Lessons from the impossible

I have absolutely no idea what to write about today. The ever apparent ragged I've run myself into keeps raking through the possibility of any cogent string of thoughts.

Yesterday in my burst of activity, when I said "do something impossible". I did not mean do something unhealthy. But I guess that is what my body heard.  This morning I woke ill, reluctant, and subsequently decongested into something that stung like wisdom:

My art it not worth my sacrificing my health for.

Fatigue/exhaustion aches and tenses me in a way that stops me from trusting myself. My mind learning from the bodily punishment that there is danger in going deep and committing to anything (and yes there is, but mostly worthwhile).

For instance I've spent more than an hour today generating new content. Most of it extremely surface level and brimming with frustration. Regardless of the state of my body and soul I try and make space in my life for the not-so-conscious creative magic of my brain to do its thing. Every day. Often it doesn't come.

Like today, everything I wrote just felt like empty cycles of word shuffling. My ability to string thoughts into a sensible sequence of ideas for was massively depleted.  It was like going to yoga full of fear and stiffness. No wonder my thoughts couldn't hold a pose for more than 15 minutes.

Still I'm glad I did the work. Proud I showed up. And to me, that seedling pride can be so radical. Today I am recoving from my poor self-care choices. I need that recovery. And also I need to show up here for what I've committed to.

Unfortunately there is a very loud part of me that insists being present/visible while in recovery is impossible. That part of me is, I think, mostly shame. And that shame tells me that this process must be private. So that's the impossible I'm doing today, revealing my nasty, unproductive recovery.

But hang on. Where did I learn to feel this shame? Why must recovery be a private/invisible thing. Why must we only ever present ourselves to others at our very very best?

Nothing against our very very best, but seriously, WTF?

Maybe it has to do with how it's apparently some sort of American value to look like you don't need anyone or anything to just live you life the way you normally do (see here "I woke up like this").
In the past I've written about how narratives of "inspired"/"genius" works can erase the truth about how messy the process of writing/creating can be. And I get the feeling the way we view taking care of ourselves (as private/only for loved ones to know about) relies on a very similar sort of erasure. As if knowing about the craft of our lives or our work and our presentations ruins the magic.

Any skilled craftsperson will tell you. It doesn't. I just makes you feel like a wizard.

I've taken on the impossible (Essay a Day Challenge)

It is an absolutely true fact that I have no time at all to write this essay. Or any of the daily essays to follow that I have now pledged myself into cobbling together. For instance I am right this very moment writing this sentence from the bathroom at the yoga studio where I 'm already late for the noon reverie.

I spent the morning neck deep in all sorts of poetry (the genre I'm angling to have masters in 18 months from now) and will be at work til 11 tonight. The only time for additional scribblings are the half hour gap between yoga and work (that's if I skip the shower) and a 45 minute lunch I generally like to spend in the parking lot as the token non smoker in the smoking area.

This project is impossible. But then what is the process of creating, if not slinging ourselves at the impossible and aching for others to follow us through nonlinear implication into some semblance of mutual understanding. Which isn't really the same, but close enough that resonance can be achieved

Yes. This project is impossible. Which is part of what attracts me to it.

I am an impossible person. My body and my genders are impossible. I mean things my body will likely never be able to reflect and encapsulate and my words are always too short, to calm the constant fever of confusion that heats my life and pushes my engines forward.

....

I am skipping the shower. The smell of my motor oil be dammed. Now each sentence is coming between furtive bites of cottage cheese and leftover ratatouille: my makeshift lunch. I gobble between keyboard flicks before I fly off to my grueling sentence of customer service numbness. There I'll have to get over how under the skin my temper gets when someone asks "how are you?" without ever wanting to really know that answer. As if such a personal question could be a stand in for the beige conversational rocking horse of "hello".

The answer of course is "I am impossible." A terribly unreasonable greeting by most counts. And we must not upset the customers!

I've begun to worry about my bicycle which, for expediency's was sake, was left the porch. But now I worry her wheels are beneath someone else's pumping. And fuck.

I thought that by committing to this impossible task, I might find some fucking reprieve from the anxious thoughts that plague. I thought that if I could plan away every minute and even cover up the possibility of a fallow moment that the worrisome waves would stop smashing into me. I thought I'd reached dry land with American perseverance. But I guess there's still some saltwater in my engine.

I hate how this is turning into a prose poem. This is supposed to be an essay. An impossible piece of literature that is ragged on the edges and long in the mouth, yes, but still very much so an essay.

