Cleaning up the Covid Shitpile
I received an email from Medium the other day sharing tips on how to ‘Grow your writing in 2021’ and it suddenly occurred to me, as I read the headline, that I hadn’t written anything in almost a year. I giggled to myself as I read the first tip…
“For writing resolutions, often a good place to start is in building regular writing practice”
…as if it were simple! The following advice was all about finding inspiration in interesting places and translating that as subject matter for your writing. To be fair, there was some great advice, presuming your problem was finding things to write about.
But what if you have the opposite problem? What if you, like me, have a plethora of potential crap to give voice to, but the shitpile from the last year is so enormous you’re not sure which turd to clean up first? Each one is connected with the rest, and the more you try to clean it the messier it gets? Well, I have some advice for you. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. But the only choice you have is to get your gloves and your facemask on and get started. That mephitic mountain of muck will become more rancid the longer you stare at it, and you will become less capable of dealing with it. Sure, like me you’ve probably thought “F#*K It let’s just bury it and move on…start fresh.” But let’s be real, even if you cover a turd in glitter…underneath it’s still a turd and eventually, everything new will become malodorous too. So stop looking around you and outside of you to try and find sparks of inspiration you hope will make you feel alive again. That’s not gonna happen while everything around you smells and looks like death. Accept it, make peace with and start cleaning up, one sticky, stanky, piece of shit at a time.
I, like many others in the wake of covid-stasis, have felt completely unable to get moving again. I now understand that this is because I can’t see over the mountain of crap I created as I piled drama upon drama, unresolved feeling upon unresolved feeling on top of each other, because in the midst of it all I was incapable of dealing with it. Until I clear this mountain, I won’t be able to move forward and see what comes next.
It is always said that “the hardest part is gettings started” and I know this to be very true. Stupidly, the more you spend energy saying it, the less energy you have to actually start. So here goes…
Thank you Medium, your email really gave me the shits enough to pen something for the first time in almost a year. As pieces of writing go, this is mediocre at best, if not total crap. Its value, however, lies not in its words but in its movement.
