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Thursday, January 26, 2017

Eric and the 1000 Words - Day 6

This is my sixth day in a row to write 1000 words.  That’s a little presumptive of me considering that I’m currently trying to write my sixth 1000 words, but I’m going to presume success based on the last five days of being successful.  I kind of hate this, especially when I remember that better writers set their word counts per day at much higher.  I used to have a morning routine that involved searching facebook, reddit, facebook, reddit, and then facebook again for over an hour.  Now I wake up, and check my email then I’m just bored.  I’m too tired to write though.  My brain isn’t fully functional this early in the morning (I know that 7 isn’t early, but my brain hasn’t figured that out).  I don’t actually know in advance when my brain will be fully functional.  It doesn’t seem to have a set schedule, and when it does come to me I’m usually busy doing something else.  I guess this process is me trying to train my brain to do what I want when I’m ready for it, but it’s been a fight.  There are posts that I want to write, but I just don’t feel the mood that I think I need to be in to write them properly.  In order to avoid writing what I think I should be writing, but also meet this arbitrary requirement of writing 1000 words every day before I’m allowed to take a break, I have written about my last job (in the most boring chronological order), my last Sunday at church, a disclaimer about reading my blog, and some childhood events to help convince you that I have a mental disorder.  So, I guess, here’s a story for you:
In September of 2013, the day after my birthday, I posted a note on facebook thanking everyone for their birthday wishes and made a declaration that this was my Jesus year.  I know that’s kind of a weird or stupid thing to say, but to me that just meant that I was now 33 years old and I was going to do something big, obviously not as big as Jesus, but big for me.  I felt like my whole life had been building up to something, and I was finally going to make it happen.  I was excited.  I wrote the declaration to try to motivate myself to continue, and so that anyone that read it could hold me accountable if I didn’t, not that I really believed that they would.  Then I spent a month feeling pretty happy about it, and trying to figure out what I could write or what was the best plan of action to see this through.  Every day that I didn’t do anything I grew a little more skeptical that I would ever do anything, but I kept forgiving myself because I still had plenty of time.  I came up with a story idea and thought about it a little every day, but as November approached I didn’t want to start writing anything because maybe this would finally be the year that I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).  NaNoWriMo is a competition to write a 50,000 word fiction novel during the month of November.  That’s 1,667 words per day.  The novel isn’t supposed to be edited, and the only way to win is to turn in 50,000 consecutive original words.  That’s it.  Everyone that completes that task is a winner.  It’s something that I’ve wanted to do every year since I heard about it in 2010.  I’ve never done it.
In the middle of October, while I was feeling pretty happy about the plan I had for my life, my wife worriedly announced that she thought she might be pregnant.  I started to feel some pretty intense anxiety and disbelief when she told me because she wasn’t supposed to be able to do that.  She had had a tubal ligation in early 2012 about 6 months after our son was born.  I didn’t even want to buy a test because I thought it was impossible for her to be pregnant.  She bought a couple of pregnancy tests anyway and it turned out that she was, indeed, pregnant.  This was some pretty depressing news for both of us.  We had a plan.  We had one of each, and we were finished.  We were not prepared for this.  We both had good jobs, but the hours had been cut way back, and there had been layoffs at the factory where we worked.  We had good insurance though, and we were going to figure out how to make this work.  We lived in a tiny two bedroom rental house where our 7 year old daughter, and 2 year old son were already sharing a room.
When we tried to go back to the doctor who had done the surgery, she wouldn’t see us because we owed some money from the last kid she delivered.  Something had happened with our insurance where the policy changed 17 days before he was born, and we owed money that we weren’t expecting to owe.  My wife had already quit her job (she took 11 months off with him) so we couldn’t pay her.  I understand that she was running a business, but considering that she was the one that made a mistake, and now we have a whole new person because of it she could have taken the time to at least talk to us.  A lot of the “lawyers” that I worked with thought that we should sue her (everyone that you work with is a lawyer or doctor depending on what advice they think you need at the time).  I actually really considered looking into suing.  Mostly because I didn’t know how we were ever going to manage taking care of another baby.  Day care is pretty expensive.  After not much thought though, I decided to drop the whole idea because my mother always told me that suing people is a sin.  I don’t know if that’s true, but it just didn’t feel right and probably would have been a lot of work to get done.  Plus, I didn’t want my new daughter to ever think that we won money because we didn’t want her. 
That’s something that I try to make clear anytime I tell this to anyone.  We did not expect her, and we did not in any way plan for her, but we absolutely wanted her.  She is a joy.  She’s one of the funniest most intelligent people that I have ever met.  She makes me laugh every single day.  We would probably never know that we were missing anything if we didn’t have her, but we would be missing something, something good.
We spent most of 2014 stretching our finances and living with as little as we possibly could preparing for our new child (we could have lived with less, but we didn’t know that).  We knew that we were going to need more room so I contacted a realtor.  My wife had always wanted to own a home, but I was resistant because I didn’t want to admit that I was going to live here forever.  We found a home about 3 months before she was born, but we didn’t move in until 2 months after she was born (maybe someday I’ll write about the joys of trying to buy a house, maybe tomorrow, who knows?).  We moved in 4 days before my 34th birthday.  So, I guess the big thing that I was going to do during that year wasn’t writing, but instead, laying down roots and building my family.  It was pretty ridiculous of me to bring up Jesus when I never even asked for HIs help, but looking back on the whole thing it’s pretty clear that He was giving it to us any way.  It’s taken 36 years, but Mineral Wells has actually kind of grown on me, only kind of though.  I went a little over my word count this time.
Eric Anderson

