On Creative Want
I have been ruminating even more than usual on alienation. I find myself often thinking that people are the great difficulty of my life. I don’t wish them to be. I have spent years fighting this alienation, but I’m trying now to accept that it is fundamental to me. I think alienation, as much as desire, shapes me both as an artist and a queer person. In this way I hope I can make it my friend.
When I am working through something, I google incredibly basic questions to make sure I understand what I’m feeling. This week it was, “What is shame?” I struggle with rejection sensitivity and feel related shame often, despite that I’m not remotely ashamed of who I am. I am self-aware and self-assured. I feel shame most when I ask others to accommodate who I am. This is an important distinction that feels very challenging to communicate to others. I simply wish everyone automatically understood me as I understand myself. Perfectly normal, highly reasonable.
People are the great difficulty of my life, or people’s judgment is the great difficulty of my life, or people’s perceptions are the great difficulties of my life. I know who I am. It is convincing others to find me acceptable by explaining myself that spawns this crushing shame. There is an implied rejection in this act that I can’t seem to get around. I wish I was—at times, have been—above it all, uncaring about how people feel about me. But there are people I do need acceptance from for my life to feel tenable in its current form.
This desire is vulnerable. And it is desire: I desire acceptance. I desire to fight less hard against my feelings of alienation. In my endless rumination on this, I’ve found this desire is fundamentally self-centred. Not necessarily selfish, but something that centres me without any consideration of the other. People are the great difficulty of my life—because I can’t control them. This is wonderful in ways. Among other things, it means no one can control me. So this desire has become a peace-making endeavour: my sense of alienation is a signal that I am individual, that I do not conform, that I am not controlled—that I am, in this sense, free.
I want this, too: to be myself on my terms.
And—I want acceptance.
I think it is only possible to have both at once if one is very lucky. I think it is normal not to have both, and to feel a tension between them.
I also think it is good, even important, to want it all anyway.
Earlier this week, K.M. Fajardo sent out a newsletter about her debut week. In the midst of myriad other feelings, she found herself devastated to learn her novel, Local Heavens, didn’t list for reasons out of her control. Through pride and excitement and countless other feelings, she also felt heartbreak. While she was grappling with this, a friend wrote to her in a text message: “you are entitled to want it all.”
As we come up to the month formerly known as NaNoWriMo, I found this quite galvanizing. I’ve grappled for months and years with trying to write fiction around the heady combination of a writing-heavy job and my debilitating fear of failure. I still badly want to write. I still call myself a writer. I still identify writing as my chief ambition, even as I fail to consistently do it. I do have something of a habit in place where I read or plan or edit an average of twice a week, which is a tremendous victory. It is also not writing. I think writing looks like different things; I also think writing looks like exactly one thing.
I want nothing more than to write. But I also want to excel at my job, which requires me to show up with fresh writing chops. I need to make sure I’m getting out of the house. I want to see the people I feel alienated from in case eventually I don’t. I want to spend quality time with my partner, who broadens my horizons and challenges me in the best ways. I’m trying to make exercise a major part of my life as I enter middle age. I have a new responsibility in the shape of an infant goddaughter. My father is aging. Everyone is aging. The world is ending. Time is short and I want to live and write and work, to honour myself and show up for others.
We can’t have it all. But we’re entitled to want it all.
And so I’m pleased to announce I’m doing a stupid little baby version of nanowrimo in the interest of allowing myself to want it all, and to kick my own ass into honouring myself.
I’m not trying to get 1,667 words a day; I’ve learned my lesson about that. I just want to sit down to my projects every day for a month or so. I want to care about writing daily and for it to matter to me daily. This is within my power, especially with a degree of support. A friend is running a little challenge; a favourite podcast is gonna make unhinged content about it; my partner’s out of town for almost two weeks in the middle of it; and the death of the NaNo organization has successfully shifted the paradigm away from the wordcount and enabled me to set my own goal.
Writing daily and my day job may be incompatible things, but there’s one way to find out. If all I learn out of this are the borders of my conflicting desires, then I will have information I need to prioritize one and make the other my friend.