What side of the bars am I on?

Many years ago when teaching public speaking at Syracuse university, a student gave a speech about her spring break in Amsterdam. Consuming mushrooms every day, they decided to go to the zoo where they promptly learned they were on exhibit for the animals. Unable to escape, they sat on a bench and wondered about their new life until the zoo staff told them to leave at closing time.

A memorable speech but not for the correct reasons. Needless to say, it left a mark on me as a master metaphor: What side of the bars am I on? Supercharged by Freudian thought, I always am aware that anything I’m viewing is looking back whether I want it to or not (or even if I’m aware).

I’m writing today as I have been doing most every day of January recess, trying to get some things in the hopper for publication, and I realized (again) that it’s pretty useless to fight against my writing process. I am full of (paralyzed by) shoulds and ought to’s and other such dicta to the point where i just stare for long periods of time at a screen and click around in Reddit or various Discord servers.

Here’s my major should: I should want to sit at my desk and use my very nice PC with 24 inch monitor to write, in silence. I should be able to do this in the evenings before bed.

What my process really is: I have to use this very particular Chromebook model, at my dining table, with books around it all opened to a particular page, but placed page-side down on the table in a semicircle around the laptop. I need pretty loud classical piano music as well. And I need to make sure I don’t eat anything all morning (starting as early as possible) until I am pretty certain that I have tapped out where I want to be on the page – or to a place where the backspace key is being tapped more than the letter keys.

This reality also involves a lot of coffee and water, and occasional visits to the internet to see what other books about my topic I could buy and have sent to me. I’ve been lucky in the sense that if I dedicate my morning to writing, the after-lunch to evening shift can be about reading and notetaking. I’m not a very good afternoon writer, but I can sew a lot of productive seeds – or create prep for the writing kitchen for the next day’s cooking quite well.

Am I a prisoner of these habits? Most assuredly yes, but only because of perception. At some point I am asked to leave the zoo, and I can get up and walk out of the exit. However, to fight that perception is to miss a lot of time where I could be taking in the animals, the exhibits, the day, the words, the thoughts, the other things we need in order to write. I can just resign myself to being stuck, and consequently be on the right side of the bars of the writing habits most every time.