One Way Or Another

Color-Field Cookies. Recipe by Susan Spungen. cooking.nytimes.com

I used to get so much writing done, simply by squeezing it in the interstices of my ridiculously busy life taking care of patients, running the practice, parenting our son and staying married. I’d jot ideas down between patients. I’d drift off with my boy after reading to him in his bed, wake up and write for a couple hours. If I was on a roll, eagerness would get me up a couple hours before him and I’d write some more.

 A couple decades have passed. My son is all grown up and on his own, my beloved pooch passed away, the practice (almost) runs itself and my caseload has shrunk through natural attrition. For practical purposes, I’m partially retired. For three years I’ve been living the dream, writing full time. My book: Practice, Practice, Practice: This Psychiatrist’s Life comes out this weekend! 

Now that’s done, I have a steep mountain of work I don’t want to do— social media, social media, social media; self-promotion, self-promotion, self-promotion. I’m a work dog and of course I want people to read my book. Normally, these two things would be enough to boot me in the butt. Yet cooking is all I’m doing and thinking about. I belong to a CSA. You would not believe the splendor and bounty of the food I have to play with. I used to wake up with ideas for essays. Now I wake fired up with ideas for repurposing left-overs or eager to attempt an appealing recipe.

This is a problem. (Maybe I should talk to somebody. Wait. I’m a psychiatrist. I’ll talk to myself. Problem solved.) Finishing the book has opened up large, lovely, uninterrupted swaths of time to fool around in. All that open space uncluttered by compelling responsibilities has revealed I’m a procrastinator. Not your eating-bon-bons-watching-tv-on-the-couch type. (That would be my husband, with pretzels.) No, I’m a go-out-for-one-thing-come-home-with-another procrastinator. I get plenty done by avoiding what I should actually be doing. My friend Joan (“Baking is my super-power.”) Janson says, “Procrastibaking is the way to go.” There’s nothing like a carb serotonin surge for keeping calm and carrying on. Obviously, if I want to get the next book written, I’ll have to spend way more time in the kitchen. Cookie, anyone?