By Ellora Kothare
My resolutions are like my writing --- unfinished.
Starting used to be where I got stuck until someone told me to aim for a bad beginning --- 'start badly, but start.' And I’d like to think I did a decent job at tripping during my first contemporary class. The point is of course, to get the ball rolling, the pen moving, the feet dancing. The point is when Liz Gilbert writes, her aim is to show up. But the point is that she's also Elizabeth Gilbert, who traveled from Italy, to Bali, to India before writing Eat Pray Love. Okay, that’s not the point. Everyone has a different process. And just like every process, every story has a middle --- where I usually get stuck. It's when the doubt kicks in, when I start to check my phone more often, this is when I eat a lot of chocolate. Like I said, my resolutions are like my writing. And the plot twist is always the tough part. Planking is easy until you’re a minute in, dancing is fine until you have to do a split, and so is being honest until you’ve made a mistake. This is where the cliches come in, because we can hide behind them. Except some cliches are useful. It’s just, there’s always more to the story. See what I mean? This is the middle. It’s also the part where words like 'cumulonimbus' slip in, when what I want to say is 'cloudy', when all I really want to say is I’m distracted, lost and confused and I need time. I don’t finish in time. I procrastinate until it’s too late. The reason it’s late is because the pen wasn’t working or the internet was slow --- always the traffic, never me.
This is usually when I make my own stop sign, when I leave the piece abandoned. This is when I decide it's not worth finishing. Except it's not about this piece. It's about making peace with the practice. Like I said, my resolutions are like my writing. They're both stories and this the end, but it's also the beginning.