Don’t ask me future-related questions

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post for ages; if it comes to that, this year my intention was to write a blog post each month. How well that worked out you can see.

A common saying of mine over the last couple of years has been “Don’t ask me future-related questions!” because so many things have been up in the air constantly. Those areas range from “what I plan to do this week” to “where I see myself in several years”. It stopped being a useful question a long time ago.

My main undertaking this year has been a giant research project, which is slowly shifting from the researching to the writing (nonfiction) side of things. I’ve been enjoying it no end, but a consistent difficulty in getting anything done on it has been that I can’t follow the first bit of advice given to students everywhere and make myself a Weekly Schedule. The thought of being able to expect that if I write down today what I plan to do two weeks from now, it will happen according to my plan, has become a foreign idea to me.

Partly this is due to the fact that, within a week, no two days have the same work schedule, so that while Mondays may all look the same as each other, Mondays never look the same as Tuesdays which never look the same as Wednesdays, etc. This makes it very hard to make resolutions like “Every day at 9:00 a.m. I will sit down and write for one hour.” It’s very hard to achieve consistency when you can’t get up in the morning and repeat what you did the day before. 

The unpredictability of my body has also been a hindrance. I can’t count on having energy tomorrow, even if I do today and have had for the last 3 weeks (that actually makes it more likely something will go wrong). This means that if I reach the limit of what I can get done in a day, I can’t just set the rest aside to do tomorrow; for all I know, it might be a fortnight before I pick it up again. I may have a day off, and make an ambitious to-do list in anticipation, and then wake up in the morning with a head full of fog, or a body whose needs are going to need to come first for whatever reason all day, or plain fatigue (doesn’t sound like much, but trying to write clear argumentative essays while tired is like pushing string), and get nothing done. I might wake up the next morning bounding with energy (comparatively) and spend it all on a work shift before I get a chance to do anything around the house with it. 

There is also the not inconsiderable fact that beginning in May the construction yard next door to me, which previously went and did its business elsewhere, started tearing things up and tearing things down and building giant new buildings, working 14-hour shifts six days a week, and even if I became miraculously insensitive to noise (I did not), the fact that Google Docs frequently had to stop taking dictation because there was too much background noise would have been an obstacle in itself. They seem to be coming to the end of that project, just in time for winter and shortened days and a notorious lack of energy. (I have started taking vitamin D, which worked such a miracle in the first two weeks that I was the first person to church one Sunday, which never happens — but I have also been told that the difference gets less drastic as your body gets used to it, and it’s been nearly a month now, so even though most days I have had energy, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.)

The document containing what I have written so far is currently 25,000 words, which, when I had fewer responsibilities and things, I could have done in a month. Maybe six weeks. Instead it has taken me almost all year. Nonfiction takes longer to write than fiction, at least for me, but still, remembering the rate at which I used to churn out books and papers, it’s frustrating.

This is where the irony always stings me. One of the great lessons of this project so far has been that if anything gets done, it is not me doing it, it is God. So the fact that I cannot count on myself to make things happen even on the small scale of five hundred words a day or whatever goal I might wish I could set myself, is exactly in keeping with the broader scope of the thing. If I cannot count on myself to be able to drum up the energy or make the time to get things done, and yet nevertheless, however slowly, they do keep getting done, the only logical conclusion is that I am not working alone — more than that, I am not even the main actor. 

Learning this lesson is (of course!) as frustrating as any other part of it, and I can’t claim to be done yet, but there it is: something a bit deeper than a blog post on “10 tips for making productive study time as a working adult” or something. (Not, of course, that I would have written any posts like that anyway.)

Have I mentioned that this is frustrating? I know my unreliability bothers other people, and it bothers me just as much. It’s no fun, but perhaps if you’ve been dealing with obstacles to your writing (or other sub-creating) this will let you know you’re not alone.

The laundry needs switching now, and then I have to put dishes away (I have done dishes three times this week! that’s the magic of Vitamin D for you), and I do work today, so this will probably be all the time I have for writing — but hey, at least I got a blog post in while it was still this month. No promises about next. . . .