I’m on draft 6 of my essay for today. I have reached the bad place, the place where I start to pull on my hair, and the self-hate begins. I have to make a decision about the point of this essay. The reason. The stunning conclusion! If I could decide that, I could finish it. Others have written about their difficulties with finishing a project, and I start thinking I should scrap my essay and write about starting… ‘cause, hey, that would be cool. But my problem isn’t really starting. My problem is the middle.

I do what I usually do. I call Emily, my convenient textual foil. She’s just come back from a date. (6 p.m. in Seoul = 1 a.m. in LA. I owe my sanity and productivity to our Vonage line.) I tell her about my issues and ask her about her date. “It’s not going to work. He’s so emotional, so touchy-feely. And what is that thing he was doing with his thumb on my knee? I just want him to BACK OFF. It’s like dating a woman. Any minute now, he’s going to knit me a fucking scarf... Hey, you should write about the middle, and you should call it ‘in medias res.’”

Now there’s an idea. It would have to start in the middle of things, of course, with the way in which, after amassing a certain amount of expectation and material, I have trouble focusing and discarding. I put aside my essay and begin again. Of course, this act of putting aside things I’ve worked on for days and starting something completely different is a symptom of the particular disease I have. It’s a problem with commitment. I’m the George Clooney of writing. (After all, I’m the one who rewrote my honors thesis from scratch, with a new argument, two days before it was due.) The commitment phobia explains the particular failure of my dissertation, which was like an arranged marriage — no passion! no chemistry! — all about the positioning of myself in relation to a set of literature and arguments and dueling committee members. It was all about finding a topic that would support me on the job market while I was off flirting with bad-boy angles that would leave me committee-less and probably jobless as well.

So I start again, draft 1 of “In Media Res,”—enamored with the idea of comparing writing to dating. That first stage is always fun; I walk towards the cafe smiling, excited; then I sit and type for a few hours, chortling to myself. I’m puffed with a sense of all the possibilities, with the idea that this essay — yes, this essay! — will showcase my particular brilliance, that it will wow and amaze, and I’ll be able to talk about x, y, and z and tie them together in a startlingly provocative way. I want to shout my idea from the mountaintops.

Stuck again on draft 3 of “in medias res.” I use the metaphor of dating to describe my writing process. I compare getting ready to write (comfortable clothes, mood music, anticipation) to preparing for a date. I compare the reading and writing done for classes to speed dating and preparing for an exam to a one-night stand. I think it’s funny. I send draft 3 to Emily.

She calls me back. “Um, do you have anything you can send besides this?” The answer is despondently no.

“OK, the problem here is that you are trying to be funny, to compare dating and writing — I get it. But this is not funny and let’s face it, you don’t know fuck all about dating.”

She’s right about that. I could count the men I’ve dated on half of one hand. She, on the other hand, has been out with a new guy between drafts 3 and 4 and is already extrapolating to the end of the relationship: “He didn’t know the word ‘anomaly.’ I was trying not to be an intellectual snob, but then he asked me to use smaller words. I can’t sacrifice my vocabulary for this guy. Plus I don’t think he would know the difference between an objective and a subjective pronoun if his life depended on it.” I choose not to remind her of the guy she went out with last week who asked her if she wanted to go to the “Philharmonica.”

This is how our conversations go: what is stable and solid in my life is full of uncertainty in hers and vice versa. She, in a solid relationship with her work, in a job she’s celebrated for and certain of, can diagnose and calm my anxieties about whether I will ever figure out what I want to be when I grow up (or rather, when my kids grow up). And I can watch her struggle with dating the way I struggle with writing, trying to avoid reading too much into each decision, trying to suss out all the potholes and wormholes and assholes before they manifest themselves.

When my son complains about how he doesn’t have the Death Star II Lego set (which costs $500), I tell him that sometimes, when people focus on the things they don’t have, they are unable to appreciate the things they do have. Emily reminds me of those things I don’t have, and her presence in my life both clarifies and tempers my dissatisfactions. When she finished her PhD, I remember being so happy for her while fighting off the pang of “that should have been me.” When she sees me with my sons, I’m sure she feels the same way. We do our best here, juggling dating, writing, and life in general, trying to figure out where it’s all going. I’m thankful that although sometimes it feels like it’s all going to hell, our friendship is as solid and reliable as ever. Sometimes you have to take your eyes off the endpoint and just enjoy being in the middle of things.