I've been thinking a lot about my writing process lately - if one can call almost complete avoidance a process. There was a phase about three years ago when I first started writing - it was not a painful, difficult thing like it is now. It was something natural and that I felt I knew well. I've tried (or maybe more like... considered) most all tactics suggested to me by those with similar challenges; comfortingly, that basically includes all other writers. There is the oddly named ‘pomodoro’ method, of breaking up your time in 25 minutes a day, and using one for writing. I've received a step by step handout on ‘How to Sit in a Chair’ which surprisingly, was helpful, as sometimes the first step can lead to the second, and so on. There are morning pages, writing three (or ten, or twenty, depending on who you ask) pages as soon as you begin your day, writing every day no matter the amount, shutting yourself in a room like Stephen King recommends, or tried and tested workbooks like The Artist's Way. Elizabeth Gilbert, who famously wrote Eat, Pray, Love nobly suggests to make friends with fear, let it do what it exists to do rather than, well, fear it. Thank it for doing its job, give it love, and take it along to the inevitably frightening and sometimes paralyzing beginning of a creative process: as a partner rather than a hinderance.
None of these things have worked for me. I think a lot about things that ‘don't work’ and worry (endlessly) that they would if I pushed harder, tried harder, was less lazy, was braver. This very well might be true for this example, and I do not intend on being otherwise convinced, but for now I will try what does work. There are three things that truly drive me to write: one is being forced, or perhaps strongly encouraged - a workshop or class that I am taking with frequent deadlines which I will doubtlessly leave for the last minute and stew painfully in the pressure until somehow there are two thousand words on the page. Usually late, but there. The other, is reading. Reading was always a haven and a backbone in my life, but it became something I lost in the overwhelming undertaking of living with depression. I couldn't concentrate, had no attention span for anything, dreaded the unknown, even something as small as a television show or movie I hadn't seen, only repeats would be manageable. I couldn't face a book, and never allowed myself to start slow and read something easy and comforting. To my immense and indescribable relief, after four years of endless false starts I both slowly and suddenly got it back late last year. Today I read with almost the exact same pleasure and ferocity I had until I turned 30. But alas, I digress; the point is reading is a pre-game, a warm up for writing. Reading is the biggest turn on for remembering the power of words and the urge to create a story and a connection with a reader. So, that's coming along.
Lastly, to my complete lack of surprise but mild exasperation, the thing that makes me most able to write is to have an audience. It certainly is to connect with those reading my work, to hopefully share experiences and mindsets others have or have had, perhaps bringing them some comfort in their own fears or shame. It's also absolutely to purge my own thoughts from, as my psychiatrist calls it, my hot, fast, bouncy brain. But mostly it's for encouragement. It's a fact I am starting to get very comfortable with admitting, my need for reassurance. The confirmation I am seen and felt. That here, or there, is where I can do better. That my thoughts and actions and in this case, words, are finding their place somewhere. That they will bounce back to me, and in the best case scenario, causing some delight and good before they do.
So that brings us here, to a newsletter I have considered starting for at least a year, more like three, and that sat open, blank and waiting on my desktop for two weeks. Here it goes, out into the void. Or, more like, out into the cushy laps of the most caring and encouraging people in my life. The point of this will be to get words on the page, to share updates and feelings I am terrible at sharing on video calls (or really any other medium), and sharing writing bursts I've managed to get down in journals, in a class or in angsty scrawls on my left arm.
For a few weeks now, I have a mason jar where I am delightedly growing scallions on my kitchen counter. This is something that at some point I knew was a thing I could do - that particularly with my love of using scallions on any dish, I did not need to keep buying them; they could just grow right in my kitchen with just a little bit of water, to the point of them becoming unruly, stretching to reach the underside of the cabinets. I tried to remember when I forgot this, how that happened, why there is a fact I used to know, a thing I used to do that somehow just left my mind. I was never able to figure it out. I remember knowing it once, I remember no longer knowing it, and I remember now, knowing it again.
With that I'll leave you with a writing prompt I had in a class a few weeks back on ‘Good food and goodbyes’:
We leased a Jeep and drove across the country. We drove 17 thousand miles in four months, three thousand under the maximum allowed distance for the two year lease. We both had, albeit mostly silently, resigned to the fact that all the plans we had made, boasted about, even, for our life together would never come to be. That between his bipolar and my depression, the active third and fourth participants in our relationship, we'd only continue to wear down the admiration that once lit us both up. So we did what got us there in the first place and embarked on an ill-advised adventure, this time in the first thirty days of a global health pandemic. We went from New York City to upstate New York, to a navy blue cabin with white window trim and fairy lights wrapped around the back porch, down a winding road where you could hear the river. We adopted a dog near a farm where we slept in a tee pee and drank tequila with the owner as baby chicks squeaked under a red light. Drove to Michigan where I learned the lake was like the ocean, wore masks and gloves in Chicago and still ate our favorite burger in the dog hair filled car. Iowa to Kansas City to Boulder for the summer where the Rockies shone no matter the weather. I saw the Grand Canyon, the national parks of Utah, the road where Forrest Gump ran, our Great Dane panting in the heat behind me in the photo where I smile and hold my hat onto my head, leaning against the wind. We looped back through the Southern coast and by the time we wound up back in New York we were more in love than when we left and more sure of the impossibility of our future as ever.
Months later, on the day Biden won, we dug through storage in the Bronx, climbing brown boxes like a mountainside to salvage what we needed to rebuild our own individual lives, he asked me ‘Do you remember the day you first tried a Wawa sub on a highway in Arizona?’
‘Sure.’ I smiled.
‘That was a good day.’
Later, we discovered that our trip racked up an unspeakable debt in tolls and penalties, and that Mik, for all his horse riding and bucolic new life, continued to be a dick.