Restlessness

I’m restless tonight…I have this sense that I should be doing something, but when I look around at the messes made, to do list unfinished, books unread, sewing projects ½ done, I know that those are not the things that I should be doing. I look at my laptop on…then I turn it off entering the avoidance once again.

But this time, I walk through the rooms of this tired house looking for something, looking on my phone for something…always looking and not finding. Irritated I pick up the laptop and turn it on knowing that this is my destiny yet fighting it kicking and screaming.

The screen glows blue and then white…my fingers begin moving, creating, searching and maybe this time finding.

I stumbled upon a book recently called “You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One)” by Jeff Goins. I stared long and hard at the cover. I knew at that moment that I did not need to read this book, I only had to do what the title said – start acting like a writer. (I'm reading it anyway.) The truth is that I’ve been hiding over here and allowing the distractions of the day-to-day to get in the way of who I am and what I’m supposed to do. Only until now, there was no guilt or pain or discomfort in doing so. Over the last several weeks everything I allowed to distract me has lost its luster or has been removed. I can’t focus on anything for any length of time if I even have the desire to begin it.

This same author, Jeff Goins says in another short book he has written called “The Writer’s Manifesto” that a writer writes because he cannot NOT write. If I had read this six months ago I would have laughed at the idea of that. Now that I’m here in this desolate, unrelenting, purposeless place, I can’t agree more. These words will push their way out of me one way or another and it seems lately they are intent in coming out in painful ways.

So, I’m writing because there is this part of me, once small, yet growing and pushing and relentlessly calling me to put the words out there and maybe I will just find what I’ve been looking for.