author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Today is an exercise in self-forgiveness. Some days, none of the stuff on the Big Scary Checklist get done, and then it's 9:30 PM and I'm tired. And beating myself up for getting nothing done doesn't help. Like, what, tired-and-guilty is better than just plain tired?

So. I hereby officially forgive myself for not writing today.

I did other things. For one, I did my Wednesday morning volunteer reading for AINC. I do three and a half hours of reading for them each week. On Wednesdays, it's 54 minutes of employment ads from varying parts of Colorado, and the recording has to be uploaded by 2:00 PM. It actually takes more like an hour and a half because I have to gather the reading material from several newspaper websites and then sort out the ads that don't have verbally tranmittable contact information. (Phone numbers are good. Email addresses are good. "Click here to apply" is not so good.)

Why, by the way, am I so reluctant to acknowledge how this task screws with my day? I guess I'm in denial here. I don't want to admit that this hour and a half has to come from somewhere. I mean, it would be nice if I could pull it out of a pocket dimension and magically have 26-hour Wednesdays, but I can't. And so it's an hour and a half I can't spend writing, it's an hour and a half of my productive energy for the day, and it's even more time taken because afterwards I sort of need a break. And I just need to take all this into account when planning the shape of my Wednesdays and my expectations thereof.

Lori and I tried out a couple restaurants up here. Lunch was at the Avon Bakery & Deli, whose bread really is just that fantastic. And dinner was at China Garden inside the Lodge at Avon Center. It was more expensive than I had remembered, but the food was delicious and the portions were generous enough to feed us for lunch tomorrow.

I had a good long afternoon walk along the riverside path, mildly regretful that I didn't have time to do the four-mile hike all the way to Edwards. I went as far as that townhouse campus that's just west of Nottingham Lake, where I settled down on a pillow-like boulder at the foot of what looked like an ex-bridge (which will be a completed bridge again in the near future, if the active construction crew across the river was any indication) and read some more of Cameron's Walking in this World. And it was just as well I didn't go any farther, because by the time I got back to our room, I was exhausted. That was pretty much the energy expenditure that all but guaranteed that the productive part of my day was over.

I wish I had more energy in a day. The stuff listed here ought not to have eaten up my day's allotment of potential. But "oughts" are sort of useless, because they aren't "is."

This morning I woke up dreading today, knowing that I needed to work on my short story and feeling scared of it. And the fear won the day, which makes me sad. But in the fear I recognized an opportunity for monster watching. "Monsters" is how Havi Brooks, whose blog I have become quite fond of, conceptualizes these fears and blocks and inner obstacles. You should read the whole post linked above, but here's the nutshell edition:

When you're working on a stuck or sitting with a hurt or working through the layers, you eventually discover that your stuck just wants to protect you.

Your monster means well. It's just going about it all wrong.

Your monster is small and vulnerable and fuzzy. And it just wants to know that you'll be okay. And that's why it makes itself so big and fierce — to scare you into letting it take care of you.

And once it knows that you know, it can turn into something else.

So I tried to have a little chat with my "stuck" in the safety of my Morning Pages. I called it "Dear little fearing monster," and I asked it -- asked myself, really, but writing dialogue is more fun for me than writing angsty internal monologue -- what precisely its goal here was.

As it turns out, it's trying to protect me from the ineviteble blow of finally discovering that I can't actually write and every success so far has just been a fluke and I'm not really a writer which means I'm not really anyone at all.

Dear little fearing monster comes from the family Imposter Syndrome. It's a family that many writers become familiar with. I see successful writers bemoaning it on Twitter with a frequency that is both depressng ("You mean it never goes away?") and heartening ("You mean even the big kids feel that way?"). I am in good company here.

So I had me a chat with this scion of that familiar family. "Dear little fearing monster! In protecting me, you're not letting me write. You're so afraid I'll find out I'm not cut out to be a writer that you're not letting me be a writer. In attempting to protect me from this bad thing, you're actually making the bad thing happen."

"Well, that makes sense... but what if I do let you write, and you write something that's no good?"

"I'll revise it."

"But what if you can't revise it enough? What if it'll never be any good?"

"I'll never know. I'll just keep revising it, or, in a pinch, put it away temporarily and move on to the next story. You can't prove a 'never'; you can only create one -- by deciding never to try."

(I say things like that a lot. For instance, my rote response to anyone who argues against encouraging would-be writers because, they say, some people aren't cut out to be writers and really just shouldn't try. People really do say that, and I find it rage-inducing. So I've got my response down to a slogan: "The only way to prove a person will never make it as a writer is by getting them to stop writing." Of course, the rage-inducing naysayers then like to say that anyone who can be so easily discouraged doesn't have what it takes to make it as a writer anyway. Because apparently they think that only the invulnerable deserve to survive? Only those with skin two inches thick have anything to say worth hearing? Really? How convenient to bullies, then, that no blame accrues to them, but only to their victims for being bullyable! Gah. This would be the point at which I am obliged to remove myself from the presence of such compassionless pieces of excrement, lest I do them a violence. Besides, it's not them I'm talking to. I'm talking to my colleagues, to my friends, to the walking wounded: "The only way it can be true that you'll never make it as a writer is if you stop writing. And even if you do stop writing today, you can always pick up the pen tomorrow.")

To make a long story short -- and I'd better, since the original conversation went on for two full pages of longhand, even without parenthetical asides -- I gave the monster job security. I gave it permission to keep scaring me. But I told it to change its method. That old refrain of "But what if today you try to write and discover that you're no good?" It's no longer allowed. I am taking it out of that toolbox and throwing it off a cliff. The replacement tool is, "But what if you never write again?"

My little monster has full permission to nag me with that question. And I will respond to that question with, "Nonsense. Look! I am writing now."

That was this morning at about 9:00 AM. Thirteen hours later I haven't written all day, and my monster is concerned. I would like to reassure the dear little thing that a day without writing doesn't mean no writing ever again. Tomorrow, unlike today, the AINC reading can be done late in the evening, so I have no reason not to go straight from Morning Pages to story.

But "tomorrow" doesn't appease the monster. The monster knows I said "tomorrow" yesterday, and see what happened?

But look! I am writing right now. And now I will take what I wrote and paste it into my blog editor, and send it out to meet the nice people of Internetlandia.

Hello, Internetlandia! My monster says hi!