I speak Spanish. Not as well as I used too, and my accent has transformed from something resembling a Chihuahuense ranchero to that of a pale foreign guero, but I still speak it.
Since I learned it as a missionary for my Church trying to convince people to join us at our Sunday meetings, one of the phrases most deeply ingrained in my gringo mind is “no me nace.” If you stick that into Google Translate, you’ll get a nonsensical “not born me,” which was super unhelpful the first few times I heard the phrase. I caught on to what they meant eventually, though.
Like all idioms, there’s no exact translation. The best I can come up with is the rather harsh “I don’t feel like it.”
That doesn’t quite capture “no me nace.” I had person after person tell me how going to church wasn’t born of their soul, that it wasn’t the burning desire of their heart. Going to church, they’d tell me, had to come from an effusion of yearning, like an explosion of the bowels after some tainted Chipotle.
Now this is the part where I make this relevant to me. And no, it’s not on that Chipotle point.
Though I think tainted Chipotle is an acceptable reason not to go to church
I haven’t been writing for a while. There’s really only one excuse to give.
No me nace.
I think it’s fair to translate that to my crude English. I just haven’t felt like doing it.
There’s the conflicting emotion that I’m sure all content creators experience at some point. On one hand, I enjoy writing. I enjoy putting my thoughts and insights–as superficial as they may be–down in words. Then they’re committed. Then they’re real and out there for the world to see.
That’s where the other hand creeps into the picture like Thing on Addam’s Family. The world doesn’t really see what I put out there. After various ebbs and flows of effort starting sometime in 2010, there are, at most, a handful of people who even notice when the content doesn’t appear with some sort of regularity.
So if I’m not feeling my guts churning with the need to post new content, do I really need to write something like a man stumbling around for another hit of Immodium?
For my missonary “no me nace” street contacts, the answer was always something along the lines of “would you want God to say ‘no me nace’ when you reach out to Him for help? Then why would you say that to Him about the simple act of going to church?”
That’s not working for me here. There’s no existential dilemma at stake. There’s no threat of a Supreme Being’s disapproving scowl if I don’t craft lines of prose mixing fart jokes and tax work. I’ll just have one less thing on my plate to worry about.
Writing is work. Unpaid and unviewed work, in my case. And honestly, I’m not sure if I would rather have it paid and viewed work, since that brings in the criticism of anonymous psychopaths.
Now this is where I should put the “so what” part of the piece. That’s what I can’t figure out. That’s why I’ve written several posts trying to get me through my slump without posting a single one.
So what indeed.
Here are some options I’ve crafted, based on the which way I want my post to lean:
(1) The Inspiring Writers’ Blog: I don’t feel like writing. We all hit slumps. But the world needs my work, so I should push through it until I want to do it again.
(2) The Realist Blog: The world doesn’t need my work. Shut up and go home.
(3) The Psychology Blog: I’ve just hit a wall. I need to break through it. That’ll reveal my true self, putting me on a path to show that this struggle is just another small bump on the road of discovering my true worth.
(4) The Political Blog (Social Justice Warrior Leaning): As a cisgender white male, I should check my privileges and stop writing anything, since the mere fact that I put my content out on the web is, de facto, elevating my opinion over those who do not chose to write. And that’s wrong.
(5) The Political Blog (Trumpkin Leaning): Not writing is what the stupid Social Justice Warriors want you do to! Tell them to go back to their parents’ basement with a sippy cup filled with hot milk by writing every minute of every day.
(6) The Economist Blog: This is a simple example of comparative advantage. You wouldn’t want a top notch corn farmer to grow pumpkins. I’m an accountant, and can benefit society better by acting as such. Writing is a wasteful side project I should leave to the experts. I should spend that wasted effort reading tax treatises to help this country reach optimal economic growth.
(7) The Tax Blog: If I can show profit motive, all I have to do is write enough to justify classifying that new laptop I bought as a business expense.
Eh, I think I’ll go with #7. I am a tax accountant after all, and I’ve gotta get those deductions.