plugging in.

This night, I have cleaned the kitchen, done two loads of laundry, made a large pot of curry split pea soup, killed time looking at apartment listings, and eaten an embarrassing dinner of crackers, spreadable cheese and pickles. But I have managed to fight through anyway and get down to work. Other things seem more important. Suddenly I suspect I should make a loaf of bread. I feel the need to clean out my closet.

You might be tired of hearing about this procrastinating and putting off and distracting myself. Trust me, you're not as sick of it as I am. But I mention it only to give proof that I'm continuing to slog through it and make progress in the way that I do.

There are many reasons I know I should write. One is this: sometimes I read a book, a page, even a sentence, and while I'm thinking of its beauty and appreciating it and reveling in it, I'm also thinking: I wish I had written that. So I keep on taking things in, out in the creative world, and these things mash around my head and I hope for the best. I hope that my own style will come out of it. You keep taking it in and taking it in and taking it in and something will come out. That's physics, I think. Action and reaction.

I read a chapter of a book today. I sat very still and got tingly feelings in my fingers. Shallow breath and eyes that blurred around the rims from intense focus, from lack of blinking. These things happened. I got the restless-leg-syndrome feeling in my arms and clenched my fists over and over to soothe it. This is what my creative impulse feels like. It is the highest high I know. Seeing something brilliant and wanting to make something else while wishing you had made this awesome thing you're looking at now. It is this single moment when I forget fear, inhibition, failure, rejection, propriety, even life itself. The world is suddenly so big, so full of things for me to see and write and tell and I realize I am staring at this screen with my eyes jacked wide open like it's all unfolding before me now. I'll open them wide enough to take it all in.

at the beach.

Three years ago, I parked my car at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown and stared out over the water. I was taking my lunch break. I was writing in a notebook. It was February. At that time, things in my life had taken a sharp turn. A plan had been shattered. Trust had been broken hard. Everything felt, in a word, bleak.

I sat at the steering wheel of my parked car. I gripped the wheel, shivered a bit, let the sound of waves fill my head. I remember looking out over the expanse of the bay and thinking, The ocean and the sky are the same color. I don’t know why, but it felt very profound. It was everything I felt. Life was covered with a thick gray blanket.

The ocean always has a way of pushing my thoughts out of my brain, in whatever form they’ll take. Something about the waves, something about repetition, something about the rhythm of introspection. Maybe this is why I couldn’t really be a writer until I came to know the ocean. And sometimes it is bleak. Sometimes it’s stormy. But peace doesn’t come from feeling peaceful, it comes from feeling everything as each thing passes.

This past weekend, I drove out to the Cape for a day. I just had such a craving. I needed to be hit in the face with salt air. I needed to see the familiar things that trigger the home feeling inside of me. Saturday morning, I picked up a croissant at the Boulangerie and drove to White Crest Beach. I parked and sat in my car. The sun was very bright and the wind was blowing hard. I saw a handful of whales surface - just the spouts blending with rolling waves. I wrote there for two hours in my notebook. Sand was pelting the windows of my car and it was rocking a bit in the gusts of wind. I wrote until it hurt my hand to grip the pen. I mean, I was gripping it hard. I drank an espresso out of a Dixie cup.

the well isn't dry.

I read your pages and I lingered. Fingers tracing words from top to bottom.
You laughed. I smiled. It hurt a little bit.

Sometimes the tedium of looking at my life, over and over again, looking at the details the sounds the light the people....... Sometimes it gets annoying. The sound of my own voice is grating and somewhere inside my head, my brain is saying Shut up shut up shut up.

I have very little to say because I can't nail my thoughts down anywhere. I can write until I get that weird little cramp in my palm, somewhere under my knuckles, but nothing is really coming out. The old fight will never end, will never be won in any sense. Some days inspiration will come rushing out of you and spill out everywhere before you can hold it in. Some days the well runs dry.

This well isn't dry. It's confused about whether or not it's a well. It has the echo.

It helps to believe in something or someone. It's good to hope for something that is bigger than yourself. I practice awe like religion, each day staring at the sun as it rises and sets, filling my lungs up with the sky, cracking my chest open with the wind and a song. Feel it and appreciate it.

memories of a gorilla suit.

I can't remember what I ate as a child. I know I ate things, I know we had meals. There are pieces, mostly memories of melting cheese on chips and watching I Love Lucy. There's the sugar bomb cereal that none of the neighbor kids were allowed. They always wanted to sleep over for the breakfast.

I don't understand why I can't remember the meals, years and years of my life. What was I eating? In my adult life, I structure my entire day around what I'm going to eat and when. I love food and I love to make it. I will gladly devote my entire evening to buying groceries and making a meal. I read food blogs like it's my job.

