The Guilt of Productivity

Yesterday I managed to do a fairly substantial re-write of about 90 pages of the thing I'm working on now. I have a large amount that I have to do from scratch for the end, and I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to pull that off, but it was a good day for writing.

On the other hand, I ended up in a place that's very familiar to me. If I'm writing, I'm not doing anything else. I'm not washing dishes or folding laundry or going grocery shopping or any one of a thousand things that need doing around a busy house. And for that, I was beating myself up. The irony is that when I'm at my 9-5 job (which is really my 8:30-4:45 job), I'm not washing dishes, doing laundry or grocery shopping and I feel no guilt about that whatsoever. What's wrong with this picture?

So, I have determined that my goal for this November (and hopefully one that I can hang on to for a while) is to let go of that guilt. My writing is just as important to me as that thing that I do to earn a living, just as important as clean dishes or food in the pantry, and about eight times MORE important than folded laundry. There you have my guilty secret. I don't care about folded laundry.

This November, I'm not going to make my family suffer with my angst. I'm not going to beat myself up about what I'm NOT doing. I'm not going to agonize over every decision I make about how to spend unaccounted-for time. And with all that time that I save on unnecessary histrionics, I'll get even MORE writing done!