Writing myself a sanctuary when I need it
Hello, friend.
I’ve written stories since I was tiny. I remember looking at my toes poking out of the bubbles in the bath when I was really young, pre-kindergarten, and imagining each one as a person with its own name and life and story. It’s what my brain does. It’s why I went to college for it.
But for years and years, I said that I didn’t create while tired, angry, sad, or otherwise upset. The dishes have to be done, I said, and the floor swept, and nothing terrible happening. That’s when I can write.
I’m not sure now if that was never true or if it just stopped being true by mid-2020.
In the earliest part of the panera, I curled up in bed and watched hours of Skillshare videos. French artists with soothing voices doing wondrous things with polymer clay, watercolor lessons, ink and stamps and all the media I always loved and all the media I’d never tried. Sometimes I laid on my side in bed, the laptop on its side too, just taking in the soothing presence of people making beautiful things with pleasant voiceovers. I did that and told myself that there was still beauty and joy, even if most of my exposure to it at that point was through craft tutorials as most of us hid from each other at home, doors closed tight.
Then in May 2020, I started writing, and I learned to hide in my art in a way I hadn’t done since I was a teenager and stuck in a life I knew I didn’t want.
My therapist told me a few months ago that she was curious if my volume of writing would keep up once things got less shitty. “ME TOO,” I said. But it did! Writing remained a sanctuary, but even on days when I didn’t need one, I still wrote and wrote and wrote.
It became a sanctuary again in recent weeks. I’ll spare you the details, but I’ve spent time in two pet ERs, learned all about veterinary hospitals and overnight stays for observation, and been very grateful for my emergency funds. I write this with my cat back next to me where she belongs. Pink skin with velvety white traced over it emerges on her side and her neck in a way that it doesn’t usually; another patch on her stomach has had a couple weeks to grow in since an ultrasound. We have a lot of new drugs and have found stability. And the last two days have been excruciating.
But I wrote. Or, more specifically, I edited. I’m in the starting phase, the pen-on-printout, ideas-on-post-its phase, of the second draft of a novella I wrote in June and July. It’s lighter, lots of feelings, with a magic system I’m still devising. And for the last two days, when I was stressed out to the point of mild aphasia, when I could feel my brain acting differently than usual, I could still return to it and have good ideas. Even when my brain had become sluggish with stress, taking a second or two more to understand things than usual, I could still make new connections on this story. A character’s motivations, how a secondary character should work, the particulars of this fantasy-inflected version of the Bay Area I’m writing. Everything else felt terrible, and I cried so easily, but I could sit with my fancy Japanese pen and see something come together. I could do so little to fix things in my real life, mostly slapping down a credit card and then going home to wait things out, but I could do this.
God, I’m grateful.
Turns out I prefer writing when the sink is empty and clean, and the cat litter outside the bathroom is vacuumed up, and there’s food in the fridge, and my small cat purrs by my side, and my mind isn’t warped by pre-grief… but if I can’t do that, I’ll make do with what’s available. I hope you have a good place to hide on bad days too, a warm and soft little sanctuary that gives you a moment without all the weight on your shoulders.
Here are some things I’ve written or liked.
- Recollecting life on the edge of the prairie: Portraits of queer life and landscape in rural Washington, a thoughtful, dreamy, and very affecting meditation on sadness, triumph, and finding space for all kinds of people, and not only in the dense, urban places we expect it.
- Caveman: An Interview with Michel Siffre dives into the history of the man who’s likely done more experimentation than anyone else around time isolation and how bodily rhythms are affected by sunshine and other external stimuli.
- “Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills is so good it made my skin crawl.
This is one of the first couple of pictures I took after Susie got home from the pet hospital. I sent it to my neighbor, who’d been keeping tabs on the whole ordeal. “Great news,” he wrote back, “but when are they sending her head?”
Normal has never been something I sought, but sometimes it’s the sweetest thing of all.