Secret confession: I have no idea what I am doing. And without that knowing, impossible is not really a thing I can define is it? So here is my challenge to you, oh few, and bodacious readers.

Do something impossible. Trust that your logic brain is unable to compute the parameters of what is statistically possible. Give up im/possible. With the greatest love, throw your body through artists tools and ritual, at something distant, worthwhile, and impossible

I'll see you all tomorrow!

Misunderstanding and creativity

I have amazing and loving friends who know exactly what beautiful and inspiring things I need and send them to me on a nearly daily basis.

I've been sick for the past few days. Yesterday I thought I might be getting better but this morning I woke up with the mysterious and alarming symptoms of a concussion. I don't think I hit my head, but for the first forty minutes I was awake today I experienced something like aphasia. I forgot and couldn't understand certain words. I could read the words in a sentence but I couldn't understand them or how they fit together to form complex thoughts.

I felt terrified without immediate understanding.

Luckily, without even knowing I might have this problem one of my dear friends sent me this comic.

When I finally got to reading it, and in between paranoia about strokes and meningitis, I started to be okay with the the fact that I didn't know words as well as usual. One of the places I find the most stability and comfort is in language and my ability to use it. I was terrified this morning by having lost some small measure of that.

I still have a headache and probably am not thinking as clearly as when I am 100% healthy. But that doesn't mean I can't create or should stop working altogether. I might slack off a little bit today and only meet part of my writing goal. But I can still show up. Because I don't have to know everything or really even know much to write.

There's this piece writing of advice that I can't stand being thrown around.

"Write what you know."

Now believe me, I understand the importance of research and inquiry (especially for nonfiction and novel writers) and making publishable content accurate to reality. But I learn the most when I write about things I only half-know or know an astonishingly little about. This type of writing is never guaranteed to produce anything substantial, however it presents the most exciting risks and often leads me to a sort of digging deep that I don't reach by sitting down with a known plan in mind. (this is especially true for poetry)

I certainly had other things on my mind this morning (namely frustration and fear) but now that I'm on my way to some semblance of wellness I do wonder, what might have come out of me in my state of nonsense.

I used to be really uptight about what ideas I thought were a good enough to write about. These restrictions kept me from writing poems more than a few times a month. While this mistake probably stopped me from writing some bad poems it also stunted the development of my craft.

These days, barring emergencies, I show up everyday to write despite my bad feelings. Somedays a screen's light is too harsh for my eyes too look at and I let my phone record a spoken outline of my ideas or I just cobble together a collection of what I find to be touching inspiring or upsetting and make notes. But I show up for my craft for at least 10 minutes every day. And it's usually not pretty.

I guess what I'm saying is that the writing process doesn't always look cogent, or knowable or smart. It's hard work to unlearn the erasure of creators methods which are often mired in long and intuitively rich periods of misunderstanding.

My NaNoWriMo Project (NaBloWriMo)

So here's the thing.

I participated in National Novel Writing Month exactly once (Nov. 2011). The novel I wrote then remains unedited and unread. It was fun and viciously challenging. I'm glad I did it. However I far from primarily consider myself a novelist. My writing priorities actually go something like this,
poetry
essays/blogposts
prose poems
short stories
novels.

So while I won't say I'm not a novelist I will say that writing a novel is not high on my list of priorities right now. In light of this preference and my fierce passion to get better at nonfiction, this year I've elected to hold myself to the daily 1,666 word count demand of NaNoWriMo (50,000 words in a month). Free from the expectation of a novel I'll encouraging myself to daily draft both a personal essay/otherwise creative nonfic piece and a poem.

In addition to writing the directed 1,500+ words I'm resolving to blog every day this November. As someone who generally posts about twice a month obviously this terrifies me. Writing 1,500+ words can take at the very least 40 minutes (and I'm anticipating the switching genres will only take longer) and editing a drafted blogpost usually takes 1.5-2 hours. This is a huge undertaking. And it is bound to have some kinks.

In the past two years I've tried to hold to content of this blog to some standard of coherence and relevance/usefulness the communities I care about. I will still attempt to meet this standard, but I can't promise that the quality of my upcoming daily posts will not be somewhat erratic. Bear with me friends, it's gonna be a long month. And please please please comment on upcoming posts, especially if something you read sounds interesting yet unfinished. I plan to make updated/expanded/edited post on the things I'll likely only be able to skim by doing daily posts.

