Dre asked me, “How’s the writing project going?”
Writers love to get a question phrased just this way: as if their writing project were a real entity that could be going, as opposed to a phantasmagoric pipe dream or a nightmare of blocked hours spent googling popstars and writing grocery lists.
“Actually, it’s not going that well,” I admitted. “I’m back in therapy. It’s taking a lot of head-space right now. I haven’t figured out how to balance them both.”
“You can take a sabbatical,” suggested Dre.
“From therapy?” I said hopefully.
“NO!” yelled Dre. Her eyes bugged out of her face and her head spun around as she bellowed, “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE DON’T STOP GOING TO THERAPY!”
Maybe that’s not exactly how the conversation went. It’s possible that she just said, “Take a little break from the writing project.” But, you know, that’s not what I heard.
***
A lot of people, including the author Walter Mosley and every single writing teacher I’ve ever heard of, advise that the only way to be a successful writer is to write every day. They can’t all be wrong. There is a certain reason to the advice. The more you write, the more you write, and the more often you are writing the more you are writing all the time. As the World Traveller says, when you enter the writing life you begin “thinking in sentences.”
Here’s where the issue of head-space comes up. Because, for example, if you’ve entered a therapy that invites you to ponder the narrative of your life as if it were a text rich in nuance, portent and innuendo, and you have some hope of earning a living and keeping a household from decrepitude and starvation, and you are also being interrupted every ten minutes by an eight-year old superhero hell-bent on world domination, there is very little daily space for thinking in sentences.
A few months back, talking to a friend without children, I mentioned the challenge of finding adequate logistical space—at that time meaning simply available hours—for my writing practice. She said, “What about all that time when Small and Sweetie are at school and work?” I felt profoundly invisible when I had to point out that those are the hours during which I go to work too.
***
When Small was very small I heard the actress Annette Benning interviewed. Benning doesn’t impress me that much: she is married to Warren Beatty, which I think shows remarkable lack of judgment, and she portrayed the most annoying lesbian in the world without so much as a frisson of butch energy or girl-girl chemistry, which royally peeved me. But she is an artist with four children. Though I don’t recall her exact words, she basically said that balance is bullshit. You can’t be an artist without throwing yourself into your craft one-hundred and ten percent. And you can’t throw yourself into anything one-hundred and ten percent if you have to pull out of it at the end of the day, go home to wipe butts and read bed-time stories. Her solution as a working mama artist was to pick few and compelling projects and commit to them entirely, trusting that her family was safe and whole during her brief stints of absolute absence.
I return to this wisdom again and again to help me understand why it’s nigh on impossible for me to get up at five am to write. Not because I can’t get up—I do—and not because I can’t do great work at that hour—I can. But because the re-entry into family life is so wrenching, pulling myself from the depths of the creative mind to meet the pattering feet of my waking family, silencing the sentences of my thoughts to find the clean laundry, that I can’t put myself through it. The lurch from the deep quiet of my writing mind to ordinary family discourse is so painful that it casts a pall over the next day’s wakeup, so that each subsequent attempt at daily effort carries the association of the last session’s inevitable and disastrous end. What’s more, the transition puts me into such a place of sputtering rage and frustration I become unwilling put my family through it. It would be kinder to them if I just left for a months-long writing sabatical.
If only it wouldn’t interrupt my therapy.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
mindbodymama: Unstuck
It’s the nature of things to get rutty, like it’s the nature of groups to intone in droning harmony “we’vealreadytriedthat” at the suggestion of innovation. Maybe it starts as a groove or a rhythm that winds down so slowly and over so much time that no one notices when the music stops. Or maybe it’s a problem that’s hiding in plain sight from which we all agree to avert our eyes.
It’s hard to know exactly when the tipping point occurs, beyond which the problem you’d previously agreed not to see takes sharper and sharper focus. It’s hard to know when the things that don’t set right begin to chafe, and when that chafing moves you from irritation to action.
It’s been a fall of unsticking around here, inside and outside, actual and metaphorical. I discovered it is possible to take action both suddenly and finally: finally, after eight years of procrastination, I suddenly unstuck thirteen loathesome carpet treads and repainted my front stairs. Finally, thirteen years after I bought it at a Goodwill on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, I suddenly refinished my nightstand and installed darling little drawer pulls. Finally, eight years after our daughter was born, Sweetie and I suddenly had a weekend getaway. Finally, after two years of using our bedroom for overflow storage, I suddenly purged the crap and rearranged the furniture to give us the calm retreat beloved of the shelter mags.
Finally, I suddenly finished a quilt for Small. Finally, I suddenly cleaned all the closets. Finally, I suddenly hung the full length mirror.
It is so satisfying when a problem visibly and manifestly shifts. Where once was clutter and now a lonely dust bunny rolls along. Where once I stared at every random sentimental item ever handed me and now a line of crisp white boxes close their lids on my relentless memories. This is order I created. It is excellent to be done, to have made the changes needed to align things just the way I want them.
What’s hard is the space between the moment of commitment to action and the resolution. Sometimes you are lucky and the carpet squares come up, the paint goes down, and barely an hour has passed on the clock. Those are the times you laugh at yourself for tolerating so long anything so easily repaired.
