Decaffeinated

Hi friends.

I quit coffee three weeks ago so I could feel better. This is not a letter about being middle-aged although this feels like a pretty middle-aged kind of thing. Sometimes I just want to keep being middle-aged out of everything. (Good fucking luck, I know.)

But anyway we make these kinds of shifts all the time. The irresponsible shit you pulled at 16 doesn’t fly when you’re 25. Then you used to go out dancing all night when you were 25 and now you’re in your thirties and you’re like, “No thank you, sir, I have to get up for work in the morning.” And sometimes when you’re nearly 52, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, after years of just living it up in a caffeinated state, just having a goddamn party every morning with a fresh cup of Joe, you discover if you drink coffee it makes you feel like garbage all day. So now you are person who doesn’t drink coffee.

Don’t think I won’t miss it but I do feel a lot better now. But for the first ten days I thought my brain might never work again in the morning, and that is my most delicious part of the day for thinking, when I can just sit there and my mind offers me ideas unbidden. Every day in those ten days I thought at least once: Maybe I’ll just have to go back to coffee if I want to feel like me in the mornings again.

But this week I realized my brain was back. I was waking up and sitting with a glass of water quietly in the living room and all of these great ideas were coming for the novel I’m revising, and I would just shoot off little emails to myself. When I finally did get up, really, to face the world, it was like an outline for the work I needed to do that day already existed in my inbox.

I did not think about this newsletter during that time. My brain did not want to. It had other shit to take care of. Until today.

And then I found myself thinking about a friend of mine who said he was in a rut. Maybe there was a sameness to everything that left him uninspired. Sometimes stability is boring. He is a productive person, is able to make his art for a living (mostly), and I witnessed no stoppage in his pace. He is disciplined, he does the work. He has new ideas all the time. But nevertheless, everything felt the same for him.

I have been thinking about this a bit myself, not because I’m in a rut, but because these revisions have gone on now for a while. (I actually used “ENDLESS” in an email to a friend about it the other day.) It’s just steady fucking work, and I have no choice but to hammer through it and it’s not always interesting, even if the book itself is always interesting. Let’s put it this way: solving the problem is fun, implementing the solution is (often) not.

So yes the creative life can sometimes be one of drudgery, although certainly not more so than any other job. The revisions, yes, the rut-feeling, yes, and sometimes lots of no’s when you would murder for just one yes.

I sat there this morning in bed, my decaffeinated self, and I let myself acknowledge the challenge of it all. OK, this is work. OK, it is hard. Then I thought: What is a finish line anyway? In the creative life, when you complete one project, you just start another. I said to myself: You’re lucky to even be in the race.

Sometimes you just have to remind yourself that you’re lucky you get to do this in the first place. If it’s something you get to make any kind of living at, you’re lucky. If you’re someone with the ability or luxury to carve out actual time in your day to be creative, you’re lucky. If you live in a place where freedom of speech is a given, you’re lucky. If your brain is still healthy and working, then you’re goddamn lucky.

The creative life has so many ebbs and flows. Yes we want results! We all want results. But could we, for a moment, appreciate that the opportunity for results even exists? Could we appreciate that are we here alive and functioning, breath steady, with our brain sending us messages to wake up and embrace the day and try try try to make something new?

I’m going to try and appreciate it today. How about you?

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on twitter and instagram.