Naming Those Feelings With Which We Write

"Do you ever have mornings where you hate your writing? Or maybe hate is too strong a word, let me rephrase it a little, do you ever have mornings where your first feeling about your writing - and so I guess it's really a feeling about yourself - is disappointment?"

I'm not sure whether this is my younger self asking my present self this question or my present self asking my younger self this question or whether this is my self of a moment ago asking my self who's about to begin the writing process. But whoever is asking them (and whoever they're asking them to!), these questions have been floating around in my head.

"And when you sit down to write and your first feeling is disappointment, how do you get past that?"

Ah - that's a question I think I can answer.

"I don't think it's about getting past - or not getting past - disappointment. I mean, there's a part of me that wants to be able to wake up every morning and sit down to write without feelings of anxiety, self-consciousness, or self-doubt, but I've also been doing this long enough that I've come to accept that those feelings are always there. There are some days they are present more strongly than others, some days where I'm aware of them in a different room of the house.

"And sometimes what I do - just as an exercise - is to try to personify all of the emotions that come with my writing. There's a wide cast of characters: Disappointment, of course, also resentment and jealousy and envy. Frustration, too. But then there are the ones I'm less prone to welcoming every morning when I start: Curiosity, wonder, even (so rarely!) excitement."

The morning run was filled with blowing snow and slick roads, but a few things I took from the conversation I listened to along the way:

1. Build in many definitions of success. If your only vision of success is X, for example, you're missing every other letter of the alphabet. This is complicated, of course, by the fact that we're measured on certain metrics of success (hey, academic journal articles and citation counts), but still - I think there's a sense that defining success in only one way is ultimately limiting and self-defeating.
2. Accept the bad days. That was the theme of today's run - a 'suckcess run,' the app called it - but it seems so relevant to this writing process. There are going to be bad days - lacking motivation, focus, attention, enthusiasm, inspiration. Ultimately, I think the goal should be to have less bad days than before, but that doesn't mean they're going to just go away.
3. Don't start the work angry with yourself. I think this holds true for both the running and the writing. I wonder if a corollary of this is don't start the work angry with the world. And that's not to say that there isn't a space for anger as a motivating force - but if you're only depending on anger (at something) to be the feeling that gets you to start your work, I wonder if that will ultimately lead to a kind of self-defeating approach. At least in my case, I often notice how easily I slip from, 'I'm so infuriated at the world' to 'I'm so infuriated with myself for not doing enough about the world.'

So having written that, to the day's work.