Muses and Movement

I wake up daily with the intention to write. Daily, I write down what I ate and how I feel in a composition book, I write posts on forums, emails, comments and things on Facebook, text messages, silly notes to my fiancé...

But I don't work on my story.

Perhaps I'm distracting myself with television, reading on my Kindle, surfing the net on my phone, etc... I don't deal well with silence. I'm not one of those people who needs absolute silence to create. In fact, my best work seems to be born in the midst of chaos, noise , and multitasking.

In high school and through my college courses I always studied and wrote papers and stories with music blaring or the television on and a billion instant messages pinging in the background. In all that chaos, I made art.

Now, it seems the television has grown interesting enough to distract me. The sounds of children playing, teenagers giggling as they walk past the paper thin walls of the glorified tin can that is my house, vehicles driving through the trailer park or pulling into my shared driveway, and the occasional earthquake or catfight are enough to cause me to leap out of my seat in the throes of a mild panic attack if I don't have the television streaming dribble into my living room to blame the sounds on. Blaring music just isn't enough. Even now the creaking doors of my neighbor's little green pickup just made me jump.

I suppose it doesn't help that silence doesn't seem to exist in my little trailer park near the airport. Of course, if it did, I'd likely start imagining sounds to frighten me and waste hours trying to find television programming or music capable of drowning out the scary sounds in my head.

Perhaps I've list the ability to focus through the chaos. Perhaps my story isn't interesting enough for me to push everything else to the background. Perhaps it's time I stop whining long enough to give my muse a chance to speak; maybe I'm drowning her out.