lacuna
Hi, sorry, it was August, and I wasn't writing. Or I was writing novels and not much else. Or I don't know what's been going on, but it hasn't resolved itself into anything remotely resembling a personal essay, or even much of an email.
It's weird. It shouldn't be weird, but it is. Lots of people don't-write about themselves all the time! Most of their lives, even! But I do, and so when I don't, it gets to be this big weird like identity question: when I stop wanting to write about myself once a week am I different person, or just the same person in a different circumstance, in which case I will go back to feeling like the other kind of person again at some point, probably?? (History suggests that this is the case, despite the fact that whichever mode I'm in always feels certain and basically eternal.)
The longest period of not-writing I've ever gone through was a Connecticut winter. I had just destroyed my own heart to keep D. from doing it for me. I had been in love with him for years, at that point, and in the aftermath I discovered that everything I'd written during that period-- Tumblr posts, mostly, then-- I had written with the quiet, vain hope that he would read.
I had written to him instead of talking to him. Once I had decided we weren't going to talk anymore, I found myself surrounded by an unexpected blank: cut to vast silence. The world was covered in snow and slick with ice. I had no friends in New Haven. I carved days into sets of hours and tried fruitlessly to fill them.
I don't remember how it ended. I just know that it did. When I was dating S he asked me not to write about him and I said I couldn't make any promises, but it occurs to me now that it must have been a relief: that he wanted nothing to do with that part of my life and self. That I was going to get to keep my writing inviolate, so that when he broke my heart (which he did, eventually) it wouldn't feel quite so much like he'd crushed up my entire body along with it.
When I was sick I wrote all the time. I think maybe people thought it was "brave" to be open about how unwell I was, or at least vulnerable, but in fact it was just necessary. A thing I have never been able to convey correctly, I don't think, is how depression's sadness turns psychotic, makes the walls melt and the world distort, and I felt hazy and porous and uncertain and so, so crazy. I was just trying to extrude some of it: to turn feelings into words, to put them on a page or a screen, to transform them into something legible and manipulable and sensical. To siphon off some of my sickness, and put it into an arena where I still had control.
Now I'm well again, relatively, and it would be much less embarrassing to write about how I am and what I'm up to, but I can't bring myself to do it. Being well again means understanding boundaries: feeling a distinct line between my private life and the one I live in public on the internet. I've been on Twitter less, too; I just have fewer general interest jokes these days. I am enjoying the same things (reading, teaching, the ocean, boxing, my goddaughter, etcetera) but also I am enjoying not having to do anything with the experience of them. Just walking through these long, hot days; making my life and not much else, for a little while, at least.
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It's also been slump-y work-wise because, you know, August. A while ago I wrote about Claudette Zepeda-Wilkins and her matriarchal restaurant, Los Jardines, in San Diego, and that was very fun.
In these gaps in work busyness I have made a commitment to do something every week until midterms to help Democrats get elected on November 6th. So far, this has included phone banking at Planned Parenthood and canvassing for Katie Hill and writing postcards to potential Arizona voters with Sister District. It's been as soothing as anything is, and I highly recommend making your own schedule and finding your own outlets, so that when Twitter is making you think you might puke from rage you can say, I have decided how I'm going to engage with this moment and rage-pukes are not it, and put the phone down and save your energy for the door-knocking, or whatever it is.
On that note, here is a poem my mother read me while she was making dinner for the family the other day:
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
-Marge Piercy, To Be of Use