Can't Quit

Writing: I wish I knew how to quit you.

Not really, although pretty much yes, most of the time, I hate to be writing this, let alone thinking it, and it is true that I don't mean it in that if given the choice to never have to write again, or feel the impulse to do so, I would take that choice, I do mean it in that these days I wish so much of the time that I had gone to medical school and become a world-famous brain surgeon, or even just a well-paid dermatologist who could leave work in time to have dinner with her kids.

My relationship to--with?--writing these days has some very Brokeback Mountain elements. I am full of yearning and dreams, self-loathing and shame. (No, Dad, this does not mean I am secretly a gay cowboy.) The other day, a new friend who is a successful novelist posted a Facebook Status Update that said something like: I hate writing, and although I had just met this woman I felt an overwhelming kinship with her and immediately posted back to her with such enthusiasm she's probably still thinking: Yikes. What's her problem? I was just kind of kidding.

It's the "kind of" that's important there, because I suspect, actually, she does hate writing, sometimes, just like I do, and maybe she even wishes she could run from it, "quit it," choose something else, something safer, saner, more socially acceptable and consistently productive, either to do for a living or simply to love.

I think that's one of the reasons I am writing this blog right now: to try to make myself fall back in love with writing, or in the hope that if I don't let myself run away from it, keep my relationship to--with?--it out in the open, that it won't just quietly disappear. It's always better to be honest, right? Out in the open and true? Writing, I don't really wish I could quit you. Except when I really, really do.