I stood staring at my dresser. So tall. So tidy. So white. Until you opened it that is.
Just the other day my grandma shook her head as she glimpsed the inside of my dresser.
Nothing was folded.
I know I needed to get everything out and fold it and put it away, but that would make a mess. It was easier to just stare at the dresser.
Kind of like it’s easier to deal with writer’s block by waiting for inspiration to hit us, than getting out all our clothes to fold them. We know inspiration for folding our laundry basically never comes, we just have to do it. So, why, why, why do we think inspiration for writing will hit us?!
Seth Godin said it this way, “No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down. Why then, is writer’s block endemic? ...Write like you talk. Often.”
So, I'll do what I didn’t want to do.
I'll get out my clothes and I make a mess.
Here’s the key phrase to folding my laundry and filling a page, "Make a mess.”
I don’t get my clothes out into tall tidy piles that make sense.
We get them out and make a mess. Then I fold them. Then I put them in tidy tall piles. Then I put them back in my dresser.
You’re probably like, “Okay, duh!”. But, this is exactly how it works with writing. I know because one of my favorite instagram posts this winter came from a moment just like this:
It was day one of the five day Fill the Journal challenge with Morgan Harper Nichols, who writes poetry that’s like fuzzy socks to the soul. I stared at that page paralyzed by writer’s block. Eventually, it dawned on me that I didn't sign up to write anything epic or fuzzy-socks-to-the-soul. I just signed up to write. So, I did. I didn’t think about how it all went together or what moral I wanted everyone to understand at the end I just wrote. Before I knew it the page was full. And all those words I didn’t think I had even had a theme.
Don’t believe me?! Try this exercise…
- Get out a piece of paper (or pull up a google doc) so tidy and white - right?!
- Now, I want you to set a timer for five minutes and write until the time is up. Looks a bit messy?
- Then, go through and find the themes. Arrange what you have into paragraphs (as best you can). Then add sentences that bridge the gaps. Now, you have a beautiful page of words.
In the end, I think folding laundry and filling a page is more about showing up to do the work than holding the tidy ending. As long as we show up for the tidy ending, it’s gonna be easier to stare at that tall white dresser or blank sheet of paper than risk messing it up. But the tidy ending in everything...cooking, relationships, laundry, home renovations, and writing comes after risking the mess.
So, here’s my hope for both of us: May we risk making a mess more often so that we can have a chance at holding those tidy endings and share them with others.
P.S. You know what I would love more than anything?! To see a picture of your full-messy sheet of paper. Share it on instagram and tag me!!!