Memory is a funny thing. The pieces that carry through, the things you remember, and the things that are lost. Years of life, significant acts, eating, all lost. In this moment now, you can't imagine a time when you'll forget. Can't imagine not remembering the feel of that hand or the way the Boston air smelled after a cold December rain. But you might forget.

the notebook, continued.

Here's the deal:
Two months ago, I said I was going to finish the notebook. I only had seven pages left. More or less the moment I said those words, it became impossible for me to do it. I still wrote, finished two pieces, blogged, wrote in other notebooks. But something in me resisted finishing this notebook. I don't understand it so I can't explain it. I kind of lied a little, mostly to myself, and said it was done. Well, it wasn't.

I know this might seem insignificant - maybe it is insignificant. But it matters to me.

So today, holed up in Starbucks on my lunch break with an Earl Gray tea, I wrote the last seven pages. There, it's done. I want to throw it away something fierce, but I will not.

The notebook ended on this:

And now I'm staring at these last pages gripped with fear, fear of the beautiful words and the ugly words and myself. Just another face in another Starbucks scribbling things that seem so important. Well what is it? I will not throw it away. Keep on keep on. Stand in the long line and creep forward with each moment and word, stare out the window, look back and blink. 

***

when you see it.

I am stubborn. I hate to be told I'm wrong. I hate to be told what to do. I also have widespread insecurity about my talent and abilities and I tell you what: I have a hard time with criticism.

I know that it's something I need to work on.

Here's the thing with writing: it's not all objective. I can write a piece, edit it, read it through twice, feel pretty good and then discover that someone else doesn't get it. Outside of my own head, it's completely possible that it doesn't make sense.

I am trying to get serious about this. I am trying to live the writing life that I long for. I am coming back, again and again and picking up the pen. I am fully aware that a necessary step in my writing self-actualization (as it were) is learning to accept and get comfortable with criticism. I'm trying.

My usual reaction follows this pattern:
I send off the piece, it doesn't matter to whom. Total stranger, someone who loves me, whatever. As soon as I click the send button, my heart starts racing. I imagine them reading the words and feeling total disgust for the words, and obviously by extension, for me. Obviously each word I have written is a tiny little representation of my person and self-worth.

say yes to yes.

Sometimes it's a Monday and you need to freewrite. Just garbage, you just need to get it out, clean out the gutter, empty the trash, get something moving through your head and your hands. I feel inspired today. I feel uninspired today. I have no desire to write about anything other than how much I hate my writing. I can accept it. These days come and go.

Lately, I have been easier on myself because I realize that, even when I'm not writing, I'm building the material in my head. I am always, always thinking about everything I see, about philosophy, about people, about life.

I know I still need to write though.

I can or I can't. I want to or I don't. Whatever.

I have been thinking lately about what I recently heard someone call chronic powerlessness. That is, he thought we all suffered from censoring and limiting our own dreams because we feel held down by you-name-it.  Power structures, social structures, relationships, religion. I see it all over in my life. We all get it, don't we? Sometimes I think it's nothing more than a coping mechanism - it is easier to expect less or nothing and never be disappointed. Well let me say it again: WHATEVER. I can deal with disappointment. I will not deal with fear and immobility. Write something, write something. Write.

the real doubt.

I’m bad at drafts. I mean, I can edit. I can clean up sentences, choose new words, trim extra commas. But real drafts, the kind where you cut everything up, tear it into pieces and then put it back together again -- I have a hard time with that. Once the structure is on paper, I get attached to it. It feels familiar and I don’t want to let it go.

I have been putting off editing a piece I started over a month ago. I know it needs some mashing up and rearranging and I can’t bring myself to do it. The result is that I freeze up, change a few words, write very little, nothing new.

Here’s what I need someone to write about, for my sake: the real doubt, the kind that cripples you and fires around in your head with whips and electric fences. I am typing word after word, typing them in a row, in a line, line after line. They’re weak, contrived, I don’t like them, to be more precise I hate them. I am staring at the screen and I know: I can never be a writer. The moment the pressure is on, there are no words. I mean, listen to these sentences I’m writing. They’re pathetic. No one wants to read this. I know it’s a mistake to give voice and free reign to that critic in my head. But I have to write about it so that maybe someone else can read this and know that sometimes when you write, you hate yourself for writing.

on the non-form form: the lyric essay.

It’s about time I introduce my love affair with a so-called sub-genre of nonfiction, that is the lyric essay. I studied the lyric essay my last year of college in an attempt to understand and write in this style. Even now, it is vague and undefined. You can find any number of descriptions and definitions floating around, but when put on the spot, I always answered by explaining that it is non-linear. It is somewhere between the land of the essay and the ocean of the poem.

