Pushing Through Discouragement

I have been thinking about the things I have chosen as hobbies throughout my life. I used to do a lot of jigsaw puzzles. I started out with ones of 500 or 1,000 pieces, and then after a while, I gravitated toward insane ones with 2,500 pieces or more that were very difficult to complete because they were jigsaws of things like a hundred candy apples, all the same color and impossible to differentiate one piece from the other. Then Demon Baby came along. Enough said about jigsaw puzzles.

I do New York Times crossword puzzles. I started out in my teens doing the one in the magazine on Sunday and rarely being able to complete it (I refuse to use the crossword puzzle dictionary). And then I started buying books of the puzzles. It reached a point where, if I was familiar with the overarching subject of the puzzle, I could do a weekday one in under ten or fifteen minutes, so I started exclusively buying the books of SUNDAY puzzles. This man is a god. But . . . again, sort of like jigsaws, I would reach a point where whatever I started doing was too easy and it was time to graduate to something else, like a burst of sprinting in a race.

Knitting . . . well, frankly, I still suck. I don't check my gauge. But I am happy not being particularly good. Scarves are now ho-hum. So are hats. So I have burst through to making a shawl with a ruffle. I would complete more projects except for that Demon Baby kid who likes to make Samurai swords of my knitting needles. If a little thing like a project happens to be ON them . . . he doesn't care. So I have to keep my projects hidden away. Which makes it more of a pain to work on.

Finally . . . I started guitar lessons. I have offered to feed my daughter's boyfriend a steak dinner once a week in return for lessons. My fingers hurt. I don't anticipate a day when they will NOT hurt while playing. I also don't anticipate a day when I won't have to sit there with the fingering chart on a music stand, arranging my fingers into an A-minor chord. BUT . . . I presume, like all my other hobbies, a day will come when, like scarves, I will leave the A-minor chord in the dust and move along to a different chord.

Which brings me to writing. I am not particularly sure why all my hobbies involve mastering something ALONE. But they are all internal sorts of activities. They all involve pushing myself through discouragement. Writing does too. He can pep talk me all he wants. I can do the same for him. Or for any of my writing friends. I always am delighted to hear from lurkers to this blog who email me and say that one post or another got them through a bad writing time. But in the end . . .

You can't quit. And you have to push yourself through discouragement. You have to have it IN you to WANT it. And I mean WANT it.

I really want to learn Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. It is my favorite song in the whole entire world. I don't know if a year from now, I will blog and say, "Fifty-two steak dinners later, and I can PLAY it. . . . BADLY . . . but I can play it." But I also know it is my nature to stick with it. To choose those hobbies that are about an internal challenge. To quietly WANT it. And then to persevere.

Thoughts?

Learning to Make a Hat

When you are a full-time writer, who loves to read, and who loves to write for fun, but you also make your LIVING at it, sometimes, it seems like your entire world is writing and reading.

As some of my regular blog readers know, the last month or so has been in a word . . . a bitch. I am exhausted, stressed, having memory issues BECAUSE I am so stressed, like walking into the same room five times, forgetting why the hell I was going there in the first place.

Now my parents are visiting and I am getting less sleep than ever. They are night owls. I usually am in bed by ten p.m., but I am staying up late to spend time with them--but still getting up before dawn with the kids while my parents sleep in until 9:00 a.m. I am to the point where sometimes I even wonder if I am making sense when I speak because I am so tired.

BUT . . . one really great thing is happening.

I love to knit. LOVE it. So far, knitting in my world has consisted of making very lopsided scarves with holes where there shouldn't be any. After a while, I mastered scarves that AREN'T lopsided, and they have no dropped stitches. So I decided to up my repertoire to make a hat and a blanket. But this isn't something I find "easy." I can't learn by reading. I have to learn by DOING, and thus I need a knitting mentor to guide me through Hatmaking 101.

Enter Mom. I am halfway through making a hat with three different colors of yarn for my baby. And as she walks me through how to switch out stitches and yarns and master a more complicated project . . . I am reminded how much I ADORE knitting. I haven't knit a thing since Christmas--too busy. Too tired. All the excuses.

But sitting with her until late each night, making a hat, I am reminded that, tired as I am, making time for nonwriting things, nonreading things, is important. It staves off burnout. My garden is also something I adore for the same reason.

So, writers and readers, do you find you have to make time for hobbies so you don't get too burned out? And what hobbies do you have? And do you have to FORCE yourself to make time for them? I wonder, too, if I feel this way because I make a LIVING as a writer and it doesn't seem like a hobby anymore, but something that has to be worked like a business at times, much as I love it.