Once again I am preparing to move. Because I’ve found a better apartment at a substantial discount from what I’ve been paying, I don’t mind. In fact, moving is providing me a chance to get rid of the inspiring books I read twenty years ago and haven’t opened since.
I’ve clung to them through the years, never stopping to think that if they weren’t on my shelves and I ever felt the need to reread them, I could always check them out from the library or buy them used online.
As I work my way through my bookshelves, I discover volumes I bought but never opened. I lost interest in reading them soon after I brought them home. Others I purchased because I thought I ought to read them for one reason or another and never did. These, too, go into the Goodwill box.
Packing is also giving me a chance to clean out the notes for novels I never started. It’s providing the opportunity to discard many of the once-intriguing news articles that made me think of essays I could write — essays I never wrote. Like the books I never read, the fragments of pieces I never wrote make me feel guilty every time they catch my attention, guilty even though I’ve finished fourteen books and countless articles.
As writers many of us collect massive amounts of paper in preparation for projects we don’t always finish. Often we get down on ourselves for not following through on all of our good ideas – especially those we spent days or weeks developing. Those unopened file folders weigh us down with a burden of guilt and frustration. If we’re not careful, we begin to define ourselves more by what we didn’t write than by what we have accomplished.
The brainstorming phase of deciding what to write about requires coming up with as many ideas as we can. Even though many of them are perfectly good ideas, we aren’t necessarily the best people to execute them. Sometimes we outgrow them. We don’t care to devote time or energy to complete them, especially when something better comes along.
This sort of clutter that we collect scatters our attention and siphons our energy. Clinging to what is no longer useful to us is different than keeping folders of notes and clippings for writing projects that take time to mellow. It is not the same as hanging on to the material we’ve collected for writing we have a love/hate relationship with or that we fear to start. In these instances, the idea continues to call to us, or at least nudge us. We continue to think about it and to care about it, even though we haven’t yet taken concrete action to turn it into a story or an article or a play.
As I haul the trash bag full of notes on projects I no longer want to write to the dumpster behind my apartment, I wonder why I kept them for so long. Perhaps I secretly harbored the notion that I might not ever be able to come up with another idea again. Maybe I was afraid to be a quitter. Worse yet, I might have been afraid to let go in order to grow.
In the back of my mind I believed I could always go back and finish what I thought of starting years ago. In my heart I knew that even if I could, I didn’t want to. Neither did I need to. My concerns and my interests have changed over the past twenty years. They’ve changed over the past five years. I’ve healed from the anger and the hurt that drove some of my writing in the past. I’ve let go of the grudges. It’s time to let go of the unnecessary clutter that not only anchors me to this place, but that keeps my energy from flowing in new directions that are appropriate to who I am today.
As the year comes to a close, this is a good time to look back at the writing you’ve accomplished since January. Make a list of all the projects you finished. Make another list of those you started and then abandoned. Take some quiet time to sit with this second list. What projects do you continue to feel committed to working on? Which ones no longer hold any interest for you? Write about how you might be able to help yourself let go of the projects that represent writing goals you’ve outgrown.