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Elizabeth T. Williams
Ocean at sunset

Doing the work

Posted on December 3, 2021December 3, 2021 by Liz

I’ve been avoiding the work. It’s always too late, too busy, too <insert excuse of the moment here>. And yes, life is too full and I say yes to too much and I have two adorable tiny kids who need me a lot right now, but I think all of that is an excuse, really. I’m mostly still afraid of putting stuff out there. And so I let myself get sidetracked by emails and urgent/unimportant things while I set aside the one thing that I have always needed to do: writing.

And so here I am, picking up the figurative pen. Taking a page from Seth Godin and shipping something already. Will it be good? Maybe not. But at least it’s a start.

It’s funny, the second I say “it’s a start”, I get nervous. I’m not sure why. I’ve been “writing books” since I was old enough to know writing a book was a thing. My dad’s a poet, and when I was growing up, he was always typing things into our ancient Commodore, two fingers at a time, creating patterns in lines. One day he sat me down in the student union at University of Utah, where he was studying at the time, and taught me how to write poetry, too. I think I was maybe eight or nine, and had been working on a poem about the ocean (an odd thing — I never lived by the sea) and I remember him teaching me how to make something I could see in my mind appear for others. The grains of sand tumbling like a mini-avalanche into a footprint. The salt on my lips on the long ride home. The rainbow sunset streaking the waves. It’s funny. The things I remember vividly are pretty rare, particularly these days, but that lesson sticks in my mind like it was yesterday.

So where am I going with this? I suppose I’m trying to convince myself that there’s value in creating, even if only for myself. I’m writing these words because I need to write, and always have, and as long as I’m not writing, I feel like something’s missing. So here’s to reclaiming a bit of myself again — I feel like I finally have a safe space to play.

If any of this resonates with you, I highly recommend listening to this podcast for some starting inspiration. I also want to shamelessly plug my dad’s new book, Game, just because I can.

Featured image: Photo by Yousef Espanioly on Unsplash

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