This post was originally written in June of 2023
I've been having a hard few months, friends. Several months. Many months. The world just keeps getting more on fire and I feel so utterly helpless. And amid all the book bans and horrible bills and stories about how we are literally killing the earth, I'm also bombarded with think pieces about how publishing is totally imploding and fucked forever.
I have found myself wondering, kind of a lot: Why am I doing this writing thing? Like, really why?
I don’t mean that in a cynical or defeatist way. I mean the first few months of writing this year were so spectacularly un-fun that I’ve genuinely questioned why I’m putting myself through this. Why I'm putting myself through ANY of this.
How do I really want to spend my one wild and precious life, you know? What if I just worked the bare minimum at my job and came home and cuddled with my cat and played my cello and read books and watched tv and walked by the lake and hiked in the woods, and DIDN'T do something that makes me continually feel like a total failure in every way?
And the thing is, I think I had to really let myself ask that question in order to start climbing out of the hole I've been stuck in for a while. I had to really let myself put the option of just, NOT, on the table. Because I could quit. I could stop. And I'd survive. I always have.
There's this magical thing that happens, I think, when we truly open ourselves up to new options. Some call it God, or the universe, or astrology, but I don't really believe in any of those things. I think it's us, ourselves, our own brains, that put out new feelers and make new connections when we really decide to let them.
I was talking to my mom about playing cello again, (this connects, I promise, so stay with me) and she told me about a conversation she'd had years ago with my high school orchestra teacher.
Mr. P actually taught my older sister AND me AND my brother from 4th grade through graduation. He had someone from our family on his roster for literally 15 years. And he was probably the best teacher I ever had. I was never great about practicing but Mr. P never chastised me for it. Her never yelled in rehearsals. Not even once. I have zero bad memories of orchestra, which seems impossible but it's true.
My mom said that at a parent teacher conference my freshman year she'd told him that I'd do whatever I needed to do in order to get an A in his class. He could, she half-jokingly suggested, make me practice more, and if I had to do it, I would.
He looked at her with his always chill Mr. P smile and shrugged and said, “I just want her to love music. That's all I want for any of my students.”
This mindset is the reason I was able to pick my cello back up 20 years later and play. Because the point of it, always, for everyone involved, was only ever joy. I'm sure he wouldn't have been mad if we'd all practiced more, but he didn't care what we got at large group contest. He cared that we loved music. The process was more important than anything else.
Nowhere else in my LIFE has that ever been true. Every class I ever took was in service to some imagined future. Every job pitched as a stepping stone. Every purchase, apartment, or choice of any kind is presented as one rung on the never-ending ladder to perfection.
And every time I open any app there's someone trying to sell me something that will optimize my life and shorten my tasks leaving room for… more tasks? Somehow?
Writers want to teach us How to Draft Faster. How to Increase Your Word Count. How to Hack Your Writing Sessions. Now that I'm dipping my toe back in the music world, it's the same. Master Pieces Faster! Conquer The Basics in 30 Days! Get to the Good Stuff With Less Work!
Capitalism is just the WORST, friends. It's convinced us that the end product is the only thing that ever matters.
I don't think that's true. I don't think it should be.
I just want her to love music
I do want to get published. I do want my books out in the world. At the very least I want a finished novel, of course I do. But if that’s all I’m focused on every day when I open my laptop, I mean, of course it’s not been fun.
I can’t control the external. I can’t make an agent sign me. I can’t make an editor buy my book. I can’t make people pick it up and read it. So, why, really truly WHY am I doing this writing thing?
The answer simply has to be because it brings me joy. Or there is no point in making so much room for it in my one wild and precious life.
And when I really, truly let go of the external stuff, it did start bringing me joy again. It's still a choice, every day, but so far it's what I want to do.
Not the tiniest bit revolutionary, I know. Nothing that hasn’t been said a million times by people wiser than I am. A few years ago I took an entire class called
The Slow Novel Lab by Nina LaCour that is basically all of this only said much, much more eloquently. (BTW I highly recommend this course!)
But there is knowing something, and then there’s knowing it. And I think I might finally get it. For now, anyway.