You don’t have to write ‘King Lear’ this week.
When I first saw the tweet, I was inspired.
“Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote ‘King Lear,’ ” one of my friends retweeted the missive from New York-based singer /songwriter Rosanne Cash.
It was last Saturday, just a couple of days into working from home, and I thought to myself: I could do that. Not the “King Lear” part, of course. I never got the hang of iambic pentameter. But the tackling-alarge-project part.
Within hours, I saw more and more people retweeting this idea. Soon it was on Facebook, and as I was still trying to internalize just how I could turn the frown of being homebound upside down, I came up short.
I have a friend who is learning to make sandwich bread. Another who is refinishing her kitchen cabinets. My father is taking social distancing to the extreme, and spending his time in my favorite hayfield, re-siding a barn to host my wedding this year.
Me? I have read a couple books. Scrubbed my house. And as I sit in the evenings, pondering what kind of genius I can bring to this world, or how I can turn this stolen time into the best thing that ever happened to me, I feel the impostor syndrome kick in.
I have always — always — been the girl working on my own “King Lear.” I was in eighth grade the year my mom bought me a stack of purple notebooks and a pile of purple pens for Christmas. And on that very day, I started writing a story. A novel, really. It was 500 pages long in my big, bubbly, 12-year-old handwriting. And I finished it the following Christmas Eve, just in time to start a new one on Christmas Day again.
It’s a tradition I kept up for … my whole damn life. My house is lined with binders containing drafts of these books. Ones from a 12-year-old version of me, and ones I didn’t start until I hit my 30s. I’m swimming so deep in them that one of my big-idea projects for social distancing was to build more shelving to house them all.
But I just can’t write one this week. I’ll open my laptop at night, tippy-tap along the keyboard for a bit, and watch the sentences sputter out in front of me as my eyes glaze over.
This is not my “King Lear” moment. This is probably not your “King Lear” moment. And that’s OK.
Or at least that’s what I’m trying to tell myself — a woman for whom enough has been both a goal and a curse word.
Because here’s the thing about this first week at home: It has been exhausting.
Working at a newspaper during events like this is whiplashinducing enough. Tell us all to work from home, thus stripping away the the calm reinforcement that comes with working in a centralized office, and I feel like my life has been reduced to a terrible soliloquy from a midaughts rom-com.
You know the one. Drew Barrymore is cursing the state of dating in “He’s Just Not That Into You,” when she utters the world’s most contrived lamentation: “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home and then he emailed me to my Blackberry and so I texted to his cell and then he emailed me to my home account and the whole thing just got out of control.”
It’s so dated. And so clearly written by committee. And so … relevant. At any moment, I’m likely to be missing a text, an email, a Slack message, a Twitter DM, or a Facebook comment in which someone needs me.
Last night, I momentarily felt like a #girlboss, as I stood in our kitchen, stirring dinner with one hand as I balanced my laptop in the other, catching up on email. My fiancé, John, even started chanting at the sight — “Go Maggie! Go Maggie!” — and for a moment, I was flying.
Then the sauce bubbled over, splattering all over my shirt, thus writing the perfect metaphor for my entire life as of late.
I wanted to cry. For a second, anyway.
But instead, I laughed. Because that never would have happened if I’d just set the laptop down and accepted that I don’t have to optimize every moment of every day.
I don’t have to write “King Lear” this week. And neither do you.