Decompressing

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There have been multiple times over this past semester when I have been convinced that I will completely collapse. I am a perpetual procrastinator. I don't believe I was born this way. I remember the first time I brought home reading homework from kindergarten. The book was Mr. Jones and Mr. Bones. (Someone has posted the text, so if you want to read it CLICK HERE.) As soon as I got home, I ran to my room and read my book. When I finished, I ran to the kitchen to tell my mom and ask what I should do next. She was cooking or washing dishing - something that kept her close to the counter - and she probably expected homework to keep me occupied for more than a few minutes. I danced around the kitchen and pestered her with "What should I do now?" every few seconds until she suggested that I read the book backwards. I didn't question this, I just I thought that my Mom had all the best ideas. So I ran back to my room and read the story from the back cover to the front, ending with Bones Mr. and Jones Mr. You can bet that as soon as I finished, I was tearing down the hall to ask what to do next.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to that insatiable curiosity and drive to do everything as soon as possible. I didn't know that doing dishes was a chore; I was helping. Folding socks was not a chore; it was preparing ammunition for a sock war. I didn't realize I was not a very good artist; I was simply astounded by the fact if I draw a fish with crayons and then paint over it with blue watercolors it looked like the ocean. Books were where the stories lived. I didn't take forever trying to figure out what to read; I just grabbed what I could reach on the bookshelf.

Somewhere along the line I realized that not everything is possible. The last day of second grade I cried because I was changing schools and it hit me that I wouldn't get to know all the kids at school before it was over. All of those other children were friends I would never get to know. The same thing happened when I visited Powell's Books in Portland for the first time. I cried, because there was an entire collection of Goethe in German that I could not afford. There were books on the shelves that I might never be able to reach.

This semester it seemed that every week something I had always assumed was within my reach was being put on the highest shelves, behind the locked bars of the rare book room, just slightly out of my realm of possibility. I'm astounded at the number of times I have said, "I really cannot deal with this right now. I will cope over the summer." And yet I am happier overall with the work I produced this semester than any other semester. Not because it was my best writing ever, but because I finally stopped writing what I thought I should and started writing what I want. Papers this round contained a lot more Liz ranting than ever before and a lot less deferral to the expert opinions.

With every PhD rejection letter that came in, I reminded myself that Neil Gaiman liked my paper on Coraline. He told Anna, "One wishes it were a whole book." That was also a paper where I abandoned the topic I thought I should have been writing on and wrote what I wanted. Now that I've this expanse of time in front of me without any solid job prospects, I'm going to try to spend a bit of time each day writing what I want to write.