Gabs Writes

Tag: writing

  • Hey, I’m back! Welcome back.

    Hey, I’m back! Welcome back.

    There’s a game my kids like to play, usually while they’re supposed to be eating dinner.

    The first floor of our house forms a loop from our table to the play area to the front hallway to the kitchen and back again.

    When they don’t want to eat dinner, they stand up and run away from the table as quickly as they can, careening into the front hallway, through the kitchen, and back out until they’ve reached the table again.

    “Hey,” they say, adopting a tough guy attitude. “I’m back.”

    “Hey!” their dad and I reply. “Welcome back.”

    Then, as we try to invite them to sit down and have some dinner with us, they go running off again, leaving us to shout at their retreating backs, “Hey, where you going?”

    They love it. They will run this loop a dozen times. Sometimes we try to get them to eat a bite of food every time they complete a loop. Sometimes we seize the opportunity to finish our own dinners before the next stage of the night begins.  

    But the pattern never varies. They always come back, and we always welcome them back. No hard feelings. We’re just glad they returned and want them to join us. Then they run away again, giggling madly.

    Hey there! Long time, no see. (Photo by Vladislav Klapin on Unsplash)

    I’ve had this game on my mind as I’ve been thinking about the changes I’ve experienced in my own life over the past several years. The projects I’ve started, and the ones I’ve been forced to abandon. The way I get too tired to carry on with something that I want to do. How I continue to think about that thing and how it eventually becomes so large and daunting that coming back to the project feels like an almost insurmountable obstacle.

    I’ve thought about that with this blog, which I was initially so determined to maintain before everything else took up my time. How I’d reach the end of the day and couldn’t bear to write anything even though words were rattling around in my head. And how, after a while, it felt like I couldn’t write a new article because it had been too long.

    But now I’m looking at it from a different perspective. Why abandon the thing you want to do to bring a little creativity back into your life? Why turn it into a point of stress by making it align to firm deadlines that at this stage of life are impossible to maintain?

    What if you just…let it vibe?

    So, hi, I’m back.

    I can’t promise to a set schedule, but I don’t want to let the blog die. I sometimes still have interesting ideas or want to write about a book that I read, or just have something I want to say or try out. And I’m giving myself permission to do it on the schedule that makes sense for me. I know that’s not the way you’re supposed to do writing on the internet. Considering what I do for a living, I know that updating your content based on vibes is kind of the opposite of what you should do.

    But nothing makes sense anyway, so why not embrace the chaos.

    I’ll come back when it makes sense. I’ll write some stuff. Then I’ll go away. And I might come back soon, or I might stay away for a little longer. But you can rest easy with the knowledge that I’ll turn the corner at some point and come tearing out of the kitchen again with something to say.

    I hope you’ll welcome me back each time I do. And maybe the irregularly timed missives can bring a little bit of interest to your inbox instead of becoming yet another thing that starts piling up that you haven’t read yet.

    It’s good to be here. I hope you’re enjoying your meal.

  • Writing is hard. So is the pandemic.

    Writing is hard. So is the pandemic.

    Setting goals for yourself can be a double edged sword.

    If you’re an Achiever type, who needs to get a set number of things done in a day or you feel like a Failure™, goals motivate you. They are invigorating. When you reach them, you feel so great.

    But, if you are this type of person who has to check everything off the list every day and you fall short on a goal, then your feelings of being a Failure™ tend to compound, multiply, and grow until you are convinced that you are the worst and laziest person in the world for not being able to achieve this one thing.

    When I started this blog last May, it wasn’t on a whim. I had been thinking about hows and whys of starting a blog for a couple years. For a long time I let my perfectionism stand in the way of getting anything done. I had to come up with the perfect content plan that would include many brilliantly crafted arguments that ended with profound realizations and takeaways.

    Yes, I am fully aware I am ridiculous.

    Once I gave up on the idea of regularly delivering the impossible through writing and decided that I could do literally anything else, the ideas started flowing. As it turned out, I hadn’t completely run out of ideas and had nothing to say. I’d just paralyzed myself via perfectionism. A lot of my writing for fun in the past has been fiction writing, particularly books. I thought that writing a blog would be a nice, easy release from that. These posts are shorter, therefore they’re easier! (Again, why does my brain do this to me and why do I fall for it every time?)

    So I set the goal of a post a week. If you go back through my 2021 archives, I did a decent job. Missed weeks here and there, but overall, considering the having children, being in a pandemic, and the holding down a job then quitting that job and starting a new job thing, I did pretty good.

    Then it all sort of unraveled.

    Blonde, white girl lying facedown on bed, hair in front of her face.
    This has basically been me for the past two months. Not pictured: The children climbing all over me.

    Like many parents, my last couple months have been really hard. Sick children, sick me, daycare closings, the Omicron variant, and a whole mess of other shit has very unfortunately returned me to the type of burnout I was experiencing last summer. (I am not opposed to reviving hot cicada summer for this winter. We can make it work.) But this time instead of trying to power through and do the writing at night, I instead kind of collapsed and started mindlessly watching YouTube instead. Oh, and I also finally saw some Squid Game months after everyone else had already forgotten about it.

    The terrible part, other than the absolute grinding burnout, was that I was thinking about writing pretty much every night. But I didn’t have the energy to do it, couldn’t force myself to pull out the laptop. So instead of delighting in this great outlet, I just thought about the article I wanted to write and how much I sucked for not being able to write it. Pretty much every night of December and January. Good times!

    My goal for 2022 is still to write and update this blog. Weekly, if I can! But, if not, then often enough so that you know I’m still here. I have a couple topics I definitely want to cover. There’s a whole treatise I want to write about the Kate Winslet/Cameron Diaz masterpiece The Holiday. And although it’s not Christmas anymore, I’m going to write about that silly movie two months after it’s relevant. Because I want to.

    I still have a couple thoughts brewing about the Mission:Impossible franchise. I want to write more about how the internet thinks of and approaches content. I want to write more about books. And I have a plea to make to authors and movie makers around the world to please stop giving your mean female characters “mustaches.” What are you doing with that. Stop it.

    But the bigger goal, other than posting semi-regularly, is to be kinder to myself. And to remind myself to be kinder than others. It’s been almost two years since this pandemic thing started and everyone needs a lot of grace right now. I basically need boatloads of it by this point.

    I hope you’ll give it to me. And I’ll try to return the favor.