I sit cross legged in my office chair, trying to find a yoga style position that will ease whatever it is I’ve done to my left lower lumbar region. The cat has her butt firmly planted on my left thigh while enthusiastically kneading my right knee. It seems to make her happy, and my bathrobe is thick enough to shield me from the claws this morning. A perfect cup of french press coffee steams on the desk. All is well.

Should be writing.

That is the mantra running through and through my brain. It starts when David’s alarm clock jerks us both out of the warm drowse of sleep and into a harsh reality of work and parental responsibilities. It mutters at me while I’m loading the French Press and making coffee. Sneers when I sit down here to send out an early morning Twitter message and discover my fingers are not yet capable of typing words recognizable in the English language. Or any language, for that matter, except for that of the sleep deprived.

Should be writing.

Thinking it now while I’m WRITING words here. Thinking it while WRITING morning pages in my journal. And later, I’ll be thinking it while driving kids around, tidying up the house, working with people at my job.

Should. The language of guilt.

Should is not an action verb. It is never motivating. It is a sneaky, manipulative word that leads along a path of regret, self doubt, and perfectionism. And the end thereof is a wasteland of books unwritten, dreams unpursued, moments of life unlived.

The other day, while I was sitting in an airport, bored and waiting for my flight, I opened my laptop and thought about writing. (I should write. I should). But the flight was boarding in half an hour and I really didn’t want to delve into the WIP. So I did something I haven’t done in years – started writing descriptions of the people around me.

During that half hour something happened.  I don’t remember the other faces I saw around me that day. But the three directly across from me, and the one sleeping on the floor – I know exactly what they looked like, what they were wearing, what they carried with them. A sense of them lingers with me still. Writing made them real to me.

Should has kept me from that kind of writing. I think it keeps me from writing here as well.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my writing a lot – remembering the joy of it. Writing to tell a story without wondering with every chapter, every character that shows up in my head -”what genre is this? Can I sell it?” And I wonder if it’s possible to forget about all of the shoulds and just be a writer.

Writer: one who writes. One who writes to make sense of the world, to make bits and pieces of it real enough to fit on the page. Maybe, if I’m lucky, to frame a piece of my reality in words or story that will also mean something to people who read. For right now, the day waits. I can’t tell the shape of it yet, although there are a few landmarks I know to expect. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll pause somewhere in the middle of this day – not to write what I think I should – but just to capture a moment, a person, a time, a place – and put it on the page.

Not because I should. Because I choose.

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