One Hundred Words At A Time

Imagine trying to write clearly in a room where no one can see. This is a brief tale of how I began writing this year—and how ophthalmology waiting rooms, of all places, became my classroom.

Hope is: Wanting to Pull Clouds by Sigmar Polke (1992)

The woman beside me had achieved something I’d never witnessed. She was simultaneously knitting and eating almonds—neither activity requiring her eyes. Her hands worked like a pianist playing two entirely different songs. One hand threaded orange yarn into precise loops; the other fished almonds from a buried Ziplock bag. I watched her, transfixed. I’d been told multitasking was a myth, but here was proof to the contrary.

My mother, midway her NYT crossword clue, paused to screenshot a recipe for rum-buttered almond cookies. I briefly wondered if she should share it with the knitter beside us. It was early January. We were still collectively clinging to the afterglow of holiday baking.

I’d brought my laptop to continue what I’d started calling my experiment in honest writing. For years, I’d maintained separate vocabularies and folders: one for private thoughts, imagination, and truly exploratory fun; the other for public and professional work—always sanitized, structured, and resolutely safe. The latter asked questions it always answered. Neatly. The former never saw daylight.

I avoided sharing anything that might betray the fact that I didn’t really know what I was doing fiction especially threatened to do that. But that morning, laptop balanced precariously on my knees while my mother leaned over to show me mouthwatering confections, I realized I’d been practicing a kind of literary cowardice. I wrote constantly but shared nothing that mattered. It was like practicing swimming in a three-foot pool. Hands off the wall but no risk.

So, I made myself a promise. Write something true and send it somewhere that would probably reject it.

The promise wasn’t about publication. It was about reconfiguring my own ideas of acceptable humiliation. I’ve learned, time and again, that’s the necessary river one must wade to improve any skill.

Across the waiting room, a man unwrapped what could charitably be called an egg sandwich. The smell had both weight and trajectory. He ate with the confidence of someone who considered the NO FOOD sign decorative. An elderly farmer shifted in his, visibly affronted by the sandwich’s existence.

“Left the farm at five,” he announced to his son. “Haven’t eaten.”

“I know,” the son replied, in the voice of someone who’d been knowing this for hours.

“Not since last night.”

“I. Know.”

Eye Miniature, British Painter

On the television, the Property Brothers demolished something with matching grins. Behind me, a woman whispered to her teenage daughter that she wished they were watching House Hunters International instead. At least then they could pretend they were somewhere more interesting than central New Jersey.

Several people watched YouTube at full volume—no headphones, no apologies, no evidence of spatial awareness. One man was fixated on an AI-generated ad for apple cider vinegar featuring teeth no human had ever grown. I began mentally calculating how many steps it would take to reach him, skip the ad, and suggest vinegar was better suited to salad dressing.

Patience is the only currency accepted in waiting rooms, and we were all deeply overdrawn. Then I found a digital magazine of micro-memoirs, exactly one hundred words each. Brief, vivid, emotionally sharp. I read the whole archive in one visit. Some made me laugh. Others grazed a place I thought had healed. All felt more real than anything I’d managed to write.

The guidelines were simple: write about five minutes of your life. Find the moment. Stay present. I made a list—my first filter coffee, a failed dinner party, rediscovering childhood board games. Tiny, flickering scenes that, for me, were turning points. I wrote about pretending to be productive while quietly wrestling with whether I lacked the courage to be truly bad at something I cared deeply about.

A surgeon pushed through the double doors to update a young man on his mother’s procedure. The son listened with his back turned and said, “Nah, yeah, just like call me when she’s done,” as though ordering a pizza. The room processed this comment in the particular silence reserved for moments when someone has accidentally revealed their entire character.

My mother picked up her crossword again. “Twelve down, five letters. Past, present, or future?” she murmured, then typed with suspicious confidence. I glanced over.

TENSE.

Fitting, I thought, as she was called in and I attempted to write about time in a place where it had clearly stalled. The suspended animation of waiting rooms—the careful choreography of not making eye contact, the practiced postures of false calm. Everyone here was managing tension in their own way.

In that moment, I was part of a fragile community of people caught between their before and after selves. I submitted the piece before wisdom could intervene. My mother emerged, sunglasses perched at their proper angle of post-appointment authority.

“One down,” she announced.

“And one to go, before the year’s out!” I said. “Best not disappoint the deductible.”

Three months later, along with bills for anesthesia, I received an email with a subject line I’d trained myself not to expect. I read it twice. Then a third time. My first submission had been accepted.

Now I write every morning at eight. Not because I’ve mastered anything, but because I’ve grown comfortable with mastering nothing. Some pieces find homes. Others remain permanently filed under Attempts. But every day I honor that quiet promise I made in a room full of people trying to see more clearly.

The strangest discovery from my experiment has been realizing joy isn’t the reward for getting things right. It arrives, uninvited, the moment I stop demanding credentials from my own curiosity. Somewhere in the muddle—still unsure, still flawed, in moments of glorious incompetency, I find it.