Chelsea Laine Wells
How I Balance Writing Against My Busy Life
The fact that I remembered agreeing to write this essay a sheer week before the deadline with a bolt of panic like the one that comes when you wake up to broad daylight and realize you’ve overslept would perhaps begin to address the topic: how I balance writing with my busy daily life. The short answer is, I don’t. The long answer is, in and among my full time job, grad school through distance learning (sounds easier than in-person college, right? It so isn’t.), taking care of the house, taking care of the cats, most recently planning my wedding, moving into a smaller place so we can save for a house, and last but definitely not least, finding out a week before my wedding that we succeeded in getting me pregnant with our first child – writing, which is in fact the neglected but truest and longest love of my life, takes a backseat. More than a backseat. Lies in the trunk bound and gagged and barely clinging to life.
So – my goal is to use this essay as a way to figure out why I’m not writing, and to be perfectly honest about it, because despite the obstacle course of reasons why I am busy, there are deeper, darker, more embarrassing, unpopular reasons why my characters get neglected, why my writing journal sits untouched, why my moments of inspiration come to nothing, why I joined Sam Weller’s summer novelist’s club on Facebook and posted exactly twice before falling off the edge of the earth, true ambitious Columbia grad that I am.
The Ugly Truth About Myself
The real reason that I almost never write – yes, almost never to never – is because I’m lazy. Oh, God, so lazy. I mean really. I can spend an entire day sitting on my bed watching television. I love television. And I can rationalize it beautifully – just look at everything I have to do/ have done/ am thinking about doing but neglecting to actually do. After a long work week and an online presentation for grad school, thank you notes that must be written post-wedding, first trimester exhaustion and nausea, a visit to the vet for the sick cat, laundry that’s been in the dryer for five days and I keep turning the dryer on in order to “freshen” the clothes before I “put them away,” then forgetting, then “freshening” them again – who would begrudge me ten straight hours of Intervention on Netflix Watch It Now? But this is where the ugly truth comes in, what I know about myself, is that if I had none of those other things to do, if I was caught up on everything (never mind the fact that this doesn’t happen, ever), if I had the whole afternoon open and no way to rationalize using that precious free time to anesthetize my brain with one reality TV show after another instead of writing, I would still be there on that bed, in my pajamas at 3:00pm, choking up when the family gets real with the addict about how they’ve seen addiction negatively affect their life in the following ways. Because I am lazy, and writing is hard work. My grandmother taught me this: you will make time for what you want to make time for. Despite all of my overwhelming stressors and responsibilities, I still have time for Netflix. But not a short story, apparently.
Was I always like this? No – well, yes I’ve always been lazy and a top-notch procrastinator, but I was not always like this with my writing. Otherwise I wouldn’t know that I am a writer, what with the total lack of writing. So what changed? This brings us to college and my uncomfortable honesty about how it affected me.
The Ugly Truth About College
I want to be very clear in saying that I do not regret my college education at all, and that I learned and grew exponentially in my program and met awesome writers with whom I still keep in touch regularly. However. Despite what I gained from my professors and classmates, and the enormous inspiration taken away daily from everything we read and studied – despite all that, a major side effect of my Bachelor’s in Fiction Writing is the fact that I lost my drive to write for myself.
I used to be a self-motivated writer. Throughout my early twenties in particular, and prior to that for basically by entire childhood and adolescence, I wrote purely because I loved it. In my twenties before college I would write for hours at a time, at work on post-it notes, on my lunch break, on my days off. I hand-wrote, hand-edited, and then typed it up. I was a purist. I had no idea how tentative this self-motivation was. As soon as I got into Fiction I and writing became homework, a gear slipped in my brain and I wrote for the school deadlines, and never on my own. It was like dessert became vegetables. I lumped fiction assignments in with my gen ed assignments – and who studies their gen ed subjects when they’re finished with the homework? No one. And I knew this was happening, I knew I was doing this to myself, but somehow couldn’t fight my way out of it – and still can’t fight my way out of it. The only way I am consistently able to produce and complete work is with the motivation of a deadline.
Sure, there are rare exceptions to this. In the past approximately five years I have produced a couple of complete minor short pieces based on the momentum of my own inspiration, and I went though a period of working on a novel which now lives only theoretically in my author’s bio. In reality it is curled and dead in a desktop folder that makes me squirm with guilt when I look at it. And when I attended a two-week writers’ residency I was extremely productive. But the writers’ residency felt something like a honeymoon – like when on vacations or holidays when you and your significant other are both on best behavior and high with the euphoria of a break in routine so there’s none of the normal bickering. And recently I’ve become part of a writing project in which we are given prompts with a three-day deadline. With the deadline, and a herculean effort, I am able to produce work. Without it, nothing. And that’s completely my fault, for integrating the concept of deadlines and class work in such a destructive and permanent way. But to know your own shortcomings do not empower you to defeat them, unfortunately – otherwise I would be defeating shortcomings like nobody’s business.
