Writing and Self-Loathing

It was a week ago that I sat down to my computer and scoffed at the blinking cursor. With admirable courage and terrific posture, I let my head fall slack on each side to get the kinks out and then I began cheerfully clicking the keys of my laptop. The ticking of the keyboard continued until the afternoon. Sentences turned into pages. I felt like a genuine writer. Yes! I have things to say! Yes! My prose is lucid! Yes! I am a bona fide writer!

Today, I am crumpled on my futon, unable to write or read. As my cat, Newton, kneads my stomach, I feel tight nodes of stress under his furry mittens. How could my soaring feelings of "writerly-ness" become this dark shadow of tension and anxiety?

It is times like these that I burrow into my futon, under an old quilt, to read real or fictitious tales of lives worse than mine. As I am reading the first fifty pages or so of Anne Lamott's _Traveling Mercies_, her suffering is combined with my own suffering and feelings of overwhelm. Why, I ask myself, am I not reading an uplifting tale of perseverance? No! Writing is misery! A real artist suffers for his or her art! The myth seems to be true.

I like to take walks when it gets like this. I like to remind myself that there is a world outside of my writing. Today, I enjoyed the jacarandas bursting with purple blooms, I walked beneath a bougainvillea overhang, and I chuckled at the goofy French bulldog who would not let me pass. But, as I walked home from the corner store, clutching my wallet and a bottle of olive oil, I figured it would be a good moment to do my version of the Zen "slow walk." I admire people who can really walk so slowly that every movement is acknowledged. I, myself, walk at a slow-ish pace noticing the places where I hold tension. Well, today it was everywhere. I had tension in my ankles, for goodness sake!

As I prepare to teach a writing course this summer, I have really started to notice these habits. I'm sure there are more to come.