Thanks!

<3 WRM

Playful Waste and Bringing Down the Stakes

This post was in part inspired by and written for my fellow blogger and long distance friend at thetoughestcookies when he asked me earlier this week about how to overcome anxieties about starting a larger writing project.


It's been a long time since I've blogged. And to be completely honest with you dear readers, I've been afraid (and also busy). I'm really proud of my previous post and have been chipping away at a monster of an essay about why I prefer the term "consent positive" rather than "sex positive".

Being between these two ideologically heavy hitting pieces of writing has left me in something of a stall. Instinctively I allowed the last thing I had written set the standard for the seriousness and heft of what must come next.

This set the stage for a series of thoughts about my writing not being "good enough". Regardless of how (in)consistent my posts here seem, writing for me is a constant. I write anywhere from 15 minutes to 4 hours every day. It's not as if I haven't been generating content. I've just reflexively cast it all as writing that is "not up to par" with what I usually post here.

Today, I say fuck that shit. Starting with figuring out where this reflex comes from.

I recognize that the reason I want to maintain an illusion of polished and tightly packaged writing on my blog comes from the way our culture loves to erase the important role of process in any sort of creative activity. The way we're taught to think of work that is genius or “inspired” is to judge it by the inverse amount of effort it appears the genius/creator put into that product. I'm not saying that the "it just came to me" moments of creative lightning don't happen. They do (and more likely to if we engage in regular process). What I am saying is that the narrative of spontaneity and ease in the creation of genius creative work is falsely held up as the primary story of powerful creative works. And I am tired of it.

There's a multitude of articles (especially in the era of social media) that really pinpoint how the phenomena of overnight success is a pretty inaccurate representation of the amount of work time and energy that a person, organization, or group has put into their creative products. I would argue that the concept of overnight success itself serves to erase the important process work that happened before and probably still happens after someone's work is packaged, polished, and (hopefully) recognized.

Creativity isn't magic. It's showing up time after time (in my case day after day). Sometimes if we're lucky it FEELS like magic and we're "on it" or really "in the game" and running with that lightning. But those moment have less to do with recognition then they do with our creative practices matching whatever our brain waves are doing that day (which we have some but certainly not complete control over).

And so in that spirit (and to remind myself that it's okay vital) I want to talk a little bit about a thing I like to call wasteful play.

I used to tutor writing in college. I am very familiar with the terror so seemingly inevitable that creeps in when too much focus is put too soon onto what might be the final shape of creative products.

The fruits of our creative process are not completely under our conscious control. Some ideas need to lie fallow or exist outside of the shadow of high stakes and possible conventions of a final product. Any person engaged in a creative process (which CAN be anyone) should sometimes just play with ideas rather then work towards an end product. Don't ask your ideas too quickly about who they are and what they might be. The sprouting collaboration between your conscious and unconscious creative minds might not be ready to speak only in the language of known variables.

Accept the fact that playful waste will happen. In fact come to expect it. Learn that there will almost always be work you do and stuff you create that will be left behind. That doesn't mean these works don't have value or don't have potential to be used for something awesome in the future just that their work is not contributing to the final shape this particular creative product at hand.

Accepting this playful waste not only stops the paralysis of "what if it's/I'm not good enough" because of course some of it WON'T be (part of the final product). It also offers you really useful information about the kind of thoughts that are related to the idea you're currently working on but might need their own separate structure. Accepting playful waste gives you a place to store mini ideas that could spark and/or be mixed into future projects. This can give you a good sense of how the creative projects you're working on are related to each other, if ever you decide to arrange them in a series.

It also organizes your process into spaces where you can be either messy or clean with your ideas. Having the freedom to create playful waste lets you be sloppy. It gives you a place to go through sloppy executions of ideas so when the time comes to bring a sharper focus to the shape of your creative product your messier ideas don't muddy the idea you are working to make cleaner and clearer.

Accepting the occurrence of playful waste also helps contribute to more concisely focused creative products in other ways. If your well of creative runoff is always available to you and possibly brimming with hints about what you might want to do for future projects you no longer run as high a risk of trying to stuff too many of your ideas into a single piece.

The hardest part of accepting wasteful play and really letting yourself be messy is that it requires a constant process of unlearning the lessons of product focused, genius rewarding society. But I promise, everyone's process is messy in some way or other.

So go make a mess. I will if you will.

See you in the muck,
WRM