Friday, January 20, 2017

Eric and the 1000 Words

This is what it has come to.  I’m punishing myself, at the very least, I’m withholding joy from myself until I accomplish something.  I have filled my life with distractions.  Facebook, reddit, podcasts, tv, video games, and pretty much any other projects the happen to pop into my head that aren’t actually productive.  As long as it isn’t writing I will throw myself headlong right into it.  I don’t know why I need to escape from my brain, but I do.  I have been aware of this need for several years; I’ve even written about it before, but that was a long time ago.  I obviously haven’t learned how to prevent myself from falling into that trap so I’ve come up with a plan.
I am not going to allow myself to look at the internet (unless it’s specifically for research or a job search for that matter), play any video games, watch tv, or listen to podcasts until I have written 1000 words every day.  I will allow myself to listen to music, read, play with my children, etc…  These distractions are important to my soul.  This might be overly ambitious for someone who hasn’t written more than a total of 3 paragraphs in the last 8 months, but it’s the kind of drastic measure that I need right now.
This is the first 1000 words, and it’s harder than I thought it would be.  I should have expected this though, considering I spent 45 minutes staring at my computer screen last night.  I only wrote three sentences.  I have a pretty big piece planned.  I’ve been working on it for most of the last 8 months, but I’ve only been working on it in my head.  I’ve written it and re written it over and over and never put any of it down on paper (screen?).  I don’t know why it’s so easy for me to compose these words when I’m busy doing other things with my hands, but then I draw a complete blank when I’m confronted with the keyboard and screen.  I think I’ve been building pressure over the last year and now I’m at a point where I’m terrified to fail.  I believe that this is my last best hope for happiness.  If I can’t write, If I’m not a writer then what am I and why have I been lying to myself for all of these years.
I didn’t want this post to be about writing.  I have a lot of ideas about myself that are tied to me being a writer, but I wanted that to be in the bigger piece that I was talking about earlier.  If you’ve read this far and you are bored I’m sorry.  I knew that this first post was going to suck, and I pretty much set out with the plan of it sucking.  I needed to lower the bar for myself and prove that I could, at least, suck for 1000 words.  I promise that I won’t be posting every 1000 words that I write, but i’m putting this up to show where my head is.  I guess I can tell you what my life has been like for the last year.
The plant that my wife and I worked for closed down on December 17, 2015.  We had both worked there for several years.  Neither of us particularly liked our jobs because it conflicted with our personal politics, but we liked the people and we were pretty good at what we did.  I guess that last part is a matter of opinion, but we were good enough for them to keep us around until the day they closed the doors.  We both spent the next six months on unemployment searching for a new place to pay us to live.  She was hired the week before her unemployment ran out, and I have been staying at home taking care of the kids while draining my 401k.  It’s been stressful, but not as stressful as you would think.  Don’t get me wrong, I have a new found respect for anyone that stays at home to take care of children.  They are a nightmare, but I thought I would be more stressed about not knowing where my next paycheck was going to come from.  Sometimes I think the lack of stress is from a deep depression that I can’t pull myself out of, and sometimes I think it’s God telling me that everything is going to be okay.
I know that I am depressed and anytime I even think about writing I talk myself out of it by pointing out that everything I write is narcissistic nonsense that no sane person would give a crap about.  I also know that since I started going to church again back in April 2016 I have felt a shift in my attitude.  At first I was angry every single week.  I was angry at God, at the people, at myself, and just angry at the situation.  I only started going because my mom asked that we all come on Mother’s day, and I didn’t want everyone to think that was the reason so we started going 2 weeks before that day.  Something convinced me that I needed to be there.  I told myself it was for my kids, but it was just as much for me and my wife.  Every week I left the service pissed off at something someone said or did.  I don’t know why, but my politics seem to greatly differ from the leadership's politics.  That hasn’t changed but I am less offended by it now than I was then.  My anger began to subside and I would alternate between feeling motivated one week and pissed off again the next week.  Now I’m only angry a fourth of the time.
I’ve also felt myself forgive things that I thought were unforgivable, by me anyway, but I’ll have to talk about that later because that’s been my 1000 words.
Eric Anderson