Just Get On With It Already.

Not long after college, I had this crazy relationship. One day, we’d have a montage kind of day you could set to a Goo Goo Dolls song and edit into a romantic comedy. The next, we would fight like feral cats. (During one particularly memorable roustabout, she told me, in anything but joking terms, that she wanted to push me down a flight of stairs.)

In those moments, just after I knocked on her door and just before she answered, I’d wonder. Will she give me a hug? Or will she stab me in the chest with a butcher knife?

I’m no longer with this person, thankfully. Writing has taken her place. (And for the record, I married a stable, sane woman.)

Some days, I love it. And actually think I can do it with some skill. That I can string sentences together. Tell a story. And maybe, just maybe, have some kind of impact on people.

Then there are the dark cloud days.

I try to write in the mornings, before work. I wake up and change Jack’s diaper. Feed him. Walk the dog. Feed her. And that small, mean voice is in my ear the whole time. Are you insane, thinking about going back to that keyboard? Don’t you remember what happened the last time you went there? That crap you wrote? Trust me. Dump this writing thing.

I grew up on the far south side of Chicago. There was a time when men of that neighborhood could walk from their high school graduation ceremony to a steel mill and start work. Jobs were hot and dirty things. My dad was an electrician. He did his time in the mill. From the day I started kindergarten, I was told I was going to college. This life, he would say, is not what I want for you.

Even so. Plop a glasses-wearing, small-for-his-age kid who liked school into this neighborhood, where football and baseball are all that mattered and only queers did homework or read for fun. Sometimes, I can still feel that boyhood anxiety when I write, like I’m doing something “wrong” that is worth little more than ridicule.

Maybe that’s why it’s been a month (!) between posts. It’s not for lack of ideas. It’s this notion, of being who you are and worrying about how people will react.

That is probably why most writers make things sound so difficult. Not that writing is easy. But if you tell yourself again and again that something is the hardest thing in the world, well, it sure as hell isn’t going to get any easier.

But how much misery and doubt is self-inflicted? Writers, artists, anyone with a vocation, put a lot of themselves into the world. Maybe those excuses are little more than a child’s defense mechanism. It’s an easy thing to do, to mistake a critique or lack of interest in the work as a critique or lack of interest in the person.

Maybe the best a writer, or any of us, can do is be honest, commit to your life, be yourself and hope for the best. Hopefully, Jack can pick this up faster than I have.