The temporary excuse was the failure of a single digit.
The diagnosis of osteoarthritis in the middle knuckle of my right ring finger – stiff, swollen – necessitating aleve and rest and splint and ice and the sticking of my flesh with needles.
I couldn’t type. Couldn’t write. Was stuck with videos and hunt & peck and voice recognition technology that couldn’t keep up with my chewing of words and streaming of consciousness.
Then, weeks later, when I finally sat down to write …
I didn’t have the right pen.
I didn’t have the perfect unlined square sketchbook with a red cover and a smooth ribbon to mark my page and a stretchy loop to keep it all perfect inside my backpack.
The laptop was too heavy.
My back hurt. I didn’t get enough sleep. I needed a snack. There was too much light. It was too noisy. That other thing has a deadline. I didn’t feel like it.
What’s coming out isn’t good.
This stuff is depressing. Simplistic. Been said before.
What’s the point. I’m doomed.
Etc.
So at 7:39 this morning I pulled the zipcar into the parking lot of Safeway and went inside to buy anything to write on.
One of those generic composition books with a place for your class schedule and the tables to convert square yards and cubic feet.
Pens. Whatever they had in stock. In black and blue and red and purple.
And I decided to write in here, this imperfect journal with a childish purple pen, every day for the month of February.
Twenty-eight days.
I write here to get back into practice.
To not judge.
To seduce the resistance.
To find my voice which apparently was squished in between sofa cushions or fell behind the headboard or misfiled itself in the banker’s box labeled “stuff to be organized later.”
I write for twenty-eight days to remember how.
I'm Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, an attorney, mom, writer, and explorer.