My obsession with lists or why creating matters
I love making lists. I am addicted to buying stationary just to make these lists, lists about what to cook, what to shop, what to get done at work, even lists of things I’m grateful for. The lists are supposed to help me relax and manage my life, but they make me feel more stressed — have I forgotten to write something down? What if I don’t actually do the things I told myself to do?
It seems insane, in a way, to think I can just neatly write into a diary and magically live out those lines, as if scripted. I assume I have some sort of control issue, or maybe I just desperately wish to cross that gap between who I am and who I want to be. The cool girl, the girl who wakes up and immediately does yoga, smashes her day at work, only has healthy, interesting lunches, writes a thousand words a day that make people cry and laugh at the same time, then goes off to an evening of fun with friends without ever saying anything remotely embarrassing or waking up with a hangover (hence the early morning yoga). In my mind, this person is definitely real and exists within myself, if I just dig deep enough, plan well enough.
Today, on my to-do list, it says somewhat vaguely: ‘write blog essay’. It seems that my past self thought that as long as it’s on my to-do list, it will get done, one way or another. But writing rarely works that way, or at least it doesn’t for me. I can’t just sit down with the intention to write something inspiring and funny without slowly losing my mind while staring at a blank page.
This morning, while trying to set up my blog on Medium, I ended up scrolling through all of the recommended articles, thinking: yes, I can write something like that. I’ve had thoughts like this. Easy. Only to find myself here, writing about the most boring topics of all, the difficulty of writing.
For me, the difficulty starts with a question I ask myself constantly. Every writer, whether a professional, published writer or just someone who sporadically updates their journal, at some point will ask themselves why they write. Why bother? Who cares?
It can seem like a self-indulgent, almost narcissistic endeavor to write down ones thought into semi-permanence, to think someone will read it and care (and let’s be honest — us writers believe deep down it will change someone’s life to stumble upon our eclectic musings). I’ve asked myself that question many times, most recently after deciding to start a blog (I’m the kind of person who’s always late to the party). Why bother?
In the end, I always circle back to the lists. My obsession with notebooks, pens and journals. The romantic notion that here is a blank page, there is a pen, now create something out of thin air. The act of creation, if anything, is what makes humans human. We create every day: we cook food, we build houses, entire cities, we tell stories, we found businesses, we make art, we start families, we tend to our gardens.
To create is to live, to take the world as our canvas and roll with it. In this sense of creation, it hardly matters whether anyone cares about what we’ve created. It doesn’t even matter if it’s any good. It is waking up in a world that is constantly heading towards entropy and deciding to mess with things a little before it all disappears. Like my lists are a form of me taking control of a life that seems so heavily influenced by outside forces, creating is a way of ordering the chaos around us.
After thinking all of this, and then writing it down, I reread the previous paragraphs and decide that maybe I am just very desperate to find a reason to do a thing that I just happen to want to do. Maybe wanting to write is reason enough to do it. Anyway. Here’s my first blog post, I hope you stick around.
