I’m really struggling right now with a very first-world problem. As I define and execute my workdays from home in the middle of a pandemic, I’m having a hard time defining what it means to act. I’ve spent hours and hours adjusting and readjusting my to-do list to readjust myself into a bias primarily toward action and secondarily toward reflection, but I’m finding, as a writer especially, that I sometimes have a hard time defining which is which. Perhaps more pressingly as a teacher and storyteller, I’m starting to question my own suppositions about which is which.
Most days (today included) I find myself (only partially) dividing my time between “service work” and “creative work.” Here are a few examples from today’s to-do list, fitted into this dichotomy:
Service:
Plan for second semester - finalize syllabi & texts
Re/Creation writing workshop tonight
Organize shared folder, esp Antonio Battle stuff for Rekha
Put together group meeting between our students and Cornell around parole prep
Creative:
Read from and annotate Best American Essays 2017
Edit reflective piece for Joni’s pub
Archive journal, pulling pieces for Goodman project and I Love You reliquary
Make master list-narrative of threads for Goodman
The struggle I encounter daily is perhaps reflected in the order I put these “halves” in above. In the past four years, I have de-prioritized my own creative work. This has been a conscious choice, a decision to prioritize the voices of my people over my own. The problem I’m running into now is that I need to create, perhaps not as much as I need to breathe, but in a way so pressing that I start resenting the world and myself when I don’t feel that space is given to me. I see this impulse, in my work with my people in opening these pathways to creative expression, as a need that is pretty close to universal.
And yet, the stuff on my to-do list that I define as “creative” always gets shoved to the bottom of my list at the start of the day, and I all-too-often feel a pang of guilt when I dive into them, like time is passing that could be better spent in service. And then, when I’m doing the work I define as “service,” I find myself guiltily looking forward to my time alone with words. Worse, when I do get to the creative work, my mind is spent and all I want to do is read instead of writing. I find that, like now actually, I’m only writing when the need to create with words overcomes me. I think I’ve perhaps written some viscerally appealing pieces out of this desperation in the past four years, but only intermittently. I wish I could find a way to write that’s more regular but no less immediate, desperate even.
I don’t know how to get past this, to achieve balance in my life between these elements of myself and my work, but I’m really trying. I’m going to ask as many people as I can in the days moving forward how they do this.
How about you?