On Not Writing
Last week my brain felt like red and blue jello juice. This week it feels like it’s hardened into a viscous thing that wiggles if you open the fridge. What I’m trying to say is I’ve had a hard time writing the past two weeks. My friend Molly described their brain as containing “ant thoughts,” ideas that aren’t substantive and don’t stay very long but just sort of crawl around.
I was at my parents’ house for the election. We kept the tv on for most of the week in the background at a low hum. Sometimes if I walked by it, out of the corner of my eye, the screen looked like a red and blue cubist painting. The news pulled me in like it was feeding me sugar water from a slow-release dropper, just as addicting as it was comforting to watch the percentage of votes rise, to know that Rachel Maddow would always have something to say. It made me think about what it feels like to be in the liminal space of waiting for something. How hard it is to be fully present in the moment when there’s an uncertain variable in the future. The discomfort and unease that arises when we are not in control of something anymore, when all we can do is wait.
I read once about this high rise in Manhattan that received continuous complaints from people who worked in the building about the wait time of the elevator. When they looked into it and determined that there was nothing they could do to speed up the wait time, the superintendent installed a mirror on every floor so that “people would have something to do.” After that, no one complained. It feels true that as humans we feel better when we not only have something to do, but a way in which we can see or track our progress, a line moving at a steady pace or an expected wait time.
Sometimes I find myself slipping into a perpetual state of waiting. With the larger backdrop of uncertainty in not knowing when we will be on the other side of a pandemic or what the other side even looks like, I imagine what it will be like to look back on this time. Or, I feel a need to take advantage of it to write more, work more, read more, do more. It can feel like a capitalist impulse, the need to constantly move forward, optimize and prioritize our productivity over our process. Jenny Odell, in her book How To Do Nothing writes,
“In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. . . We do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”
I’m hard on myself when it’s hard for me to write, somehow forgetting that part of writing is living it, is not yet having the distance to write about it yet. That sometimes not writing, is writing.
I listened to a craft lecture this week called Failing Better by R.O. Kwon where she discusses writing and revising her first novel, The Incendiaries, which she worked on for ten years. She talks about how she had to challenge herself to move away from prioritizing efficiency to prioritizing care for the work. “There were two ways I could have looked at my process,” she says, “I could say I spent ten years of my life working on this one book or I could say that I got to spend ten years of my life working on this one book.”
At the end of the lecture, R.O. describes how surprised she was that when she finished the novel after a decade, she felt overwhelmingly sad when it was over, when she got what she wanted.
I’ve felt this so often after I’ve finished something that I care about. With the relief also comes a feeling akin to losing something (do you also feel this?)— it feels like a sort of reminder that it was the process the whole time. I’m having a hard time wrapping this one up but maybe that’s the point.
Things I Read & Recommend
This tiny poem by C.D. Wright:
Tell-All, an essay by Eda Gunaydin in the Sydney Review of Books about our society’s compulsion to disclose and how we crave to be seen:
“It’s easier to say ‘I’m Severus Snape, LOL: dutiful and loyal and with greasy hair’ than to say ‘I was raised via my mother’s belief that she would be left to die alone, and much of my upbringing involved daily reminders that I must never abandon her.”
This interview, How a Black Art Library Quickly Gained Momentum in Hyperallergic by Mia Imani Harrison with the founder of the Black Art Library, Asmaa Walton.
Need a beautiful new book? My old favorite: Bough Down by Karen Green.
This video by Sonya Renee Taylor where she talks about whiteness as nihilistic: constantly having to validate its own existence because without the illusion of superiority, it doesn’t exist.
That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading. <3