I’m pissed off right now. Not at anyone or anything that I can recognize. I’m pissed off, I guess, because I want to write and yet I find it so maddeningly difficult. Because I have wanted to write my whole life and I’ve mostly found ways to put it off my whole life. Because I don’t understand why something I want to do so much and love so much can cause me such grief.

Of course it makes sense that the things we have to work hard for are the most satisfying. How could it be any other way? But I usually feel that it’s not just hard work to write but impossible work. It often seems impossible to get the ideas and words in my brain out onto paper or screen. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t really find impossible work all that satisfying. It makes me want to stomp on my head. So I just kind of shut down and I let those words stay right where they are.

I guess now, though, the impossibility of it is just starting to piss me off more than shut me down. At least more often anyway. My mind’s doing something like this these days: “Oh yeah, words? You think you’re impossible to organize? Well, I’ll show you, you a**holes! I will sit down and TYPE, and you can see how you feel then, making that arduous, confusing trip from brain to screen!”

But here comes the irony: I am happy to be pissed off right now. I am feeling lots of things! I am making myself do something hard! I am slogging through! Yeehaw! (I am picturing myself knee deep in mud, trudging along, with boppy music playing. I want to dance but am physically unable.)

So, to recap: Pissed off rather than totally shut down, and happy about that, and knee deep in mud but wanting to dance.

I declare it to be progress. Messy f’ing progress.