There’s an idea floating around these days — namely, that because we’re at home now and supposedly have “all this extra time,” that we should make the most of it and finally do X, Y, and Z.
I’ve seen enough counter-arguments floating around to know I’m not the first person out there to say we don’t need to do that. Of course we don’t. We don’t need to feel pressured to create the next great work of art just because Shakespeare supposedly wrote King Lear while he was quarantined during a pandemic, or because Isaac Newton went home from Cambridge when it closed because of a plague and thereby invented calculus in his spare time. I just shrug my shoulders at that. I don’t feel any pressure.
But I do feel weirdly pressured to write as usual, to get my daily word count or writing time in, because this is my job. It’s what I do for a living. But y’all — IT’S JUST NOT HAPPENING. It is so gosh-darn hard to write these days. The words aren’t coming. The focus isn’t there. That side of my brain feels like a conglomeration of unoiled cogs who can’t turn without some serious servicing. It’s just… flat-out hard to write right now. It is what it is. It’s like my brain possumed-up and froze and is now playing dead.
I’ll be back at it eventually. I know I will. But in the meantime, I’m doing two things, and this is what I want to encourage you to do as well:
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