I have spent the day reading critiques of the lyric essay. Blog posts arguing that it only produces a sort of shallow writing or it was formed from the anti-narrative movement of poets coming out of Iowa’s Workshop in the late 90s.  I have somewhat idealized this writing form in my mind. I can be honest - I’m naive. I come from an English program at a extremely small, intensely religious Midwestern school. When I stumbled across that issue of the Seneca Review that introduced the lyric essay, I became intoxicated with writing in a way that was experimental, unexpected. I jumped at the opportunity to push the bounds among my classmates and in the department.

I have continued to make attempts at writing in this “form” and have hit my fair share of walls. It’s loose and undefined. There’s a very fine line between work that is nonsense and work that is contrived, at least for me. So I’m going to try something new, an experiment in how I think of writing in my own head. I’m going to toss the idea of the lyric essay, at least for now. Just to try it out and see what happens.

processing & stereotypes.

I haven't been writing a lot lately. I have no excuses. When life is slow, no problem: I write. When life is fast, everything else feels more important. But all day, I have been telling myself, The things you spend your time on are the things you care about. So if I care about writing, I spend the time. It's important to me. So make the choice.

It's the old love-hate relationship with writing which means, usually, even when I want to write I don't really want to write. There's always some coercion that involves talking in my head and saying things like, Please just shut up and do it. And like anything, the longer I let it slip the harder it is to get back.

So I am catching up today. I will do freewriting tonight. I will devote at least half an hour to working on the essay I've drafted. But I will say this: even when my fingers get hung up, I keep on with the inspiration and the thoughts and my mind is still writing, even when my body isn't. I tell myself, over and over, that this is how I know I need to write. I can't turn any of it off: imagining stories about the people I see, absorbing every weird detail, sitting for stretches and thinking about big things, little things, anything. Getting wild and giddy and frantic over a beautiful word or a beautiful sentence. Reading a story out loud and getting tears in the corners of my eyes, not because I'm emotional, just because I'm overwhelmed with the language.

encouragement & discontent.

I haven't done any freewriting in 4 days. Apathy and discontent have a strange way of paralyzing a person.  The cold air is numbing my fingers. I have a headache. The world is full of bad things. Excuses, all.

I have been thinking today on goals set and goals achieved, on the path we are walking and what comes at the end. There are too many things to make sense of tonight. Too much hurt in the world, confusion in my own life and others. Too many questions that I don't have the power to answer. Too many people being born, too many people dying, too much suffering, too much greed.

I am searching hard for something lately. I am here. I am creating the life that I want to lead and every day it is the life I want and every day I am grateful, grateful, grateful. It's a story that lots of people have lived and lots of people have heard, it's not original or unique, but it's mine and that's why I care.

I have to remind myself of things often, the things that I believe and don't believe. That I am committed and capable.

The answer is to write, it is always to write. Just reminding myself.

I read an interesting piece by Langston Hughes yesterday - I hadn't seen it before. It's worth reading.  Salvation - Langston Hughes

hurricane dreams.

I have been writing. I have not been posting. Sometimes it just gets too wild to share, or too wild for me to share. Or something.

I dreamt last night of a hurricane, but I was in the house I lived in when I was 13 years old in Elmore, Minn. I was herding people into the basement, we were packing up food, I stole a sandwich and wrapped it in foil and tucked it into my shirt. And suddenly I realized: we're overreacting. It won't be that bad. Then I lost my sandwich and went out into the rain.

Dreaming of a hurricane: This dream is considered to be a warning, because it alludes to an impending crisis when all old opinions, ideals, values and beliefs are being shaken. The dream suggests that you need to start shaping something new within yourself to cope with this personal crisis.  (http://www.dream-land.info/)

I wrote for 5 hours on Friday, mostly straight through, with breaks for tea. At the end of it, 10 pages of Microsoft Word single-spaced madness, I felt like something other than human. Here is one piece:

I am very deep now. It is a dream and I am being chased, I am in danger, and I can’t cry out. I open my mouth and strain with every muscle in my chest and neck, but still no sound. I am pursued and still no sound. I keep pushing until *pop* I am awake and tangled in sweaty sheets and screaming in an empty black room, screaming alone, screaming for someone to save me.

Any writing, anything real, even anything shallow, means you must confront the blackest parts of humanity. This is art: even the most beautiful work has the deepest evil of the world in it. They exist together, as one. All it is the lighting. See: look behind the bushes in the sparkling sunlight and there a spider is consuming its prey alive, slowly, deliberately. Listen: ten bars after the song ends, there is war and death. You know they’re coming. Don’t look away. I know you want to and so do I – but there is nowhere else to look.

