Reading · Salt and Chaos with Caitlin Creeper

I do not want to optimize every square inch of my life

My life is a breathing, wild thing.

You cannot ‘maximise’ an animal, a storm, a planet.

I don’t want every hour to be ‘accounted for

A stamped sheet to hold up at the end of the day as a token of my good-ness.

I want to expel the monster in my head that tells me every day of my childs life needs to be

Enriching in some capacity

Or teaching him something

Each day needs to matter

As if I wasn’t left alone for hours in the back yard in my childhood

As if that wasn’t why I learned to write

Where my imagination grew roots that still ground me today

I don’t want to play by the rules that now we have to be as visible as possible to make an impact

I want to write when the words come

And not write when they don’t

I want to share my inner world from behind a doorframe

Head cast in the shadows

Family firmly out of sight

As I peer around the corner into a softly lit room

Filled with six people, who pore over something I wrote, unrushed but moved.

I do not want to optimize every square inch of my life