The dual life of a writer

I came a little late to my work desk a couple of days back hoping that this writing session would be a productive one, hoping that words would pour out and I’ll be able to put down the thousand words that I had promised myself for the day. Thirty minutes into the session, just as I was finding rhythm, I heard my phone ring. I looked for my phone cursing under my breath and found the damn thing hidden under a heap of papers (I hate to admit it but my work desk is a mess right now.)

It was my professor asking me to pull up some metrics for a paper that we are writing together. It’ll be nice if you can do this right away as I am presenting that paper in a couple of hours and would really like to include the metrics in my deck, he said. I sighed and told him that I’ll send the metrics to him in about thirty minutes.

As a writer, I often find myself living a dual life, the life of writer that I find emotionally gratifying and the life of a researcher/ part-time academician which I live for the gratification of the society. It is often frustrating when this researcher taps the writer in me on the shoulder and tries to take me away from my writing.

My professor spent a few minutes discussing what I was up to after which he gave me a polite reminder to send him the metrics and disconnected the phone. I minimized the doc I was writing on, annoyed that now I had to cut short my writing session. A moment ago, I was immersed in the fictional world of the book that I would want to complete soon and now I was staring at numbers. I ran a few SQL queries imagining a time when I’d be able to wave ‘this other life’ a goodbye and just be locked up in my cluttered room with my writing.