Free Write Everyday: Day #1

For one of my more alternative classes in law school, I had to write 300-500 words a day, I figured since I shared them with my professor, I might as well share them with you all.  Also, this allowsme to post something since I have not written anything here for awhile.

First entry:

"Tuesday February 21 11:00pm
Where does my resistance to put pen to paper (or in this case, letter to keyboard) come from? I have always seemed to have trouble filling a word limit.  I had a tendency in high school to check the word count with each passing sentence to constantly update myself on exectly how many words I had left to write.  I do not know why this is because I have no trouble filling up any available silence with spoken communication, and I actually like the intention behind the words I chose to put down to paper.  I guess I like that I can sound more put together or intelligent on a  written document without the “likes” “ahs” and “ums” that occur, often against my best effort while speaking.
I struggle to write thank-you notes, I rarely wrote the observation portions of the labs in science class, and in my eighth grade “weekly journal” for English class I spent the lunch break before the last class of each quarter frantically putting pencil to notebook to write all nine entries I had not yet written.  In all of these cases, I thought about what I wanted to write a lot... a lot! I wanted each “thank-you” to be sincere and heartfelt, I wanted to pick the right adjective to describe the experiment and I think I wanted my journal entries to be a good quality.  What is so surprising is with amount of time I spent reflecting on the possibilities of what I could write, I never left myself enough time to actually write what I wanted.
I put extra pressure on myself when writing because I am a harsh critic of my work.  If I say something it can fade away into memory (where we so easily edit things to see them the way we want to) but when I write I know I will be looking at it later and judging what I wrote.
I also think my aversion to writing comes from a compelling desire to be active and to truly write, I have to disengage from whatever activity I am doing and stop, sit and write.  My monkey-mind and my restless body have a hard time staying still to focus and write, especially when it comes to the preparation it can take to write something well.  In this way, I allow my other activities or work take over my attention and I become so easily distracted from actually writing."