Hello friends far and wide,
I was supposed to be heading back to the States this coming week, but due to some dumb expat-related admin, I’ve had to postpone indefinitely. There’s not much of an upside to this, other than the fact that my precious, creature-comfort routines live to thrive undisrupted in their smallness for another few months. So, yay?
I feel like I should mention that I’ve been a bit wishy-washy on writing these letters lately, mostly because I’ve been pre-occupied with my other writing projects. I must admit I’m beginning to think of this as diminishing returns. On one hand, it’s obviously a good practice for me to keep up with a weekly(ish) deadline, and with the underlying goal (hope? fantasy?) that I’m trying to build some kind of platform here, however meager the attempt. But in four years, it hasn’t really gone anywhere, and I have to ask myself whether or not the time is better spent towards other activities. I don’t know. I have a tendency to want to do all the things, and I’m not great at prioritizing.
Who wants to step up with a reason why I should or shouldn’t continue this little project? I’m not fishing for any kind of compliments here, I genuinely want some advice on whether I’m aiming at the right target here. Your perspective means a lot to me.
With love from the nether-lands,
Heather
Take all my money, Alessandro Michele.
Every morning, I get a notification from an astrology app. It's kind of like a digital fortune cookie, hit or miss, depending, perhaps, on how receptive you happen to be feeling at the moment. It means something when it means something. Today, it meant something:
"Focusing on feeling comfortable is the fastest way to feel miserable."
I've spent the past week or so feeling under the weather, with symptoms that suggest I'm presenting with a breakthrough case of writer's block. It's not that I can't write; I still write every single day. I diligently scribble my daily morning pages. I'm doing lots of writing around my writing, surrounded by multiple notebooks which rain a flurry of neon Post-its – the cheap shitty kind that don't stick to anything – as I lug them from room to room. I'm writing for an actual living now, which may be how I picked up this virus in the first place.
I recognize in this moment all the nefarious ways this exact feeling has, in the past, nudged me over a tipping point, pushing me to pivot instead of persevere. It's the discomfort that comes from feeling trapped in the liminal space between ambition and ability, between expectations and reality, as one of my writing group peers wrote this week.
But I'm standing my ground. Beating the drum of positive self-talk, I write over and over about hope, about practice and perfectionism, all while looking squarely in the mirror and trying to get myself amped up for the big game.
High achievers have high expectations, an ouroboros that chases our sense of self confidence in perpetuity. It's the anxious treadmill of motivation and disappointment that fuels and depletes, fuels and depletes. Should I be mad at this chain, should I try to break it? Should I lower my expectations? And what good would that serve?
The wall of writer's block that I've been ramming into is the feeling that I have no idea what I'm doing. Of course, I do what I always do, and try to learn my way forward with books and workshops and an endless variety of tools downloaded from the internet for the exchange of my precious email address. I've become obsessed with studying form, convinced that if I find the right container, my unruly thoughts will conform to its shape, and the narrative will simply fall into place. I've been cramming the square pegs of my ideas into the round holes of various literary devices; outlines, grids, pyramids, braids, spirals, and nothing seems to fit. The more I study how stories work, the less I feel able to write my own.
In the introduction to his formidable anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay, author and renowned essayist Phillip Lopate writes that, "To essay (essai) is to attempt, to test, to make a run at something without knowing whether you are going to succeed." That's essentially how I feel every time I sit down to write this letter. There's maybe a glimmer of an idea as a starting point, but I rarely have any idea where it will lead. I figure I'll know it when I see it. Not always so, as I am sure you are aware.
But I make a go of it nonetheless, following, as Lopate says, "the clue of [my] ignorance through the maze." What Lopate, who was riffing on Michel de Montaigne's use of the term "essai" in his own work is suggesting is that the essay represents a "mode of being," a kind of way of making things – and ourselves – up as we go along. The personal essay is a form that allows our writing to function with freedom, to let our thoughts wander with the reasonable belief that we'll find our way to a destination, "adept at interrogating [our] own ignorance."
Reading this the other day, it finally clicked, like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz", when she learns she's had the ability to get back to Kansas the whole time. Well, first I had a small existential breakdown and wrote a slightly manic email to my writing coach. I'd been so focused, as I often am, on seeking comfort in conventions – if I just follow this template, if I just complete this course – that I'd made myself utterly miserable, convinced that I didn't know how to write what I want to write. But I do. Maybe not with quite as much sophistication or nuanced insight as my ambition imposes, but I've had the ability the whole time, and these letters are my ruby slippers. Click, click, click. There's no place like home.
She writes all too well…
Yeah, I’m a Swiftie now, so what?