When the words won’t come, you still need to write
This has been the most testing day so far — over six months in — of my plan to publish a post on Medium every day for a year.
The cause of the struggle has been time. My hotel in Leeds last night was superb and my room was superb and I was tired but I still manages to sleep badly. This is usually the case when I set an alarm. Although I regularly wake around 5am every morning and try to get out of bed shortly afterwards, whenever I set an alarm — even for 5am — I struggle to sleep through. Some perverse spirit in my head keeps waking me up to check I haven’t missed the alarm go off.
So that’s what happened. Come 5am I was so tired I had to grab another couple of hours of sleep. Then it was a quick morning routine and breakfast and then a trip to site outside Leeds where the meeting was to be held.
A day of meetings. All day. Lunch at the table. A taxi back into Leeds in time for the train back to London. And that’s where I am now, writing this. So tired I can barely keep my eyes open — although I have had to go through a debrief of the meeting with the guy who’s paying for the trip. We’re about 30 minutes out of London and I have finally managed to open the Air and start typing.
About very little, as you can see/read.
But, whatever the state of the previous paragraphs, I have managed to meet the target of writing something. Not so long ago, I would have simply skipped it for today. And after skipping one day, the whole challenge would have seemed null and void and I would have let days and weeks pass.
That’s not how I treat writing any more. Writers write and that’s not a phrase to be treated lightly. It has taken me too many years to learn that.
Tomorrow my daughter Isla heads off to Malta. I need to be up at 5am to take her to the airport.
I may have to set the alarm. And I’ll write again tomorrow, too.
