The hardest part of being a parent is disciplining your child.
The hardest part of being a writer is writing.
Both of these things require discipline, something that I’ve always known and is now being pointed out to me, that I lack.
It’s not that I don’t want to discipline my daughter for poor behavior, but sometimes the effectiveness of your own voice is something that can be easily misconstrue. I’m under the notion that if I call my daughter’s name in the midst of her acting out, she’ll be cognizant of my tone and what it means and immediately stop. It’s not that I don’t write, but that instead of focusing on completing what is currently being written, I’m already thinking about what I want to write. I lack the necessary discipline to write a piece to the point of completion and then be able to revise it to perfection as well as the discipline needed to assert that my voice is enough to discipline my daughter without any further action.
So the question is now, what does this mean? What things will change? How will things get better?
Honestly, I don’t have an answer to any of those questions.
It’s not because I didn’t bother to think about a possible answer, but what steps can I actively take to rectify these situations? Do I take more time out in disciplining my daughter to do more than assert her name? Do I block out the thoughts that don’t pertain to the immediate piece being written? I’m sure anyone would nod their head yes and tell me that’s exactly what I should do, but it’s not that easy.
Ultimately, I have to unlearn and unlearning is harder than learning.
I have to unlearn the process of discipline that I have in my head for my daughter to recognize that I need to start from the beginning again. I need to reformulate and rethink the appropriate methods of discipline until I can be at the place where I call her name and she is cognizant of what that tone and her name being used means and stops what she is doing. I have to unlearn the process of dreaming up story ideas and cataloging them in my mind in the midst of writing a new piece. I’m going to have to go back to freewriting to get those ideas out to revisit later and to ensure that I’ve cleared my head of content so it can focus on what it is I’m currently writing.
There is an entire process here that has to first start with me before it could ever prove effective anywhere else in my life and to be honest, I don’t have the discipline to unlearn things. Especially since most of the things I’ve learned are now reflexes. They’ve become my natural reaction.
In summary, I’m currently in the very exhausting and draining process of trying to unlearn things while trying to learn new things to substitute them with. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as replacing something with something new, as one may think.
#Nicki 