Surfing without waves

And writing without inspiration

I am desperate for inspiration. Each day, I sit down at my desk and open the curtains, hoping to find a spark. By noon, the Zoom meetings begin and I am despondent, disappointed again by my lack of engagement.

I am telling myself all of the things I am supposed to be telling myself: That this is normal, that it's okay, that it doesn't mean anything about who I really am or what the value of my work is. And yet still the shame persists.

Who am I when I have nothing interesting to say? What happens to my sense of safety when I can’t bring myself to creative work? What is an artist's life without output, without flow?

As usual, I turn to the Internet for advice and distraction. The writers on Reddit say that inspiration is a fool's game, that being a writer is about sitting down and writing whether or not the spark ever presents itself.

They tell me to read Atomic Habits, to set a timer, to put my phone in another room. “Make a system and stick to it,” these suggestions say. “Be disciplined.”

I have always felt weird about discipline. The word itself feels so intrinsically connected to punishment, it's hard for me to separate the concepts.

Discipline, in my mind, is what you receive—what is enacted upon you—when you do something wrong. Discipline, in the advice of anonymous strangers online, is about self-control, about doing the hard thing even when it's boring or hard or even painful.

This, they say, is what makes a writer a writer. Waiting for inspiration, they tell us, is for amateurs and fools.

I talk to my therapist. She poses a question: “What do you do if your job is to surf but you wake up on a day with no waves?”

I spend the next few hours thinking about this metaphor, wiggling my way through a rabbit hole of YouTube videos and blog articles from professionals and hobbyist surfers alike. Their suggestions vary, ranging from "Do yoga to build strength" to "Go skateboarding to practice turns" to "Get stoned and take a nap."

I open 20 or more tabs and not once do I see the word discipline. It is impossible, in their context, to "just surf." As disappointing as it might be to put on a wetsuit, wax the board and drive 20 minutes out to the beach only to find impossibly still waters, the wind and waves are out of our control. We can't force the water to move. Cursing the skies might be satisfying, but fruitless. The only thing left to do is something else.

Paddling in after spreading flowers from my Dad’s funeral flowers in the Atlantic. (Jacksonville, Florida 2017)

It's not lost on me that I'm still here, writing, despite telling you how hard it's been for me to write. Some might argue that this is a testament to discipline winning out in the end.

Maybe that's true. There is certainly something to the fact that I take Thursdays off to write and that I've committed internally to publishing something here more often than not.

But a part of me still wonders if I might simply be, at the end of the day, better served by laying out and enjoying the sun.

In closing, I offer you the Nora Ephron quote that I stick onto every digital background I have: