Day 182.

Today would normally be my birthday. But I’m cancelling it this year.

Under regular circumstances, I would start the day with some exercise-like activity, make a point to write something new and spend time on editing something in progress. Then I’d go eat something fattening and expensive for lunch, then start drinking martinis by 4:30, meeting up with a few friends in some lovely old bar. But this particular birthday—or rather, non-birthday—it’s pouring rain, I’m on day 10 or so of being in a miserable dark mood, poor Ant, my partner in doing the fun things, is on day 2 of a migraine, my back is killing me, and the idea of writing anything beyond this dumb little missive is, well, painful.

When the lockdown commenced in March, I thought to myself, Self, perhaps we can get some good writing done. Maybe get the dog thief manuscript to a place of send-to-agents doneness. Maybe spend some time on those other two novel manuscripts that have accumulated a hundred or so pages each and are still waiting for me to really get into them. Maybe write a Sassbak each week. Maybe revise one or all of the short stories I wrote last year.

It turns out I can’t even read a book these days let alone write one. The time and space quarantine has afforded me to actually write has been spent not-writing in the following ways: Thinking about how I should write; dreading writing; sitting down to write only to hate every eternal moment of it; writing things that I hate so much I delete them the moment they come into existence; picking up a book to read, to be inspired, only to have my mind wander so frequently I can’t retain a single page; trying several different books in hopes one might hook me (no dice, so far); opening files to revise work, hating it so completely it makes me depressed; writing three paragraphs of a Sassbak then abandoning it; and, finally, generally being deeply annoyed for ever thinking of myself as a writer and angrily questioning the wisdom of hanging the entirety of my identity on something that I am clearly incapable of actually doing to a meaningful degree.

That thought has percolated in quiet self-defeating moments before, but it normally quells quickly. But now, these last few months, it’s gotten louder and louder: Maybe it’s time to officially give up on my lifelong goal/dream/desire of being a writer. Like a writer-writer—an author, a maker of intriguing and entertaining works that are published by strangers who pay some amount of money, no matter how paltry, for my inventions of plot and character. I lie awake at night, mulling this option over, thinking that maybe I’ll just be a copywriter, an advertising writer. That’s okay. It’s a good living. It’s much closer to being a writer than a lot of people get. Maybe I should just be grateful for that proximity and stop with my delusions of being a Writer with a capital W. So what if I never see the words “A Novel by Sage Romano” in real life.

It’d be such a load off. Maybe I’d resent the time I spend doing my paid work less. Maybe I’d actually want to progress in my career instead of remaining at my current middling level, ostensibly to afford more time for my writing (ha). Maybe I could spend my weekends just relaxing instead of berating myself for not writing, or feeling listless and miserable about whatever writing I force myself to do.

But then I remember how it used to be. When a blank page was full of possibility instead of dread. When I relished untangling the problems of a story, loved the work of creating characters and their world, when the physical, mental and emotional act of writing was all I longed for, all the time, no matter how easily the words were coming or not. When it was a release, the thing I ran to when I was bored or sad or joyful. When it was an act of empowerment and creation. The feeling I had when I’d sit down to write was peace and joy and anticipation, knowing in my soul that this was what I was meant to do with my life.

I don’t get that feeling anymore. Every sentence is a struggle. It has been for a long time now, but I chalked it up to a busy life, a busy job, various distractions great and small. The quarantine has only made me realize that the problem with my writing isn’t that I don’t have time; it’s that it doesn’t bring me any joy. And for the record, I know better than to expect constant joy. Writing is definitely work and like all work, it’s getting one word after another, as Neil Gaiman puts it. It’s not easy and, honestly, good writing shouldn’t be easy, in my opinion. But the effort shouldn’t be so uniformly painful, right? It shouldn’t feel so thoroughly fucking futile.

But what doesn’t feel comprehensively futile right now? The world is haragued by a variety of apocalypses. Why would I write about stolen dogs and aging rock stars? And maybe that’s been part of it. Everything I’ve tried to work on creatively has felt so disconnected from this seismic present. What the hell does the world need with my dumb little stories, my inconsequential musings on the nature of whatever? This thought has dogged me for a months now, this nagging feeling that if I am to write, I need to write something connected to this time in the world, something somehow relevant, reflective of the shitshow we’re all living in.

Last month, I partook in a short, casual program proposed by one of the authors I follow on writer Twitter, Jami Attenberg. She creates a community of amateur writers a couple times a summer under the banner 1,000 Words of Summer. For one week you commit to writing 1,000 words a day. It was a low-impact, non-invasive writing assignment I felt like I could handle. I wanted to see if I could tap into that old feeling, with a new blank page, with just enough of a plan to start, to let the words and characters take me for a ride.

I did it, mostly. I started from scratch with a semi-idea I had scrawled in a note somewhere, did a rough character sketch then launched into writing 1,000 words a day for one week. I fell down on it after four days, but made up for it by writing 3,000 words on the last day. The result is a story that may or may not be an exploration of how people experience loneliness differently, or something—I can’t tell yet—and it takes place in the near future and imagines a very bleak post-COVID world through the eyes of two people living it. Also, it’s probably one of the most boring things I’ve ever produced, unless you count marketing emails for a drug that treats psoriatic arthritis. Writing it did not provoke joy or curiosity or excitement about what these characters might do, where the story might go. The thrill is gone.

Thrilled or not, however, I did manage to create something that felt relevant to now, to the bleak present, to my dark moods, to this despair and anxiety we are all fighting off. Maybe writing about now, in all its misery and frightening uncertainty is what I need. Maybe it’s my way back to writing, to being peaceable with it and its variegations. But today, this is all the writing I’m doing, this rambling, sullen meditation on something that isn’t an actual problem. Today may be September 10 and I may technically turn 46 years old. But today is not my birthday. It’s just another day of looking out the windows at a world that is changing at an unnerving pace.