We all wear various hats in our life, literally and metaphorically. Often out of necessity, and even sometimes willingly. That said, there are moments where you either can’t put on another chapeau or switch them out fast enough without the whole pile landing in your lap. Now that I’ve fully beaten that metaphor to death—writing, or my career as a writer, is yet another hat I don when I can. I find it cathartic, entertaining, liberating, frustrating, time-consuming, and agonizing. Yet I keep coming back. Not sure whether I’m a glutton for punishment or that I have a talent for self-flagellation—as a reformed (recovering) bastard Catholic, I fully endorse that remark.

Laying out a story, wrestling with an idea, and documenting the self-narrative rattling around in my spacious cranium all get the process going, but the need for editing, reflection, and self-evaluation competes with the process. My problem is not that I can’t get past the blank page threshold, but rather bringing pieces to completion once I get started. Not sure if I suffer from ADHD or if I’m just too lazy to finish things, but there you have it. The master of 80 percent.

As I understand it, though, finishing a piece of writing is, to a writer, a bit of a paradox. Even after typing “the end,” the urge to revise and edit hovers over your prose like a vulture watching a highway. Something can always be changed, revised, reworked, restructured, and teased out. Sometimes for the better, sometimes devolving into a word salad. It’s necessary, it’s obligated. You know the drill: murder your darlings, cut 10 percent, no shitty first drafts passing as finished pieces.

The old saying goes, “If it were easy, everyone would do it, “ which applies to writing. Except everyone writes, even the yahoos on social media must do some preplanning for their TikTok dances and endlessly repeating cat videos. So it isn’t the very act of writing that is difficult; it is finishing them so they can be released into the wilds of the Internet, where hopefully it will entertain and inform and possibly not torpedo my goal of running the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Getting to the end of a piece is hard enough, finishing them yet another promethium chore, but for me at least, keeping my projects properly managed becomes a cat herding exercise. They all compete for attention in my fevered imagination, meowing incessantly while also being in various states of disarray and status. Started, half-written, abandoned, rewritten, abandoned again, nearly finished, then, on a rare occasion, completed. I bounce between them and go through the various stages of my writer’s journey (joy of discovery, despair at its state, hope for completion, frustration with competing demands, frenetic editing, mental exhaustion, and eventual abandonment—again).

Despite this, I persevere. Of all my “qualities” (oh, what a juicy word!), my stubborn doggedness tends to be the one I fall back on and gets me through tough times and numerous failures. I’m not sure it counts as optimism, but I do tend to bounce back onto my feet, even when the reason I face planted is entirely in my zone of responsibility.

So, here’s to the hat-wearing cat herder—let all your hats fit comfortably on your oversized noggin and may your domestic shorthairs not use your mental state as a scratching post.