a lesson i am slowly learning
In what can only be described as inevitable irony, my newsletter is accumulating an impressive number of drafts of its own. I tried writing two letters between December 5th and now, but they turned out to be embarrassingly personal.
Our personal lives present a wellspring of ideas for any artistic work/experiment. Even if we are not actively drawing inspiration from our lives, our work constantly is informed by the happenings around us. As abundant as the muse might seem when she comes from your own life, sharing it with the world is a different story.
Reading the unsent letters now, I can pick out my botched attempts at self-censoring. I tried to morph the painful specifics to not give away too many revealing details and blend them into a relatable human experience. But I ended up with an incomplete and inauthentic narrative that came off more angsty than I intended. I am still in the thick of it and processing everything happening to and around me, so it feels impossible to forego the details when I write about it.
At my most creative, I am jotting down notes, saving images and texts I find online, and documenting tiny details about the people around me. My whole life I have operated with the quiet confidence that everything I experience (or at least the ones that are significant enough) will come up in my writing.
Sometimes I wonder if I’d feel better if I didn’t have this compulsive urge to document life as it happened. Isn’t living and getting through life enough? What is this added self-imposed pressure to weave a narrative out of everything that was happening? This is not to say that I don’t enjoy the exercise. Nothing beats the voyeuristic thrill of going through my old notes from when I was either hysterically upset or happy. But there is no ignoring this ulterior motive/gnawing necessity I have for my life to be purposeful, to amount to something. To whom? To myself? To my internalized parental/societal expectations? To my readers? I don’t know. It just needs to be useful.
Writing is an excellent coping mechanism. It is an anchor against time passing - to know that I did something, that I wasn’t just floating through life like a vegetable. It is a healthy outlet, no doubt, but it is also hard to let go of the feeling that everything - every struggle, every pain - will eventually lead to something only if I could make something out of it. Every pain and fear needs to have a form. Otherwise, how do I know what I am up against? An action as simple as writing down I feel unsafe in my body when I am panicking has strength. It is me being aware, and this awareness helps wrestle (some) control back from my anxiety.
However, this also has me justifying to myself that if I could just be patient for another day, another week, another month, or another year, my time in pain today will pay off. I wrote about this earlier, and I feel like I know (slightly) better now, but I suspect that deep down, my heart is still holding on to this belief that every shitty thing happening right now is somehow a downpayment for joy and periods of calm to come in future.
But life is not as simple as saving the tastiest things on my plate for the last. This is setting myself up for failure, I realize. I try my hardest to intersperse this realization with action, and this action with forgiveness when I inevitably lose myself in self-doubt again.
Writing about it is the gentlest way I can remind myself that deferring happiness is never a good idea. Your day today is worth as much as your day tomorrow. Patience and preparation can be good, but pledging your present in the service of a distant future is a gamble.