Week 41

At the start of the year, I thought I would try writing one essay a week for 52 weeks. The essay part of that goal fell apart pretty fast. Then, slowly, the once-a-week part developed cracks. Still, I kept at it—with some combined weeks—but it never really felt like it recovered once it devolved into journal-style entries. It’s hard to do something over the course of a year—and this wasn’t even a daily thing!—which really puts into perspective the effort of people who successfully finish those I-did-something-for-a-year projects. Still, I think it was good for me to try, even just as an excuse to exercise some writing muscles.

I’m mentioning this because I’ve realized I no longer wish to continue the weekly cadence. It was good when I was kind of subtly pressuring myself to show up every week—and it did help—but I no longer want to think of pressure. I’ll still try to sit down every Sunday to work on something, but it’ll come when it has to, I suppose. And if it doesn’t—-well, I won’t worry about it too much.

These days, I measure the weight of my difficulties against the misfortunes of others. A friend’s mother passes away after a long struggle. Another friend’s father passes away—the fourth or fifth death in their family just this year. A tiny malignant tumour is randomly found in my own mother, changing the trajectory of multiple lives overnight. Suddenly, my issues don’t seem like issues. The scales have shifted; gravity is different in this new world I inhabit, and you realise the cruelty of fate is that you can’t tip them one way or another. Hard to say where things go from here, but all I can do is stay positive and keep spirits high—even when I don’t personally feel it. You realise you’re suddenly at that age where you and your friends’ parents are all aging faster with each passing day. You think, shit is on hard mode now. You think, you’re supposed to be a grown-up now.

It’s been a strange month—enjoying a vacation in Portugal while carrying so much weight. Still, finding joy and laughter and life and people to be grateful for, always. I’ve found that one can still enjoy life even in the great sadness of death and disaster. I don’t use that idea lightly—-it’s not denial but an acceptance of both great life and tragedy. There’s a saying that to feel joy—to really, truly feel it—one must also feel great sadness. We don’t know happiness until we know pain; we don’t know love until we know grief. I think this is also true in reverse: to know one’s own sadness, one must have been intimately aware of their happiness as well. From joy, soon comes sadness.

I am far from my writing, from what I want to say—and this is one of the reasons I want to drop the pressure of the weekly cadence. I think even that previous sentence sounds pretentious. Writing detaches me from my lived experience. When I write something, I lose it. I’ve felt this with my dreams, a lot. In college, I used to have some recurring dreams, but when I started writing each of them down, they stopped showing up. I think this is also why therapists often suggest writing down trauma in detail: on some physiological level, it’s a way for the body to let go of the experience. In college, when I still thought of myself as a writer and everything had the potential to be a story, I often wondered if the tradeoff was worth it.

Gore Vidal once wrote about Tennessee Williams that he was almost compulsively driven to write because it helped him live his experience—that he only truly lived it fully after he had written it down. William’s examination of his lived experience through writing is obviously the complete opposite of me (of which, I’m sure, there is no doubt). I could have a nightmare that would recur with slight variations in its visuals, but if I wrote about it, it would cease to show up. For years, I carried around imagery in my head—short stories, characters—that I refused to write down because I knew that if I did, I’d lose them. So I let them simmer instead in my head. The more I refrained from writing, the more they kept coming back. Ultimately, despite all that marination, they never made it onto paper.

I want to slow down and appreciate more—to let go, a bit, of the need to do things the “right way”; to do good work; to take more analog photos, with no feedback and only trust in the process. To trust process more, to trust others more. It’s unclear where that leads me with this project, but I haven’t closed the curtains on it just yet. The movie project continues to go strong, as does Desi Dispatch, and I’m debating even starting a shorter (30-day) project next month. When it feels like the scales tip heavily toward heartache, there’s a comfort in the simple act of just showing up.

🥘 Food

• Had a lot of great food in Portugal with very little evidence to show for it.

📚 Reading

• The Double, José Saramago
• And so I feel like I’m watching something I loved die in my arms and staring blankly. I find myself in this liminal space where something old is dying and something new is being born, but neck deep in the stark, sullen reality that both death and birth are disorienting. And intensely painful.
• Going too fast for myself I missed
  more than I think I can remember

💿 Listening

• The Wind - Yusuf / Cat Stevens
• Cage the Songbird - The Low Anthem