Mornings are for Plotting: An Ode to that Spot on the Ceiling
You wake, bleary in the shards of the new day’s sun slicing through the blinds. But you do not move. You stare into that spot on the ceiling. You know the one. It’s the same one you plunge into most mornings as your brain chews its nighttime fetters into whatever task spiral it decides to invoke today. It’s plotting your course, one to-do item at a time.
I’ve been staring at my ceiling spot for a while. In it I usually see the same task: write. I don’t really do that enough. This is a troubling-enough thing for an early-career academic. I’m supposed to be writing constantly. Writing for publication. Writing for academics. But I just. Don’t. Wanna.
But mornings are for plotting. I have been plotting a way forward. A way to write that feels genuine and arguably more in tune with the world than 5000 word essays of dense literary theory and suppositions as to the psychological impulses motivating characters that have been discussed so long they’ve become icons of discourse. I want to share with people, not publications. There’s time for the latter. There’s plenty of CV fodder in my future, whether I like it or not. (Spoiler alert: I will like it, but that’s not why we’re here, is it?)
This is, from what I can tell—from what I can hope—a beginning. A way out of the spot. The way forward into that way of writing that will hopefully reconcile my introversion with my suspicion for managed platforms. The post-based performative display. Meta’s proscenium arch will neither frame nor contain me.
I am become Readist—sharer of words. And worlds.
Mornings are for plotting. I’ve stared into the ceiling enough. Marinated in my bed long enough. Time to rise. Time to shine.