I could’ve written a short for this post. I will later this week. Instead I wanted to riff a bit on this 100th day of the new cycle. I’m feeling good, mentally. I feel that the physical is shaping up nicely to get me to a place where I won’t die in five years (or become a diabetic), which is great, because I feel good about where my head is at and I don’t wish to fall into that halting state. I’m in a place where I am ready to be a really good writer again. It took going back, as I expressed yesterday, to get a sense of what forward could look like in my life overall.
I don’t think I need to pick a lane. I no longer feel like I need to write in a specific genre. I merely need to write, and write often, letting the stories go where they may as a way to excise them from my mind like the so-called lactic buildup of physical muscle. That too needs to be amplified. If I am to be the writer, I need to be the warrior still. I cannot sit at a desk for four hours or more a day (honestly, it needs to be more to be a full-timer) and expect to survive without four more outdoors and being physical.
This is the way.
This was always the way. I started to lose it when I stopped following that path and that pathology. I drifted away into the comfort of a suburban life pretending that I’d already made it. What had I made, short of payments on a loan that were, occasionally, late? I was well into my first kid by then. After the second the whole thing came off the rails. Instead of locking in as a writer, I tried to be an academic administrator. I was the youngest Division Chair in school history. It earned a few extra bucks and sucked a few more years from my life and my will.
I’ve come full circle, as expressed yesterday. Now I look forward to what and who I can be next.