For a long while now, I’ve been really afraid to play “the game.” To be seen trying as a writer or as anything, really. I’ve made every mode of self-expression as private as humanly possible: partially as misguided protection against the looming threat of fascism, but mostly as a coping mechanism for the fact I wasn’t really doing anything to further my art.
I’ve been trailing my jealousies, the envies that irritate me and wake me in the middle of the night when I feel like I’m wasting the short time I’ve been given. Most of the time, it’s an arthritic pain I feel when I see someone going their own way and making something unconventional of themselves. I often feel like I’ve navigated and thrived in a system—a corporate system—that doesn’t really fit me and never really did.
When I turned eighteen and my mom died, I knew writing was the only thing I was really good for or good at, but it felt like such an unrealistic path for a poor orphan kid in North Florida.
I didn’t even get into college the first try.
There was a dean at the university and my sad story (HED: single mother died from cancer weeks before high school graduation) traveled up to the high offices of higher ed. They offered me admission if I agreed to do a semester of pre-reqs at the community college and got tested for a learning disability, which it turned out I’d had. It explained the abysmal math test scores, the near-perfect English scores.
When I think about that child who passed all their A.P. tests a month after burying their mother and clearing out their childhood home, I get really sad. It doesn’t feel like it was me or even happened to me.
When I think about how many thousands of other more worthy kids there were and I got selected, brought to lunch in the expensive cafeteria built for the football players, put in programs for at-risk students? It’s hard to feel deserving.
Support poured out of the community in unexpected waves. The prayer circle of moms at my high school cobbled together a couple grand to give to me and my sister, the most money we’d ever held at one time. That cash, even today, makes up the bedrock of my savings account on principle. I was offered a free place to stay above a garage so I wouldn’t be homeless. By August, I was riding the bus an hour to the college, doing my readings for fiction workshop and listening to Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange on repeat, making friends for life. It all happened so quickly.
Now my life is so beautiful sometimes it physically hurts.
I’ve held multiple jobs at once ever since, in a way that felt so necessary for so long that I didn’t realize I’d outgrown the struggle till like, yesterday.
A couple of years ago I was in a relationship that was perfectly fine, you know. The person texted me back at consistent clips and asked about my day and were nearly always available to hang out, which anyone who dates in New York can attest are a refreshing, nearly novel set of qualities in a person.
They remembered small things about me and showed up for me in new ways (to me): checking in on my mother’s death anniversary and giving emotional support, offering company at the garden where I “celebrate” her each year. We’d cook each other dinner, bring little treats like seltzers on spring’s early warm evenings. We were already doing boring couple activities, ordering takeout and watching TV on a Friday night. Going to karaoke when I don’t like singing even when I’m alone. I like pretending I’m in a Dido music video on the B48, if that.
My therapist likes to say, fine really means “Feelings In Need of Expression.”
(It annoys me, and I love her.)
Around the same time, I took a job that was meant to be the job, the one with some level of status and a scrappy can-do attitude. Probably to compensate for the fact that my relationship wasn’t capable of deepening. While they were funny, we weren’t fascinated by one another. It was cool to learn I’m looking for a creative collaborator, an intellectual peer, not just someone who DMs me memes during the workday.
The only time I was really in love for a spell, it’s because I loved how the person’s mind worked. Infuriatingly moralistic, sharp on the uptake, and swaggering. They say love is meant to be a little boring, but I historically find myself in a tortured, swirling, unclear thing about twice a decade. Maybe that’s all pretentious, but I’m tired of caring. I’m a little pretentious. I don’t want to go to karaoke. Yes, I would like to watch an obscure French movie. So sue me!
I quit the job one evening before Thanksgiving — hopped up on enough Klonopin to mitigate my post-breakup panic — with no notice, which was an objectively shitty thing to do. I was tired of editing TikToks and making memes about software ft. paparazzi photos of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce while genocides unfolded.
It was a weird time. I took kitchen shears to all my hair and my friends told me my cry for help looked so good. My health was bad for a while, fatigue. Unexplained breathlessness going up a single flight of subway stairs. A single errand enough to make me nap for hours. Now there’s a nagging part of me that thinks it wasn’t hormones or my ovarian cyst or my unhappiness or chronic depression, but some heady margarita mix of psychosomatic self-pity. Then again, these may just be rites of passage for one’s Saturn Return.
During this six month burst of unemployment — the privileged path I chose — I racked up a fair sum of credit card debt and redeveloped my early twenties eating disorder, cutting back my intake to one meal a day because my dwindling bank account terrified me and food I could otherwise control. Now I see a specialist biweekly to help me plan out meals and take accountability for my restrictive behaviors, which has been…fucking hard.
(On the bright side, I eat croissants again!)
I can’t imagine taking this kind of unplanned “sabbatical” now, given the rapid advancements in A* and the current job market for copywriters, where I’ve seen senior roles I’d apply for tally up over 1,500 applicants in a handful of days.
Lately though, I feel my emotional tides shift. Things that I had been putting off for years became no-brainers. I had the energy to call my insurance company. This year I quit Netflix, Amazon, Whole Foods, Spotify, Target, certain chain coffee shops (sometimes I cave at the airport, depending on the airport, like twice a year), and most online shopping. I don’t have any social media apps on my phone anymore. I became a regular at my neighborhood hardware store.
I’m writing again in a way that feels prolific, at least for me — a writer with preternaturally long gestational periods. One of my goals this year was to de-center writing that makes other people money, and things are finally starting to move in that direction. I’m working a full-time job and have just one freelance client instead of two for the first time in over a year.
I self-published a poetry zine on Metalabel. (I’d love to properly print this one day on risograph. To that end, the zine is pretty much pay-what-you-wish.)
I think I have a better idea what I want to say now, and what I’m working on. If you want to stick around for any of it, I’ll be eternally grateful.
C.