One good thing
A reason to keep up with hobbies, even if only in little bits
Since my day job ended, I’m home full time with my son. If he’s asleep, I write or do freelance work. If he’s awake, I feed him, read to him, change his diaper, take him to the park, and have a quiet existential panic about who am I now?
Sometimes the panic starts as soon as my eyes open: my alarm goes off at 5 in the morning, and I wonder why get up to write? I could sleep more or simply stare at my dark ceiling. I always get up to write. Even if it’s only 12 minutes, it’s one space in the day when I’m not panicking. In fact, I’m often finding reasons to panic less overall.
Before sunrise a few weeks ago, I was hunched over my laptop, at work on a short story, when I had a tiny epiphany. I don’t remember what it was about—a scene, a sentence, maybe just a word choice—and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I had an accompanying thought: “If you do nothing else today, what you just did was good.” My shoulders dropped.
I wound up doing a lot that day, mostly related to my son, who had discovered control of his bladder and peed three times on the bathroom vanity. The third time, I was changing his poopy diaper and in trying catch the pee, I wound up sending the poop flying to the floor. I momentarily stared at it, frozen by the thought that I used to sit at a computer at this time of day and get paid to do it.
It was helpful to redirect with the recollection that I’d done one good thing with my writing that morning. I pictured myself poised in front of my laptop in the darkness and felt a little more secure. It was almost like early morning me looked up from her screen at midafternoon me, standing there in front of a pile of poop, and gave a nod of solidarity. I mean, not really, but this is my writing and sometimes I like to get carried away.
I did not get carried away about the poop. I grabbed it with a diaper and shoved both into the pail, disinfected the floor, and packed my son for the park.
Taking care of him is also a good thing, and one I love doing, but if I did only that, it wouldn’t feel very good to me. Parenting a young child is a weird paradox of feeling like you’re doing everything and yet getting nothing done. Writing gives me my own world separate from the chaos.
I’ve always needed my own world. When I was a kid I preferred to play in the closet or a copse of trees behind our house. In my high school and college years, my car was a refuge. So were bathrooms, particularly at social functions1. Long, meandering walks, insulated by the music piped directly into my ears, form some of my core memories of my twenties. And of course, reading and writing were constants throughout.
You might assume I need my own world so I can feel in control, but I think it’s more about feeling free. To play? Explore? Discover? Yeah, but I also feel I do those things with my son, and even in some of my work.
Only writing lets me feel free to be wholly me. I think that’s it. In relationships and at work (which typically involves relationships), I feel hemmed in by expectations, obligations, etc. It’s funny that my response is to carve out little spaces—real or imagined—in order to stretch. When I’m writing, my only constraints are time and the mechanics of sentence and plot. Otherwise, I have endless space to roam, to sprawl.
I probably could have cut this post a while ago, but I got carried away, enjoying my little world. It’s so rare that I get to! People say hobbies are meditative; I think they’re curative. Doesn’t matter if you’re into writing or gardening or collecting baskets. I say do your thing. It’s sure to be good.
Is this why “Red Dress 1946” is one of my all-time favorites?
“have an existential panic about who am I now?” Yup! I have some heavy thoughts flying around late at night and early mornings and writing helps ground me too.