Yesterday and today I finally did something I have been
wanting to do every day for so long. I got
motivated, set my alarm for 5:00am, and got up and worked on my writing. (I am currently
trying to publish picture books for children.)
This might not seem like a big deal, but it has always
been so hard to give up that extra 1 ½ hours of sleep! My four-year-old keeps me
going all the time, and many times I have set the alarm early only to have him
wake up early, too (oh, the frustration!), or more often, to notice the darkness
and the chilly air outside the blankets and turn the alarm off.
But I want to be a writer. And the only way to be a writer
is to put butt in chair, as someone once said. I’ve always admired stories of
dedicated artists who get up before daylight to work on their craft. I wanted
to be one of them, but for some reason I just couldn’t do it.
Until yesterday. The night before, I wrote in my diary, and
at the end of my entry I held my pen above the paper and tried to decide if I
was truly going to write what I thought I might write. “I am getting up early
to write tomorrow!” It’s funny how hard that was for me to write, but I
knew that if I wrote it, I had to do it. It wasn’t a list of goals or something
on my to-do list that might or might not get done. It was a statement as fact. So I had to do it.
And I didn’t keel over in exhaustion later in the day. Instead,
I started the day with a feeling of accomplishment and a connection to my
creative self. I drank my hot tea and held George on my lap, and I wrote while
the world woke up around me.
I am going to do this every morning. I am.
