The decision follows me into the evening more often than I’d like.
By that point, the thing is finished. Or finished enough, which is as finished as most things ever get. I have written it. I have looked at it too many times. I have changed a few words, then changed them back. The real question comes after that. It is whether I press the button.
Up to that point, it is still private.
It can sit there on the computer and stay where it is. I have written it, which is true, and I have not put it out there, which still gives me a way out. That gap gives me room. Room to leave it alone. Room to decide against it. Room to tell myself I am still thinking it over, rather than simply being afraid of it.
So I close the computer.
Looking at it does not help. I go and sit down and watch television. Then, during some programme I am not fully following, I glance over at the computer and think, ‘Should I do it or not?’ Nothing changes. The question goes away for a bit, then comes back again.
That is usually how the evening goes.
I may get up and make a drink. I may sit there a bit longer. I may not be in the mood for deciding anything and leave the computer shut. Then later on, I will look at it again and think, ‘Should I do it or not?’
It is not procrastination. I do not want that word anywhere near it. Procrastination is avoiding doing something. I have done the thing. The thing is there. This is about whether I want to send it out.
That is the part I do not like. Up to a point, writing is private, even when it is about something I may later show people. It still belongs to me while it is sitting there unfinished, or finished and unpublished. It has not crossed over. It is still thought. Or thought with punctuation. Once I press the button, it stops being that. It becomes something I have actually put into the world.
That is where the trouble starts.
People make a great deal of strangers on the internet, but strangers do not bother me in the same way. Strangers are vague. They pass through. The worst thought is people who know me. Not intimately, necessarily. I mean, people who know who I am. People who know my face, my voice, where I am and roughly what I am like. People who can read something I have published and think, ‘Right. So that’s what he thinks about. That’s what goes on in there.’
That is harder.
Because once that happens, the writing is no longer just writing. It starts to feel like evidence. Evidence of what I notice, what I mind, what I cannot let go of, what I think is worth turning into words in the first place. Even when the piece itself is not especially revealing, publishing it still feels revealing.
So the evening wears on, and the question keeps returning in the same plain form. ‘Should I do it or not?’
Sometimes I go to bed and leave it. By then, I have usually made not deciding feel like a decision. Then I wake up, and the whole thing is still there in the morning, only flatter. Morning has a way of making everything look either more manageable or more unnecessary. Sometimes I look at it and think, no, leave it. There is no need. Leave it where it is.
And sometimes I press it before I can start all that again.
The difficulty is not finishing things. The difficulty is agreeing to be seen after having finished them. Finishing is private. Publishing is public. The words stop being a thought I was having and become something I have said.
Which is why I can spend an entire evening knowing exactly what the choice is and still not wanting to make it.