The truth is: there are things happening, circumstances unfolding in real time these days that I don’t know how to write about. And it’s causing me to not know how to write about anything else.
I am sitting, right now, at my desk, in my bedroom, notebook open, pen in hand, gazing out the window. The same scenery I’ve looked up at while thinking and breathing through what to say next for two and a half years. Empty back porches. Dead, dry patches of grass. Naked trees and broken fences. All signs point to February. All signs point to the life that is trying, desperately, to come back.
The truth is: I am carrying equal heaviness and awe within me.
The truth is: I cancelled my afternoon, turned off my phone, and decided to sit here in silence because I don’t know what else to do. Lately, this has felt like an impossible space to be. Not just writing, but stillness. There are ways in which I have been trying to outrun my own aliveness. Not just now, but always. My body as the location of the proof of that aliveness, that unavoidable ability to be affected. To feel. And then, to respond. It’s that part I have a problem with these days.
Less of a problem, more of a grievance. I remember being in 5th grade, back of the school bus, singing Smash Mouth lyrics with my friends: “the years start coming and they don’t stop coming” — having no idea that I had no idea what they mean. Twenty-five years later, and I’m tired. So I sit here, sipping my coffee, writing a few words and then looking out the window whenever I sense myself beginning to try too hard to find the next one.
I pause and I breathe instead.
I’m tired of trying at everything. I’m tired of everyone else trying, too.
I’m tired of showing you who I would like for you to believe that I am. I’m tired of seeing only who you would like for me to believe you are. I think I’m better at knowing how to resist the latter than the former; falling in love is what made me realize this. It’s easier for me to see the truth about you than myself sometimes. Most times, maybe. Every single one of those years that started coming and then did not stop has shown me, over and over and over, that I am not who I thought I was.
But the identity is how the bills get paid. Performance and productivity keeps a roof over my head and food in my belly and if I let go of them I’m not certain I’ll survive — at least, that’s the story I’ve been rehearsing for as long as I can remember. I heard myself repeat it just last night to someone who loves me beyond all my pretending and for the first time it sounded kind of… silly.
Who would I be if I stopped rehearsing that part? What would happen if I opened wide for a miracle instead?
Is that what I’m actually afraid of here?
I have over 100 hours of home video footage of my childhood. Actually, some of it even pre-dates my existence — my mother bought a camcorder for my father the Christmas they were engaged and the rest is history. Literally. I have the ability to view the irrefutable facts of what shaped me before, during, and after I entered this world.
Yes, during.
My father filmed my birth.
I used to watch that specific video obsessively when I was a child, trying to understand something I didn’t know yet how to explain. I was welcomed, wanted (apparently), and yet. This pervasive sense of aloneness in the world followed me everywhere, constantly.
My mother once told me I wasn’t like her previous two babies, that it was like I came out of the womb somehow not wanting her. It confused and distressed her — in fact, the very first words she ever spoke over me as my tiny, premature body was finally laid in her arms nearly two hours after I was pulled from her strapped-down, sliced-open, barely conscious body was:
“She doesn’t like me”.
Mind you, this was spoken with tender, even humorous, affection in response to the fact that the moment I was placed in her arms, I started to cry. The nurse who handed me to my mother said in response, “No, she just missed you. She knows who her mother is”.
This happened. This is exactly and undeniably one of the very first things that ever happened to me. And what I now know is that I have been trying and trying to repair that original, formidable rupture in my nervous system ever since. Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes, almost exactly. The panic in my preverbal bodymind. The separation, the sensation, the absence of touch and safety. I knew who my mother was. The problem was that I could not get to her.
Maybe my body might have even started to believe she did not want to get to me.
Maybe my body still believes that about anyone who says they love me.
Maybe my body even believes that about you.
I have been writing things for public consumption for eight years, going on nine. It has been an integral part of my job for six, going on seven. I think I am only just starting to come into an awareness of what it has done to my psyche, how it pokes and prods that earliest attachment wound still active in my body. I no longer resent it for this; in fact, I am grateful. But mixed in with the gratitude is an ever-present grief that’s difficult to express.
Two years ago, when I was trying to nurse myself back to life after burning out spectacularly, I fantasized about leaving it all behind. For a solid few months, I obsessively considered shuttering the Self-Made Everything and disappearing from the internet completely. Finding something less self-exploitative to do to make money. Shop girl. Flight attendant. Waitress in a restaurant I frequented on the Amalfi Coast.
What changed my mind was the hope that I could simply do it differently — this prolonged performance art piece of being my own “brand”. It’s why I decided to go to massage therapy school — to step into a lineage rather than spend the rest of my life wrestling with an algorithm. It’s not that it isn’t working, it’s just that I underestimated the disorienting intensity of the transition.
The way it would expose all of my deepest insecurities regarding rejection and relevance. The way the loss of digital, social currency would impact my ability to create and maintain financial stability. The way the truth would set me free by breaking my heart, peeling off my skin, and making me feel as helpless, as exposed, as afraid as that two-hour-old infant finally put back exactly where she belonged in the first place: the waiting, longing arms of Love.
I don’t know how I got here and I don’t know why I still do this. Years ago, I wrote a poem where I wondered aloud whether or not I started writing because I needed someone to talk to. I think that’s probably true, but I know it isn’t the whole story. There’s something else going on and I may never know exactly what it is. I don’t know what any of this means, what good any of it does, or why I need it so badly. I just know that I don’t know how to not do it, even when I don’t know how to do it either.
What I know, only because I feel the truth of it in my body, is that I have read things that have saved my life. Not once, not twice, but constantly.
I know that an essay in The Paris Review is how I finally left someone who was abusing me. I know that my friend Mari wrote a book that made me realize going to law school might kill me — and that I needed to quit my job and go to Europe to remember how to breathe. I know that Wintering by Katherine May is why I started singing again.
I know that the love letters my partner sends me have permanently altered my DNA.
I know that I’ve now spent two hours in total silence, having no idea what to say and yet, somehow, also saying all of this. No, not saying: writing. Writing all of this.
Writing.
Deciding.
Deciding to make something where there was nothing.
Deciding to feel and respond and stop fucking trying.
Deciding to finally face the fear and open wide for my miracle instead.
This is just...wonderful. The truthfulness. The writing about the process of writing. The digging-in to what cries to be avoided at all costs. Yours is a voice that is so resonant for me. I know it's hard to keep sharing your bare self with this relentless world, but your words are like a mini life-support moment when I read them, just this "ahhh" of yes this is it. So I appreciate you doing what must be done to say it and share it. I believe we write to save our own lives, in the end. But when we share our own true story with others, we share life, and that is something!
I loved the part of pausing when you felt like you were trying too hard for the next words. I do this in my writing and I've also found I've been doing this in life. When I feel myself trying too hard I'll pause and wait for it to come back to me. (I also thoroughly enjoyed this entire piece so much so thank you for the whole damn thing!)