Distraction is my main enemy when writing. Slack messages are so much easier to craft than stories. Just pressing Cmd-Tab is to easy. Switching out of the writing context into the gusty storm of e-mails, instant messages, agendas and minutes. The same thing goes for my research. Graphs are more fun than meetings, but why then is it that it’s easier for me to go the latter than to focus on the first. Why do university politics define my thinking even when I’m gone?

Sometimes I can just detox. Then, it really feels like the stress flows out of my system like some venom, the drama draining my veins, vacating my thinking. Things that seemed like the most important thing in the world to me, are nothing but distant, unrelated, meaningless quarrels with only a week’s worth of vacation between us.

Shouldn’t that be what I want?

Even as I’m writing this text, I must resist the urge to Cmd-tab to Slack. While going through a tunnel on the regional express. Neither my phone nor my laptop are connected to the internet. But still the craving is there. I feel like the rat in the box pressing the tiny black buttons for a kick of dopamine, of the pressure I so loathe and desire.

Sometimes I wish, I were hypergraphic, forcing me to write. I feel this urge to write, just to write, write whatever. Few things are as relaxing, sometimes even cathartic, but it’s so hard to do when stressed, when under pressure, when I can do something, anything, that is easier. Curiously, even writing an email feels easier than writing this text. My perfectionism, my aspirations, the pressure I put on myself to be a lucid, structured yet warm writer, paralysing me to do the one thing that can help me achieve these things: practise.

Consider this text a fragment. It’s bad. It’s incomplete and incoherent. I thought about editing it, but I find it telling in its current form. Especially, how the title I wrote at first just doesn’t fit at all, reveals something about the effect writing has on me to myself. But please don’t take that as an excuse for poor writing, any shortcoming are mine and mine alone.*