Write your response – mine is below –
Writing always makes me feel better.
No matter what, even if in the midst of it, I feel like crap – even if I’m sweating and cursing and writing flat out garbage, I know when the day is done I can say “I wrote three hundred words” or “I wrote one decent sentence” or “hell, I threw words on the page and that is something…”
It has to be something.
It is, indeed, something.
Writing always makes me feel better.
I set the timer for five minutes. I take a bite of donut and a gulp of coffee.
I’m writing.
Writing always makes me feel better.
It’s like easing out of a sore throat, drinking the tea and lemon water. It helps. Not always immediately apparent and it helps. I wake up and can speak more clearly. Like with writing. I throw words down, even gobbled gook, and my mind clears, just slightly.
Like sweeping away the mulberries or the darn spider webs that reproduce in Bakersfield when you walk around the block there are suddenly more. Always. Writing always makes me feel better.
Sometimes it’s simply cataloguing: “They changed the chocolate recipe. It is more thick than I like. That girl is being a volunteer and wants to be a nurse. She knew of Sheila “My friends were always talking about her,” they said she said.
That chocolate is too thick. I think I have a chocolate beard now but I keep writing because I know, I know, I know. Writing always makes me feel better.
I think back to when Samuel was first diagnosed.
I think back to when Writing Crew met at 11 every day on twitter and I wrote alongside them every single day or nearly, a sacred call.
Writing always makes me feel better.
Always.
Someone texted me. I am ignoring it because the timer will ring when my five minutes are up and this is where I need to be, not checking my phone, not answering the door, not looking at my bank balance or threatening my son’s teacher. (That last one is totally untrue but I didn’t know where to go with my words and fiction always works in a pinch.)
The timer goes off, piercing, like an annoying alarm on a travel clock I once carried in what feels like someone else’s life.
I notice, I do feel slightly better.
It works.
Writing always makes me feel better.
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Creative Life Midwife Julie Jordan Scott writes on the road,, when she sits in cafes or in train station. She writes, always.
Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people’s creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in soon!
To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.
Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.
I oftentimes make comments like “I don’t believe in blocks” and “blocks are a mindset thing, switch your mind, block evaporates” and yet here I sit, today, troubled and uncomfortable and squirmy and wishing I could be doing anything in the world EXCEPT writing about blocks but the little inner creativity coach who lives in my chest beside my heart says “Write for five minutes, just the magical five and you will feel better when it’s over than you do right now.”
When I follow through and write like I say I will write, I am never disappointed. I am always glad – even if what comes out seems like the biggest mish-mash gooey meaningless slop of words, it is better than not moving my pencil, my pen or my fingers on the keyboard.