Maybe I don't want to be doing this anymore

Do I hate writing or just my writing chair?

Today I was going to write an essay about watching people in a fountain in the gardens next to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It was going to be a post all about what the behavior of people in the fountain reveals about our tendency toward cooperation and joy.

The fountain was one of those where people can step inside and be surrounded by the walls of water. We sat in chairs in the garden in the sun in Amsterdam, watching groups of people go in and out of the fountain for a long time. These were the good chairs, the metal ones, some of which are built at a recline, like the chairs you see in all the public spaces in Paris. Watching people in the fountain was one of those perfect moments, coming after we realized we’d bought tickets online for the wrong museum. So we didn’t see Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Instead we watched kids in the fountain and that was absolutely okay.

That’s what I was going to write about, but as Saturday turned into Sunday and then Monday morning, the essay did not get written. I sat down in my usual writing chair on Sunday, feeling much recovered from Saturday’s jetlag. I opened the novel I’d been working on when I left for our European river cruise almost two weeks ago. I read the first few lines and then closed the document.

“I don’t want to sit in this chair anymore,” I thought. “This is not what I want my life to be.”

I got up and went down to the couch and read a biography about Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Then a novel by Ron Rash. I made supper. I watched some baseball. I went to bed.

This morning, I went through all my normal morning rituals. Morning pages. Meditation. A little yoga. Half a bagel. I walked out into our backyard and contemplated all the weeding that already needs to be done in mid-April. I went upstairs and sat in my writing chair. And nothing happened.

“I might be done with writing,” I said to my husband as we walked to the coffee shop later that morning.

“Good,” he said. “The cruise cured you of all that.”

He was joking. Mostly.

I’ve thought I was done with writing too many times to count. Most of those times what I wanted to be done with wasn’t the writing, so much as everything that surrounds writing. I wanted to be done with the constant rejection. I wanted to be done with the pressure to become a brand. I wanted to be done paying attention to views or likes or followers or subscribers. I wanted to be done with the pressure to engage in constant self-promotion.

Obviously, while we were cruising the Rhine River, I didn’t spend a lot of time writing anything besides a journal to record our experiences. I also didn’t spend a lot of time looking at social media. Or Substack. I didn’t much keep up with what was happening in the world. I tried, as much as possible, to just be. I tried to create moments like those in the gardens next to the Rijksmuseum. We sat on our balcony and watched the scenery go by. We sat at a lot of cafes and watched the people go by. We sat on pews in cathedrals in Cologne and Strasbourg. We sat at a picnic table in a beautiful garden by a winery in the Moselle River valley and sipped Riesling.

While we were on the cruise, I had many ideas for things to write. There’s a whole book-worth of material in the experience of being on a boat in Europe with fairly wealthy Americans in 2025. It was the first cruise my husband and I had ever done, one of those things on our bucket list. We were drawn in by the beautiful commercials we watched for years on PBS before Downton Abbey came on. What the commercials didn’t show you was that there would be so many other people on the boat with you.

I have a lot to say about the experience of doing that cruise, but the thought of sitting down in my writing chair and tackling it gives me a visceral, bodily reaciton that screams, “No!” What is that about?

The novel I was working on before we left was a SERIOUS novel. A LITERARY novel. It also happened to be a novel that dealt with trauma from my own life. It was not a fun novel to write. Maybe I created bad associations by sitting in that chair and working on that novel. After all, here I am at the coffee shop writing just fine. Maybe it’s as simple as switching up spaces. Or maybe I need to do a spiritual cleanse of my writing space. Maybe all I need to do is move the fucking chair.

I wrote big chunks of that novel out by hand, with pen and paper. But when I started revising, I moved onto the computer. This meant the temptation to constantly look at social media was hard to resist. I would revise for a bit and then scroll through Notes to check up on the latest disaster scenario. There is always a disaster scenario to check up on.

I’ve also found myself in the few days we’ve been back spending a lot more time just drifting. Day-dreaming, I guess. I have this strong desire to carve out a big, quiet space in my life. A space that is free from devices and the constant barrage of voices whispering at me from afar. There is always another interesting essay to read on Substack, but sometimes I feel like too much of my mental space is colonized by people who are mostly strangers to me, regardless of the fascinating take they have on the latest headline.

Perhaps what it boils down to is as simple as this—I want to bring the traveler’s gaze to my own life. When I’m traveling, the world is an infinitely fascinating place. Everything is a puzzle to be solved. What kind of birds are those? What was that big group of young people dragging their suitcases behind them along a canal path in Kehl, Germany, doing? Where were they going? What is it really like to be a waiter or bartender or program director on one of those river cruises?

This everyday world is determined to constantly suck us out of the moment and into some nowhere space of headlines and hot takes and…nothingness. Maybe all I’m feeling is the reluctance to go back to that place.

Before my husband and I left for the cruise, people asked us what we were looking forward to most. We would glance at each other and smile. We both had the same answer. “Coming home,” we’d say. What we looked forward to most was coming home. Now here we are, so what’s with the restlessness?

Maybe it’s that I want to be really home. If I’m sitting in my writing chair, I want to really be there, in the physical space, instead of drifting away into the cacophony of voices. If I’m at the coffee shop, I want to see what’s around me, instead of on the screen in front of me. I want to be here and nowhere else, like I was in that garden, watching children scream with delight inside that fountain with the sun on my face.