my year of rest and relaxation

I started meditating over the summer. It’s the kind of meditation that encourages you to go quietly inside, then beyond yourself. To do so requires the assignation of meaningless value to your thoughts. As soon as one comes, you must let it go, whatever and no matter the thought.

Example: what if I never write again.

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In January, I got a red Moleskine because I thought journaling would help, but its paper was too thin for the pens I liked, and so I bought a green Leuchtturm1917 Weekly Planner and Notebook and painstakingly copied those first handful of entries over, the most confronting exercise of the whole enterprise because there’s nothing I allowed myself to revise and there’s always some better form of expression just out of reach. This was, after all, my life I was writing about. It felt insulting, that lack of composure. That lack of composure, for all its good reasons, an insult.

I had stepped into the new year raw as a scrape, bruised. The feeling of wasted time, I scribbled, and then, hilariously, scribbled again. I had started reading Joan Didion, and had been reading Leonard Cohen, a lot, and I’d begun to notice the way my interest was patterning between narratives of personal and artistic annihilation.

I can see that you’re hurt, someone told me around that time.

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For the last fifteen years, there was only, always, this: I wrote and I was writing. I wrote with, against, through, in spite of, then past the limits of what I was willing to accept and what the love of my stories could no longer sustain. Atomization, things falling apart, per Didion by way of Yeats. The center cannot hold. What happens when you no longer have a center? Your discipline pushes against the void. I wrote, I was still writing. My style, sharper now, more interesting, defined. My talent, still mine, a tool I could reach for, wield, apply—but with a heart so compromised, no page would hold it. [My work] feels unalive, I told the green notebook in February. Deliberate as it is lost.

I wrote but I was not writing.

I was reading, still. Didion, still. I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point.¹ And there was another author, a woman, whose name I don’t want to reveal, whose writing lived past the edges of what was acceptable. What was acceptable was printed, and what mattered more was not. It wasn’t that I imagined we were the same—she was too remarkable and too talented for that—but I could see that she was hurt.

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Creative struggle is made so paltry when juxtaposed against other struggles that half its battle is the belief you have one. There was a bitter relief, then, in finding, not its solution, but its reflection. In Didion, who, after months of not working was paralyzed with the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I understood it no longer existed,² in author ________, who equated certain turns of her art in the hands of others to mutilation, in filmmaker David Lynch who called it no less than death. Alan Rickman and his weary wanting; some energy has to come towards me, otherwise I am emptied.³ YOU CAN’T EMERGE, Leonard Cohen scrawled next to a self-portrait.

I was not writing.

Online, there are no shortage of resources for the writer. Learn to uncover the theme of your novel and how to hook readers with a story divided cleanly into three acts. And what of writer’s block? Step back, read back, put a placeholder in the spot that caused you to stumble, collect yourself and move forward.

What of a writer’s reckoning.

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I penned the word grief for the first time in my green notebook in March, but it would be a few more months before I started to consider it in broader terms, not only as it relates to death, but as a response to any kind of loss. The writer I knew, gone, and I could see now, that everything I’d done in the wake of my own atomization was an approximation of that writer. If you have experienced grief you know that strange and disorienting process of becoming your own ghost for a little while. You hold to what is familiar, even though you are now a stranger to it, because it’s all you know how to do and have done for so long. You do this despite the distress it causes you, because even the painful, passing sense of before is more comforting than all that frighteningly lays ahead. And from this place, I returned to those words that were said to me in January: I can see that you’re hurt. And I imagined this hurt as something more literal, a wound, and I could see it too.

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Nick Cave, whose observations about such things have been helpful to me this year, says that it happens to everyone, this ‘deconstruction of and complex re-ordering of the known self’:

“It may not necessarily be death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a person’s life . . .  And it shatters them completely, into a million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realised, more clearly drawn person.”⁴

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What if I never write again.

But it’s only a thought. And outside the meditation, I have noticed the weight of it shifting, as though clearing a path. I think less in terms of wounds that heal and more in terms of healing around a wound and the care and tenderness and patience this requires. How a careful, tender, and more patient person is what I want this experience to turn me into.

Recently, I was watching the final sequence of the Max Payne sequel, a video game I have never played, and it closes with the line: I had a dream of my wife. She was dead, but it was all right. And I paused because I just thought it was such a sharp, such an electric, such a beautiful line. And then I had another thought that felt a little more worth holding onto: how could I stop. The next one could be mine.

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1. The White Album

2. Slouching Toward Bethlehem

3. Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman

4. Faith, Hope and Carnage