People talk about “protecting time” a lot and about practicing discipline but they do not talk as much, it does not seem to me, about protecting the person who writes and that, I discern, is the far greater problem for me.
I spend a lot of time in some sort of dissociated state because of being in these strange atmospheres in red states. There aren’t enough venues in which it’s appropriate for me to show who I really am or speak my mind. So I spend a lot of time practicing repression and it takes a great deal of energy, because I am out in public interacting with people so much of the day.
I was going to work tonight but studio time for ceramics, which is one of my forms of recreation, was very exhausting; the topic of conversation around me was the alleged “racism” of Black people and it was uncomfortable to listen to. At a certain point I realized I had suspended myself and was simply enduring; home is not far enough away and it is not easy to snap back.
This is what I have trouble with, really – atmospheres that are inhospitable to one’s being. I snap back easily in the right atmosphere, but such an atmosphere is not easily within reach. I can write creatively, or administratively, even in extreme dissociative states and then writing helps bring me back. But the prerequisite for academic work – and it goes for teaching as well as research related work – is to integrate, to bring my intellect out of hiding, to feel whole.
What are the strategies, then, for “protecting” not time but the person who writes?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 