2024 Resolution: Finishing Shit
and starting again
Around the beginning of last year I started dropping the ball on writing my newsletter on the regular; though it did and does bring me so much joy. The culprit was my approach to stories that I started but didn’t finish and each of them were GEMS in my mind. There was the piece about seeing ESG and dancing in the balcony, and the rest of the one about beginning ballet and the continuation of the story about going on retreat. All of these seemed 100% promising and I didn’t imagine that I would get through the whole year without finishing them. Somewhere I developed a bad habit of keeping a list of pieces I would surely publish, along with fragments of the story both on paper and in my head, and then, well, I just never wrote them to completion. I felt that because I had a good idea of them, they were as good as done.
This year, so far, has not gone so differently. I want to tell you all about how when I looked for a space to write, a co-working space tour guide showed me around and then fell asleep in the corner office, on the floor, until I left. It would be wonderful to share with you about the sixth floor of the public library where you have to check in your bag and borrow a pencil and sit in absolute silence amidst the special collection of old manuscripts about San Francisco. Or what when I made up a bedtime story about a frog and a snake in the woods? And a bunny that met them both before she then met a robin who lead the bunny up a trail she had never been up before. What about the question Olive asked about whether the frog knew he was lying when he told the bunny that the trail was too rocky this year? What about my answer which is that sometimes we lie when we are afraid. What about these adventures that seem small but can read big?
I have no excuse. I only see the results of not-writing which is that my house got no cleaner, my apartment got no less cluttered and I cooked exactly one or two more meals a week than I usually would. The only real advantage of this break from writing and pressing send was that for a moment, I was not exhausted from driving to different locations around the city to find a “room of my own,” where I could type without the distractions of my life all around me. The big disadvantage is all the writing in my head–the stories that had taken shape in my mind–just vanished, poof, just dissolved and frankly, I’ve noticed, my confidence fell away with them. Until the end of this year I had no idea how dependent my selfhood was on putting things down. Some days it’s hard not to wish that this wasn’t the case.
We could talk about Thanksgiving and Christmas, and two weeks of childcare and New Years and a penicillin allergy that required a visit to urgent care and a steroid and a few nights of holding my breath. In fact to talk about that would be to talk about everything; about the way that one indulgent Saturday morning artist’s date can turn from a deep inspiration to a nice-to-have to a thing that can’t be done because the demands of motherhood don’t work on a schedule (although try to mother without a schedule and you will likely be shamed). There is something so sad, so hard, about writing that all over again. It's a topic that never seems to exhaust itself and I sure wish it would.
Then there’s the matter of flow, which is now very clear to me how to achieve:
1) Work really hard on something that ends up having way less of an impact than you imagined it might
2) Do this again and maybe have the story not even be as good as you liked
3) Wake up in the morning first thing and have a fully formed story in your head and write it on your phone and send it out without editing
4) Be so shocked at the trajectory of this flow that you stop it midstream just in case you get ahead of yourself
5) Spend three months wondering if it’s seriously both that hard and that easy to get your writing out into the world.
If we’re going with the forest metaphor from my fairy tale, bedtime story, it’s like hiking into the middle of the woods and finding the most beautiful stream and then taking a nice dip and then thinking you can just come back tomorrow but deciding to leave the directions for the way back to chance. I don’t recommend it.
The path is not entirely gone. There’s still something visible about part II of the beginning ballet story when I put on a tutu and how awkward it felt and how masculine my body seemed in comparison to the ideal ballerina form. There’s a window seat in my mind, saved from the retreat, that reminds me about grieving parts of Olive’s birth that didn’t go as planned and how there had never been any space, not one second, to cry for that loss, for so many years. All of these stories still feel urgent and clear but the backlog of them became weighty and began to feel like a burden; I felt behind because I was and tired because I was behind. I hope this explains this catchup newsletter, this kitchen sink story, where I unload all the fragments and find a fresh place to start. I’m definitely back on the edge of the forest again, peeking into that darkness, patting my pants down at the legs to look for my light in my pocket. Each word another step back into woods. Thank you for journeying with me!