To be unsure. Of what I’m doing. Maddening given that normally, to do something, take on a project, head in a certain direction, pretty much get out of bed in the morning, there’s a general sense of “right. I have a few skills under my belt, let’s do this.” But in the last couple of weeks, taking on a new student to tutor has driven me all to distraction. First of all, I’m coming into their roster of classes with no basic idea of what’s gone on with them before, pretty much no knowledge of what’s expected from the professor or otherwise. So that’s funny. But what’s also real is my stress around it. Kind of like those dreams you have where you’re taking a test and you realize you have no friggin’ idea what the answers are. In fact, it’s not even in a language you understand. Oh, and you’re naked. When I snap myself out of that baseline panic, I realize, Lauren, ferFuxSake, no one is expecting you to understand this rhetoric class that deals with logos and pathos and other Greek-etymological words ending with ‘os’. (Bathos anyone?) Yes, I’ve looked them up, but working with this student inside a paper where they need to be used intelligently…get the f&&* out. Yes, we’ve discussed. They’ve explained to the best of…but still, I see failure standing just out the corner of my eye tapping a big clown shoe waiting to trip me.

That’s my pratfall. Rather than sanely asking, “Hey, walk me through that,” I immediately go to “Oh, miLord, I’m failing you. I’m sorry.” Then I start frantically looking for a Ted Talk or mini-Master Class where I can learn all about the subject without embarrassing myself. (SideNote: Metallica has a Master Class entitled “Being in a Band.” Curious. Won’t help me with Greek rhetoric. Probably.)

Today on the walk home from my swim, I Iistened to a great podcast interview with Meg Mason, on In Writing with Hattie Crisell. Meg talked about a quote from Ian McEwan she has pinned up on the board above her desk: “Hesitation is essential to art.” My mind went to daydreaming and how important that is to creativity–something my dad and I talked about last week when he got curious about meditation and we were exploring the difference between a purposefully empty mind and an organic letting-go as the mind wanders, bringing up all sorts of ideas and such. But Meg talked about the quote more in the realm of procrastination. Specifically, how hesitation, disguised as procrastination, springs from fear and being confronted with the sense that you may not have the ability to do the thing you’re passionate about. So you pause, hesitate. Pull back to avoid instant failure, then look it in the eye and dig for the passion to proceed. (Meg knows from what she speaks on the topic of failure. She talks about that here.) And if it just doesn’t feel right, even after giving it a good go and a stare-down and a talking-to, and then all those breaths taken, then giving yourself permission to step away. Boy, even as I write that, I know in my bones I don’t quite believe it. But as a wise-as-F woman Jami Attenberg says on the topic: “Sometimes we just have to let our work disappear and eat our failures. We tried, and that was enough.“

And wouldn’t you know it, I did a funny dance with procrastination and failure today. All morning I’d been tinkering with a certain chapter. Walking around it. Rereading it. BORED by it. But for some reason, it seemed important for me to keep it. A kind of Look-at-all-the-clever-language kind of stubbornness. I wandered away. Returned to trying to find a TedTalk on rhetoric that I could understand. Left the apartment. Went to the pool. Then, as I pretended I was a big sea turtle who knew the breaststroke, it hit me: That chapter needs to earn its keep. Justify why it’s there. Screw the fancy language. It’s not even that clever a patter anyway. As a reader, I know that if I’m going to take a ride into a scene, I want to get in the damn car for a reason and trust the character at the wheel to take me somewhere. So I came home and found the characters I’d been writing laying flat out on the hotel floor, asleep. When I’d left them, they’d been sparring on the bed…so you know, they were just over it too. I shook them awake and asked Why are you here? Where are you going? We had a bit of a tussle. They made a good case for staying, but they also wanted a couple of other players to come in and tweak the action. I mean, they were as bored as me. We came to some decisions. They’ll probably hang in. We’ll see. Which reminded me: nothing is permanent. Not fear of failure. Procrastination. Time. Characters. Nada. Well, maybe Greek has staying power. mónimos.

(Vocalized below)