A crisis of socks
Again
The creative process is so aggravating. It's supposed to be all muses and inspiration and expression and emotion, right? A splatter of paint here, a beautiful sentence there, an elegant move, a beautiful note.
Ha!
It's a mess and sometimes I hate it. I need efficiency in my life and I am mad at my novel for being the very opposite.
In my household of four little kids and two jobs outside the home and coaching and sports and all the things, there is little room for inefficiency. It's a constant state of tasks and management but when everything is humming along it works.
It doesn't take much to wobble us, though.
There's the obvious stuff – if one parent gets sick and the other has to absorb everything. Oof. But there's also the daily crisis of socks. We have twelve feet and 6 million socks but never in the right combinations. And this murders us everytime we try to get out the door. If a morning is going smoothly I guarantee it's socks that will take us down at the last possible moment.
This problem is physical – these children need their feet covered. This problem is existential – what is wrong with us that we can never solve it?
A household felled by thousands of stray cotton-blend tubes isn't a household or a headspace ready to better organize some 75,000 stray words.
I'm so mad that writing this novel can't be accomplished in the sterile little packages of time I can give to it. The sterile versus the creative. It can’t be done. But I can't quit either.
I wrote a little this week. A couple of tight twenty-minute bundles on the subway. It's not enough time nor the right kind of time, but it's the time I have.
At least it's almost sandal season.
Week 117: Sock balls
Some everyday: No
Words: Not enough
See you next week
I feel seen 🧦🧦🧦🧦🧦