Looking at my On This Day feed this morning and I had a NaNo post where I was finishing the day at 15,000 words for the month so far, ALL FICTION. I had a moment of comparing my present day self with my past self and coming up sorely lacking. I mean I will be somewhere between 5 and 6 thousand today when I finish this one. Probably much closer to 5 than 6, to be truthful. Unless I can get a fiction piece going as a companion to this one.
My past self was cranking on all cylinders for sure.
But, I mean, that's why I decided to do my own thing this year instead of NaNo. I knew there was no way I was going to manage 50,000 words and that 25,000 would be a pretty big stretch as it was. But still...
I wrote 15,000 words in 7 days a few years ago, on my way to just over 53,000 for the month. Where did they all come from? And how do I find that spigot again to turn it back on?
How weird to be jealous of past me instead of pretending future me is going to be so much better.
I mean, that's the normal thing for me. I make all of these plans for future me, she will workout two hours a day and write 3 hours a day and clean house 2 hours a day and cook a fabulous dinner every night and be pleasant to small animals and large people and...then future me becomes present me and looks at all of those plans and is like, who the fuck did you make these for?
Because future me isn't really all that different than present me but I always have high hopes for her, she just never really gets there. So how in the hell did past me get all of that done? Where did she go? Why didn't she stick around?
Wait, how long ago was that? Nine years? Oh...
So that was before the Trump presidency showed me that millions of my fellow Americans looked at that ball of racist, sexist, orange id and said, Yep! Sign me up! Before Black Lives Matter brought to a head the racial injustices that are clearly still a part of American life and being met with Nuh uh... Before #MeToo was met with, again, nuh uh... Before a pandemic showed me that a disappointingly large section of the population responded to the vulnerable needing extra protection with BUT I WANNA GO TO A RESTAURANT WITHOUT A MASK ON.... Before we lost both of our mothers. Before we lost a dozen friends and other family members. Before an insurrection. Before hundreds of anti-trans laws and JK Fucking Rowling. Before the secret anti semites decided to use their out loud voices and have not been met with a resounding denouncing. Before the current election cycle which is looking more and more like it's going to usher in a group that will do their best to make sure it's the last election cycle, and again, a huge swath of the population rooting for authoritarianism to win.
So it's not actually all that surprising that there has been a change. Maybe the real surprise is that present me is writing at all. I mean past me imagining what future me would have gone through probably would have imagined present me rocking in a corner crying softly to herself. Which I mean, catch me on Tuesday as the election results come in and we might still get there but...
As jealous as I am of me from 9 years ago I'm actually pretty impressed with the resilience we've all displayed over the past decade. Honestly, we've all been through a lot of collective trauma. We might not all agree on what the real trauma was, but we've all been through it. It's been a hard stretch. And it doesn't look like it's going to get much better for a long long time.
So I view the fact that we're all still going. We are all still writing, knitting, crocheting, paining, sculpting, throwing pots, cooking, raising kids, reading good stories, laughing with friends, loving our families, fighting for justice as a win. A triumph. A show of what living is and how to keep doing it. We are all amazing.
Even if some of us aren't cranking out 2000 words of fiction writing a day...
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