A mood
My baby is becoming a toddler in front of my very eyes. Occasionally, when she’s in a mood or doesn’t feel well, my sweet, agreeable little bean becomes a scream-groaning pumpkin who wholeheartedly tries to fling herself out of my arms.
In this state, Matt and I refer to her as “General Refusal.”
If you come into contact with the General, steel yourself. She has an iron will that hides her face from every offering of food or drink, from every toy or book, from every hug.
General Refusal doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows its certainly not that.
Relatable.
A goal
My goal for 2023 is to write 50 newsletters.
I share about my goal because I could not think of anything else to write about and frankly, I don’t want to.
Steven Pressfield, author of a grazillion books, describes it perfectly:
“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance. The resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, threaten."
If June is General Refusal, call me Major Resistance.
So here I am, three days’ dirty hair in an unflattering bun, wearing my maroon robe that looks like an old man’s smoking jacket, grinding my teeth and grinding this out, praying the baby doesn’t wake up from her phlegmy cough that has haunted our house all week, staving off my low-grade bad-itude with chunks of dark chocolate and the brute force of will.
But … here I am. Dragging my bag of Resistance rocks behind me.
A message
I wonder if writing is completely pointless or if it is ever going to be “worth it” —whatever that means—and the internet gods, like the mercurial tricksters they most certainly are, drop this on me from Jack Butcher’s visualize value:
Here I am, Major Resistance, and only one month in.
I can’t help but laugh at myself.
I am reading The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, which reads like a pep talk from an extremely practical friend. He says, "It's not what you do once in a while that shapes your life; it's what you do consistently."
Sure, I was bucked off the horse for one week, but I decide I not stay down for two in row. That’s an open invitation for self-loathing. I won’t allow it.
A shift
The baby is now awake from her first leg of sleep. She sits in my lap playing with my car keys, while I reach around her to type. She is finally in a good mood.
Here we are, General Refusal and Major Resistance, two strong-willed gals trying to grapple with our immediate emotions when we can’t see the long-term play.
I feel my mood lighten.
June starts to wriggle and fuss. She wants down.
It dawns on me: how lucky I am that my greatest obstacle is my own motivation. That is completely within my control. How fortunate to have a dad like Matt to swoop in, right in time to let me write these last few sentences. He knows it’s important to me.
I did it, I made myself just sit down and write and I’m at the end of it. All of that resistance for what?
To be here.