I can still write
There have been times in the past several years where I’ve felt like I’m close to having everything taken away from me. There has been a hostile divorce and within it some campaigns for control that have seemed to me psychopathic. It becomes hard to predict how far the situation will go, though, I realized at one point that I could approximate my understanding of the scenario by summarizing it thus: she wants me dead, in jail, or with her.
Whether or not that’s true, it’s been a frame that has helped me predict and prepare for certain shifts in the divorce process that surprised others (like both lawyers). So it’s been true enough to hold as a sanity strategy on my end, though I’m talking about subjective experience here.
When I have been feeling like I might lose “everything,” I have at times been able to remember that ultimately, while I’m alive, I can write. Maybe not every day but eventually and often enough to look forward to.
And though most of the people in my life don’t really think of me as a writer, and neither do I when I’m so busy being a bunch of other things, I’ve long hoped I would get back to writing whether life got better or worse, once I was tough enough to handle whatever blowback could come from writing.
When I was young and wanted to be a writer I romanticized it and I romanticized even the toxic culture I brushed up against in writing communities. I believe now that writers who succeed at writing good things somehow escape the toxicity and the romanticism.
But from the young place I would read interviews with such writers to see how they succeeded. And they sometimes said things that were not comprehensible at that time. They would say “you should write if you can’t do anything else,” and I thought they were perhaps being pretentious, bestowing inevitability on their trajectory as if they were born to succeed as a writer. I was incorrectly ascribing a level of success that is not real — almost all “successful” writers have less than 5,000 readers. But also I didn’t have the imagination yet for how true it could be that one could find themselves unable to do much else but write.
Yesterday I was feeling exhausted and a little down and I was thinking, what am I doing? What am I going to do if things don’t get better? And I remembered, well, I am writing, and I could keep doing that, no matter what. Maybe not every day if I had no phone or paper or pen, but often enough. I’m trying to remember that, because that’s one of the things I’ve wanted most in life is to write something meaningful, and objectively speaking, I’m closer to that now than I was a decade ago.