But other times the first step is dragging everything out of the closet. The boxes and bags and hangers and improbable scraps of tinfoil and string and construction paper pile up in the room and the upstairs landing. There are whole parts of that day and lots of other days when you wonder why you ever began this behemoth of a project. There are times that you work from morning and it seems even worse at bedtime.
And then there are projects like the kitchen that are really and truly happening even as they appear completely the same. Here I am washing dishes by hand in the 1940s enamel sink just as I have every day since I bought this house. But I shifted several hundred dollars into the kitchen fund on my magic spreadsheet today. I Googled “Ply-boo” and said it out loud more than once because it makes me giggle. I called the Kitchen Man and got a list of showrooms to visit. Everything seems the same. But finally, suddenly, something is unstuck.
In truth I am washing these dishes in a completely different kitchen. It’s hard to remember because my back still hurts, I am bored, and my knuckles in the steaming water are raw and chafed. It’s hard to appreciate this shift as much as the clean white stairs. But the change is coming. It’s already here.
In truth, Laura Bass said it better than any of this:
Change
This is where I yank the old roots
from my chest, like the tomatoes
we let grow until December, stalks
thick as saplings.
This is the moment when the ancient fears
race like thoroughbreds, asking for more
and more rein. And I, the driver,
for some reason they know nothing of
strain to hold them back.
Terror grips me like a virus
and I sweat, fevered,
trying to burn it out.
This feat is so invisible. All you can see
is a woman going about her ordinary day,
drinking tea, taking herself to the movies,
reading in bed. If victorious
I will look exactly the same.
Yet I am hoisting a car from mud ruts
half a centry deep. I am hacking
a clearing through the fallen slash
of my heart. Without laser precision,
with only the primitive knife of need, I cut
and splice the circuitry of my brain.
I change.
It’s hard to know exactly when the tipping point occurs, beyond which the problem you’d previously agreed not to see takes sharper and sharper focus. It’s hard to know when the things that don’t set right begin to chafe, and when that chafing moves you from irritation to action.
It’s been a fall of unsticking around here, inside and outside, actual and metaphorical. I discovered it is possible to take action both suddenly and finally: finally, after eight years of procrastination, I suddenly unstuck thirteen loathesome carpet treads and repainted my front stairs. Finally, thirteen years after I bought it at a Goodwill on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, I suddenly refinished my nightstand and installed darling little drawer pulls. Finally, eight years after our daughter was born, Sweetie and I suddenly had a weekend getaway. Finally, after two years of using our bedroom for overflow storage, I suddenly purged the crap and rearranged the furniture to give us the calm retreat beloved of the shelter mags.
Finally, I suddenly finished a quilt for Small. Finally, I suddenly cleaned all the closets. Finally, I suddenly hung the full length mirror.
It is so satisfying when a problem visibly and manifestly shifts. Where once was clutter and now a lonely dust bunny rolls along. Where once I stared at every random sentimental item ever handed me and now a line of crisp white boxes close their lids on my relentless memories. This is order I created. It is excellent to be done, to have made the changes needed to align things just the way I want them.
What’s hard is the space between the moment of commitment to action and the resolution. Sometimes you are lucky and the carpet squares come up, the paint goes down, and barely an hour has passed on the clock. Those are the times you laugh at yourself for tolerating so long anything so easily repaired.
But other times the first step is dragging everything out of the closet. The boxes and bags and hangers and improbable scraps of tinfoil and string and construction paper pile up in the room and the upstairs landing. There are whole parts of that day and lots of other days when you wonder why you ever began this behemoth of a project. There are times that you work from morning and it seems even worse at bedtime.
And then there are projects like the kitchen that are really and truly happening even as they appear completely the same. Here I am washing dishes by hand in the 1940s enamel sink just as I have every day since I bought this house. But I shifted several hundred dollars into the kitchen fund on my magic spreadsheet today. I Googled “Ply-boo” and said it out loud more than once because it makes me giggle. I called the Kitchen Man and got a list of showrooms to visit. Everything seems the same. But finally, suddenly, something is unstuck.
In truth I am washing these dishes in a completely different kitchen. It’s hard to remember because my back still hurts, I am bored, and my knuckles in the steaming water are raw and chafed. It’s hard to appreciate this shift as much as the clean white stairs. But the change is coming. It’s already here.
In truth, Laura Bass said it better than any of this:
Change
This is where I yank the old roots
from my chest, like the tomatoes
we let grow until December, stalks
thick as saplings.
This is the moment when the ancient fears
race like thoroughbreds, asking for more
and more rein. And I, the driver,
for some reason they know nothing of
strain to hold them back.
Terror grips me like a virus
and I sweat, fevered,
trying to burn it out.
This feat is so invisible. All you can see
is a woman going about her ordinary day,
drinking tea, taking herself to the movies,
reading in bed. If victorious
I will look exactly the same.
Yet I am hoisting a car from mud ruts
half a centry deep. I am hacking
a clearing through the fallen slash
of my heart. Without laser precision,
with only the primitive knife of need, I cut
and splice the circuitry of my brain.
I change.
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