The feeling is this: much writing and suddenly I am in a very dark state. I am thinking too much, too hard about evil in the world and evil in myself. I am swimming in circles, swimming in the thoughts and as I type I feel my face scrunch up in fear and disgust, my nose wrinkles, my eyes shut. And so I pause for a moment, take a breath, make some tea. When I sit back down and raise my fingers to the keys, the feeling is pure revulsion. I don’t want to go back in it, I don’t want to go deeper and I don’t want to find more. It is too heavy and hot and dark inside – I want to stay out in the clean air. I wonder sometimes if this is me or if this is the writing.

At the end of 10 pages and 5 hours, I wrote the following:

I don’t want to write anymore. Only 30 more minutes. I hate it. I hate writing. I hate these words and my fingers that are typing them. I hate this brain that thinks writing is good and I hate the dull fluorescent lights and the computer humming and the hot sunlight blasting in through my window.  30 minutes. I can do it I can do it I can do it blankblankblankblankblankblankblankblankblankblankb

But there is still this: "Every day, I give myself the same encouragement, and every day, I need it again."

***

I read back through some of last week's writing today.  Yes, some of it is dark.  Ok, a lot of it.  Yes, I need to get it out of my brain and onto the page.  But I also need to come back out of it and remember the beautiful moments that make up my days.

For example, today:

-I walked briskly to work this morning and was not too hot, not too cold.  Amazing fall, I love you.

-At work I made an individual cup of coffee with my brand-new, bright-red, individual-coffee-cup-maker.  Awesome and happy.

-I sat at my desk in the afternoon and thought in my brain, Man-oh-man I wish I had a snack.  Not 30 seconds later, my co-worker walked in with a bag of cheesy-popcorn she didn't want.  Do you want the popcorn?  Yes.

-Still hungry this afternoon, I thought about pie and realized that my life's purpose might honestly be: Make pie.  Or: Eat butter.  It's a tough one.  I resolved to make more pies and eat more butter.

-I finally have money (so to speak) to go grocery shopping.  So I made a grocery list tonight that included more than: peanut butter, can of beans.  It included: expensive olives, expensive cheese.  Cool.

-After a leisurely walk home, I enjoyed a hot boozy apple cider and a roasted tomato, caramelized onion, balsamic quinoa salad for dinner alone in my quiet apartment.

-Then I watched the moonrise in Medford through some haze and low clouds. Over the scary wires and oversized spotlit American flag and above the din of cats fighting. But it was beautiful.

The point is just that life is good.  There is always good love, good people, good food -- and for that I am grateful.

be inspired.

Let me tell you how I wrote today. It wasn't pretty. I did some freewriting this morning about nothing really. Writing all over the surface, writing crap.  Later I tried to make some lists (which usually calms me down and orders my mind). Later this afternoon and evening, I did some more freewriting that got wild and dark in a major way. Untimed, chaotic, unsettling.

All day, I have been circling around something and haven't been able to hit it. Finally, I said to myself, Girl stop what you are doing. Just write what you have to say. Just say it. And that's how I arrived at this:

For the entire day, I have been trying to say something. It's unsettling. I have stared out the window and let my mind wander. Everything I write is abstract.

So I'm just going to nail it down, right now, right here. What I want to say is this: I am overwhelmed by a major change in my life, one that is fundamentally altering my relationship with my family. I feel lost, scared, alone. I am disappointed in myself and what feels like a lack of ambition and direction in life. But in the midst of these feelings, I am struck by the goodness of life. I am inspired by the things I am hearing, reading, seeing. I am inspired in a way I haven't felt in a long time. All I want is to capture this sharp tug of emotion and my own battle to let goodness and inspiration win out at the end of the day.

There are things that help. People who listen to me with open hearts and minds. Remembering to laugh. Taking the time to sit quietly and reflect. Eating peanut butter brownies.

So I am writing to inspire, and to inspire myself. The world is very big with possibility, full of hurt but also full of love. I hope the people I love know it; I hope I say it often enough.

I was reminded today of the importance of noting things, appreciating them, marking how they inspire you. Keeping a light heart in the heavy moments. I make lists of these things (in disturbingly organized Gmail drafts - am I the only one who uses email drafts as a personal filing system?) Here are some to share for today.

Inspired List, 21sep2011.
-anything from this shop, but especially this mason jar chandelier.
-this post about being happy.
-this pinterest board and my food-loving friends.
-these knitted cowls -- first fall project?
-these words: What about giving more. Flexing more. Letting more go. Leaving a comment instead of reading and clicking away. Saying hi. Sending unexpected mail. Not worrying about the fact that other people are also doing amazing work (some of which might even, by unfortunate design or kind of cool coincidence, resemble yours). What about making time to ask how someone is. What about making space for someone whose work you don’t think gets enough attention. What about being a little braver, just a little. What about integrity. What about not joining in if you don’t like something, or speaking your piece if you do. What about that. I’m not saying you have to do these things. Just asking what might happen if you did.


Be inspired.  Trust people.  Share love.  Live deeply.