Day 49

I have been talking with a friend about co-facilitating a writing workshop. The theme of the workshop was my idea and I was excited about it. At the same time, I see it as a distraction from my writing. I am starting to see a lot of things this way.

I made commitments to a number of projects a few months ago, just after graduating, when I felt a desperate need to answer the question: What now? I defined myself as a graduate student/doctoral candidate for five years. The dissertation consumed so much of my time and energy and focus for the last two years. A vacuum was created by its completion.

I was like a drug addict just out of rehab. I needed to fill the hours; to create a new vision for my life. I imagined myself as a mediator, or the director of an agency devoted to conflict resolution. I got a few plate spinning in that direction. I decided that I wanted to coordinate a community forum on bullying. Oh, good, there's another plate balancing precariously in the air. Yesterday when my friend asked if I wanted to co-facilitate this writing workshop that I had suggested earlier, I recognized it for what it was: just another plate to spin. These spinning plates all serve to distract me from the writing.

I don't fully understand it, but I know that I need to write. I am afraid of that calling: it seems so primal and unrestrained. With all of these plates spinning there is little time to attend to it. My fears are abated. But always there is this tension between the fear and the calling. I am being pulled in opposite directions. Another option is to tend to the fears. What is it about fully devoting myself to the writing that so frightens me?

I heard a story on the radio a few months ago about Zora Neale Hurston author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. A well educated woman who continued to write throughout her life, she died alone and in poverty. It was only after her death that she was recognized as one of the greatest African American writers of the twentieth century.

Zora Neale Hurston worked as a maid before she was admitted to the St Lucie County Welfare Home where she died and was buried in an unmarked grave. I think about her a lot. I wonder: Was she content? Did she have regrets? Did the writing bring her joy? And I ask myself: Am I willing to take the chance?