An honest treatise on the writer's life

Tuesday, 5:34pm

Can I be honest about something?

Lately I’ve hated my writing. Actually, it’s not so much that I’ve hated anything I’ve written but more so that I haven’t written anything at all.

I hate the fact that I’ve been too consumed to write anything outside of the messy scrawling in my journal. I hate that—for the first time in years—life feels so entirely demanding that it is leaving my mind as blank as a slate. I’m so busy staring life in the face: the grief of disappointments, the slow slow progression of friendships, the tensions between desire and apathy, the consistent plodding of daily life that I haven’t looked up to write about it. And it’s all so much. Life is so much. Too much to put into words. I hate that I experience important things and yet I cannot think of anything important to say about them.

That’s a lot of hate. Not the cheeriest way to begin my first post of 2024. I get it. But as my beloved David Brooks says, the writer’s life is one where learning and becoming are all played out in public.

If you try to hide the tangled web of thoughts in your mind as you unwind it all, you’re not really much of a writer at all. Because that is what this paradox demands: a real, gritty unraveling. A live showcase, with the curtain of perfection ripped open.

When is life not paradoxical? In the midst of all of these uglier tensions, I glimpse so much beauty. I look at who I was just 8 months ago and don’t recognize the shape of that old “her.” I am changed. I am becoming. As a river smooths rock, so too growth contours us in frustratingly slow acts. I am changed one ripple at a time.

You’ve been changed by this year, too. Perhaps you can’t see it now, but you will.

It being January 2nd, I suppose I ought to write about 2023. Ought to share my reflections (and believe me, reflections do I have…). Ought to express them with gripping detail and dynamic stories. Perhaps, I even ought to share the prophetic words spoken to my heart this month.

But instead, I think I’ll just hold it all close. I’ll open my palm and let these revelations just sit. Just be.

I suppose this was all a long rambling to say that I am (once again) reminding myself to not take the weight of the world so seriously. For the sake of my words, this means returning to the roots of this page: a place where the mere demand to write outweighs self-judgement or a lack of introspective curiosity.

Isn’t it interesting how so often we don’t know what we think till we take the time to put it out in the world through our words? I think that is quite humbling. That means I need you, and you need me. We need one another to understand the very deepest parts of ourselves. We need one another to experience reality with the highest form of freedom.

That is, we need one another for all of it. For Self-forgetfulness. For creativity. For imagination. For wonder.

I need you to read these words as much as I need to write them, not because I need affirmation but because the sentences take on a life outside of me when I recognize they’ll break beyond the recesses of my “drafts” page.

As a friend so eloquently reminded me just now, “creativity is a muscle. And sometimes to work it, you just have to do the sh*t things that don’t sound good to get that spark you’re looking for.”

The birth of art is not flowery. It is sharp. Emotional. Practiced and re-practiced. Hewn in half and sanded down.

It is a series of simple acts of resistance to the self that doubts.

Here’s to a(nother) year of attempts.

Treatise? Tirade? Not really sure what to call this post. Thank you for reading it anyways. <3