imagined-community

It’s funny how a long vacation can disrupt all the little routines that organize a life. The morning exercise. Cooking for the week on Sunday afternoon. Prework trips to the corner café to read the paper.

Good riddance to some of those habits! (I don’t need to watch that much TV.) Other habits, like exercise and blogging, I don’t want to fall away. That’s why I decided to take up the NaBloPoMo challenge (National Blog Posting Month). I need to jumpstart a routine that I have lost; if I don’t rebuild the habit of blogging, and quickly, I may lose it for the winter. All that green and amethyst wool piled up on my living room floor would be easy to get lost in. Maybe I should just knit away the winter and not write a single word. Sigh. But I don’t want that.

The year after I finished my MA one of my graduate advisors told me a story about how painful writing used to be for her. Her resistance was so strong that she felt writing against her own apathy as physical pain. I understand that. I feel that. Her story, and the story of the French writer Colette’s early writing career in the literary factory, which only came to be because her first husband locked her in a room until she produced enough pages, comfort me. While writing often feels as alive and as clear as daybreak, the path to that early morning inhale, to breathing, is a struggle for me. I never want to write and yet I always want to write.

I guess NaBloPoMo is my locked room. One post every day for the month of November. Bring it on!