice as a creative. My frustration with myself, with my limits sets me up for failure every stinking time. But I don't stay there.

That same impatience that steals my words, fuels my judgements, is the same drive that keeps me moving forward. That impatience, when it's not running my life, it turns into being driven, in a positive way. It means I show up yet again to write, to put one painstaking word after the next on the page. Impatience doesn't allow those story plots and fragments to get lost in my file system. It continues to pull them up, to stare at them, to write 50 words that are complete and utter shit because that impatience it motivates me.

Impatience tells me that this is not all that there is. This is not all that I will ever be. Impatience reminds me that I'm worth fighting for.

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