The Hurt, and the Guilt
The hurtful thing I say to myself sometimes is that for all intents and purposes, I am no longer a writer. I said this to my husband once and he was furious with me. For him my writing has everything to do with who I am and how we started – he claims to have fallen in love with me the night he first saw me read my work, before we even knew each other well, and has shown me evidence of this in his journal (since I accused him of making it up). Soon afterwards, he told me that he would cut off his arm to be able to write like me, and then that he had added me to the list of writers whose heart he wants to eat in order to gain their literary prowess. (My husband, a musician and English Lit major, clearly also has a way with words.) In any case, the violence of his objection to me saying that I’m not a writer anymore forced me to think more deeply about it. I had a hard time with that. My tactic is to numb myself in the face of hurt, to harden myself against it. And the loss of my writing and my characters and that feeling you get when you’ve written something you know is good, that hum in the blood and the fast heartbeat and the tidal pull running through your body like you just woke up from a deep sleep – God, to not have that feeling anymore, it hurts. It hurts too much to think about. So I don’t, mostly.
And of course don’t forget guilt. The guilt associated with this – and myriad other issues in my life – is constant and crippling. In fact, the guilt that comes from never writing causes me to write less – much like the guilt of eating fast food instead of whatever else you other people are eating pushes me down into a depression that causes me to crave fast food – which I can justify based on the many stressors in my daily life, i.e., work, school, laundry, wedding, move, impending motherhood, and so on and so on and into infinity. Is the pattern clear enough for everyone?
Facebook is a major source of my guilt. I am friends with many amazing writers who seem to do nothing but churn out work and immediately publish, everyday, all day long. Not to mention my friends who are doing other admirable, healthy things with their lives, like posting beautiful pictures of themselves smiling and surrounded by groups of friends in social settings without even a hint of the anxiety and mortification I feel during activities innocuous as leaving the house to get the mail, and shopping for produce I’ve never heard of at Farmer’s Markets with organic cotton earth-friendly totes, and performing balletic yoga poses on sun-warmed rocks, and cooking food with ingredients like barley and soy and brown rice and vegetables and whole goji quinoa spirulina grains. And as I read these posts I’m wondering, AM I THE ONLY PERSON DOING THINGS WRONG? Is anybody else fucking up out there? Surely I’m not the only one failing to move forward in the same positive ways other people seem to be.
What Happens When I Do Write
So what happens when I do actually get around to writing? What does it feel like? What does it do to me? Here is the disparity: I can be completely caught up on homework, house-cleaning, everything is clicking at work, everything is wonderful with the husband, I ate a grilled chicken salad and a plum instead of seven tacos and a Blizzard, I exercised as much as my feeble body allowed me to, I read all morning with the television off – but if I haven’t written, I feel as though I have done nothing, and I am worthless. However: if my house is wrecked, work productivity has halted, I ate icing for breakfast and an entire bag of Cool Ranch Doritos for lunch, I’m on episode five of chain-watching Intervention, I have bedsores from my lack of exercise – but I wrote something that day, however small – I feel totally calm and soothed, I feel complete. I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. I have a great writer friend who equated the discomfort of not writing for extended periods of time to the discomfort of going too long without bathing. That’s exactly accurate: when I write I feel clean and baptized. That’s how I know there is still a writer somewhere inside me, asleep, but subject to brief awakenings and powerful enough to suffuse my whole brain and body with satisfaction when the words start coming.
Doesn’t it seem as though this feeling would motivate me to write? In putting together this essay, it certainly seems that it would. I definitely have the writing euphoria as I type this and I know this essay will carry me through the weekend, guilt-free. How ironic that an essay about my ceasing to be a writer makes me feel like one again. I don’t know what to make of it. In any case, this feeling of intrinsic rightness, as wonderful as it is, does not on its own push me forward. It is outmatched by the dead, dumb tonnage of my laziness.
What Has This Essay Helped Me Resolve
Nothing. Let’s be honest. This wasn’t self-discovery, it was a confession. I know I operate this way. I guess I’m hoping anyone else out there who has ever felt similarly will be able to let go of some of his or her guilt and aloneness. The real question is how to fix it. Maybe I need to hire someone to give me deadlines with consequences if I don’t meet them – I know my own self-imposed deadlines would just dissolve and lead to depression, which leads to boneless inertia, and so on.
But the real answer is that I need to break the spell of deadline motivation. I need to figure out how to rediscover writing as a form of pleasure. I need to go back to thinking of my characters as living beings who are subject to neglect like infants if I abandon their storylines. I need to set small goals for myself that are attainable – write for ten minutes a day, edit an existing piece for fifteen minutes before bed. I haven’t lost hope yet. I do exert myself from time to time, I do try to overcome it. There is frequent failure, and less frequent success, but at least there is effort, no matter how infrequent. This essay is another tentative first step, of many first steps.
There is no conclusion for this, just a well-worn and quiet resolution to move forward and refuse to give up, so that I can know myself again, so that the baby inside me can truly know its mother, so that my husband, my greatest champion, can have the girl he fell in love with, so that my heart will not break with the loss of my truest and longest love. I promise to keep trying.
About the author…
Chelsea Laine Wells is a Dallas, Texas native who primarily writes short stories but is working on her first novel, entitled The House of Little Moons. Her fiction has appeared in Evergreen Review, Pank Magazine, Bluestem Magazine and Housefire. Currently she is pursuing her master’s degree in librarianship and works in student services at a technical college. She lives in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, in her pajamas, with her fiancé and their clan of cats.