self-respect / habit (being a conversational addendum)
A long-needed reunion chat with a great friend yielded a discussion on how I manage to find the motivation to get up every day and write whatever it is write for no one in particular: I'm not, after all, technically on any deadline - outside of my own self-imposed ones; I haven't been contracted or asked to write anything for anyone since 2017; but, over the last year, I've churned out more stories and essays and informalities and newsletters and podcasts to this space for no one's amusement but my own than I have in the last eight years.
My initial thought was that I had simply made it habitual to the point that I literally wouldn't know what to do with myself if I didn't. And that's very true. But I've also realized that I left one part out of it, a notion from the source of all wisdom worth having, Mr. Leonard Cohen:
I do what I do every day because it's what I do every day: it's how I refill my self-respect – it's how I make each day feel as though it was lived, so it does not, as Mr Cohen says, go down in debt.