The Have To

Something funny happened to me a few days ago. I was reading Cormac McCarthy's newest work The Road, and found myself thinking about possible paper topics. Had I not been so completely engrossed in the book itself I would've busted out my laptop and started typing. The irony here is that through my entire academic career up until this point, I have always had the hardest time finding the desire or the drive to do my work, typing papers especially.

For those of you familiar with me this comes as no shock. Procrastination is a description most people would use to describe themselves, and I would to, at least to some extent. The difference is that most people end up doing what ever it is that they've been pushing off. I wait and wait and wait, and then don't. What I have found interesting about that sudden impulse to develop a thesis, find proper quotes and launch into an argument or analysis, is that I felt it at all. After years of people telling me what to write, or how to write and when it was due, and me resisting through it all, there I was subconsciously formulating my stance.

I have often wished, as I state in my blog header that I possessed THE creative impulse. That I needed to write, or needed to play my instrument otherwise I would lose my mind. I have told many people that when walking into bookstores I am completely amazed by all the books. That may seem ludicrous, but what I mean is that I am surrounded by thousands of people's efforts. People who were willing to quit their jobs to write, or would write in their spare time. They then were willing to go through the long exhausting process of editing and submitting their work to people who would eventually publish it. That whole affair completely psyches me out, for I certainly don't possess such a drive. Again, I wish I did, but I simply don't. I enjoy writing, but only when it comes naturally, not when I have to force it, which brings me back to the opening of this rant.

When I feel like I have to, I can't, won't and don't. The "have to" ends up manifesting itself as a sort of suffocation. For whatever reason, when I have to do x I will avoid it in any way possible, despite the consequences. Yet when I am free to to read what I want, when I want, and free to decided for myself what I want to write the desire is there, maybe even a bit of a drive if I dare use such a word. So who knows, maybe that essay on The Road will be up here soon, but then again, if you're expecting it . . . well, then I wouldn't count on it.