Committed

As in, I should be…committed…somewhere quiet, soft, with baby pink walls and no sharp objects. Because otherwise I might hurt myself.

What was I thinking?! Signing up for an online 30 day writing class. And just three days in – three days! – they ask for a commitment. Commit to a writing practice, they say. Ummmm…ok? OK. Yeah, sure. Why not? I can do this. It’ll be good for me. And fun..no, yeah, it’ll be fun, I say. 15 minutes day, I say.

And so I do it. I write pretty freely on the topic of favorite songs and I don’t publish it because it’s rubbish and it was just a free write exercise anyway. For me, at least.

And then the next prompt pops up in my email and I’m wishing I lived somewhere else on the planet where the prompts don’t come five hours before midnight because I’m still on TODAY’S assignment when I get TOMORROW’S and shouldn’t there be some kind of rule against that?

And the prompt for actual TODAY, which came in EDT (or is it EST? I always forget the difference) LAST NIGHT, is to write about loss. And I’m like, seriously?! I just poured my heart out on that subject for Day 2’s assignment and honestly, I don’t want to go there again so soon. Besides, I write about loss A LOT. If you don’t believe me, try this and this and uh, this, and um, oh yeah, this.

Stick with what you know, I guess, but sometimes I worry I’m a bit of a downer to my readers. (Really, I can be fun. I smile a lot. And laugh every day. For real.) And that kind of writing drains me. Not like pull-up-the-stopper-in-the-sink draining. More like a-tree-branch-through-your-gas-tank draining.

So maybe that’s why today, on my second day of commitment to a writing practice – (Or is it my third day? I don’t know because I’ve already got a task from the future in my inbox today.) – maybe that’s why all I have to offer is this rant. But hey, it’s something even if it ain’t pretty.

And now I’m done and it’s time for bed. But first, Agatha Christie. Even if she does give me nightmares.

© Nichole Liza Q.