For a long time, I didn’t want to write about food. I didn’t want to write much of anything, actually, and that was okay, because I have a job that I like and it felt good to give my time and energy to that. But this morning, in the shower, a post came to me, fully-formed, and I rushed through the part where you squeegee Berlin’s hard and streaky water from the glass in a futile attempt at aesthetic preservation, to lunge myself, towel-wrapped, to my laptop to tipple-tapple my thoughts. But quickly! Because really I was supposed to be getting ready for physical therapy, where a lady twice-weekly fixes my jaw, which cracks aggressively at me in the mornings. Writing somehow always is squashed in the in-between times.

I did lie a little bit when I said it was okay, because it didn’t feel okay. It was also a sad and stressful, guilt-ridden time of not writing – especially creative writing. In New York, I used to say, I heard poetry in the pavement under my feet. It’s always been harder to find in Berlin, feels more like work. So I made it work, set myself weekly goals and monthly goals and structured it into my bullet journal, only to reach the end of the week and find I couldn’t yet check off that box. And so often what I wrote was junk. It bored me, and I hated it while I was writing it and later, while I was reading it. But you have to do the work is what they say.

In New York, I used to say, I heard poetry in the pavement under my feet.

I was talking about this with a friend, and she recommended retiring from writing. She’d done it for her slump and frustration, and said it had helped. » Continue reading this post...