January 29

It’s Friday morning and my daughter has asked for a pajama day, which is fine with me because it’s been a long week and currently the temperature outside is 16 degrees. I have a prescription to pick up and a library book on hold, but I could easily stay home in my sweatpants all day.

I make myself an extra cup of coffee and we make a plan to meet up at 10 o’clock to read side by side. Between now and then, I want to sit at the computer to write. I’m thinking about things like soul care and what questions are essential and the importance of detaching from outcomes. My mind is always littered with thoughts that I keep trying to pin down.

Trying but not often succeeding. I started a new notebook after the new year, taking a different approach to capturing my thoughts and ideas. It’s looser, more associative. When thoughts pop into my head, I grab a pen and scribble it down. Often, it doesn’t get much farther than that, but I plan to flesh out these thoughts, dig into them like a treasure hunt.

So far, not much has happened.

When the calendar flipped to January, I went through a week of grieving. I raged against my instinct to set resolutions. I lamented my current circumstances and the monotony of these gray winter days.

What I realized is that I’ve become very complacent in communicating what I want and need. I don’t tell my kids I need time to write or read—I just slip away and hope they don’t find me. But they do and they get confused when I’m annoyed or upset.

I know I should be better about this. Why don’t I tell them I need an hour to write and could you please leave me alone? As soon as the question enters my brain, I know the answer: Because I would be on the hook to actually write and that thought feels scary.

Yes, I want to write. But I also want it to be easy. I want to be the person who knows exactly what she’s going to say, then sits down and bangs it out. I don’t want to sit alone and wonder what I should say and face the blank page.

Moreover, I don’t want to sit alone in my life and wonder what’s going to happen next and face the uncertainty of hundreds of monotonous days.

But I have my coffee and a plan with my daughter, so I flip open my notebook and find something interesting, set a timer for ten minutes, and force my fingers to move across the keyboard.

Keep it loose, I’ve written in this notebook again and again. Keep it loose. Use what you know. And maybe I should add, Trust yourself and Stop doubting and Have faith. But I haven’t written those things down yet. I’ll save them for another day.