I was asking a wise friend, recently, for a cure for despair in this thankless labour of love we call writing. They told me that, well, despair is only a feeling that passes as surely as it comes and the thing that you are despairing over might, in fact, be a door. I wanted to write this post not from a place of despair over my chosen labour, over the state of our politics or emotional numbness to the endless footage of dead children or how many ads there are telling me that my life is missing something and that I must buy to fill that hole—and often I do, I do buy—but from a place of naive, unmediated mess of a hope that what we do carries meaning, albeit its value is atom-sized-small or altogether unquantifiable. I wanted to write from the belief that by making a mark it might send out a ripple like little circles on the surface of a lake travelling out, out, out, until they are giant and then no longer distinguishable from the lake’s surface.
*
It’s 15.33. I have just blissfully flushed hours of writing time down the toilet and reorganised my Instagram highlights instead. Managing my social media persona is a strange impulse I experience as a battle between wanting to be known and seen and liked, meanwhile preserving the deeper private parts of myself, stashing them away from judging eyes. There is, admittedly, an intellectual pressure to triumph over the social norm to present, modestly, only our best side by deploying untamed vanity, to perform conscientious citizenship and participate in the culture of selective consumption i.e. to display “taste”. For creatives especially, Instagram also doubles up as a business card, a document of accolades as well as minor achievements, whilst being a sketchbook, a message board, a place for political calls to action, a general reminder to people that I still write, think, breathe—that I am alive.
I am not explaining Substack to you. What I want to say is that my pent up energy could have been directed into a more “productive” form of sharing and saying something more comprehensive, meaningful, say, on this Substack, a slightly more expanded form of staying in touch with the world, of satiating an instinctive craving for intimacy that I have not been able to extinguish—why should I?—which is a roundabout way of saying that I AM BACK and thinking about how this space can expand, flourish, grow and, well, continue…
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I find that writing is often an exercise in outrunning doubt—is this right? aesthetically pleasing? does it help anyone? does it need to exist?—in first drafts in particular. Substack posts, by nature, are very first-drafty, and therefore (in my brain) subject to this scrutiny often to an “unproductive” end i.e. I haven’t posted anything in a while. Meanwhile, at my desk, my physical working space, things are anything but ready for the immediate share: there are stories at various stages of revision, drafts two, four, seven and fifteen. There are books, stacked vertically and horizontally, journals and loose bits of paper. Everywhere. There is a wall of post-its which scream at me in capital letters METHODICAL PATIENCE and SUCK IT AND SEE. There are images on the pin-board which hold nuggets of something—of what?—I don’t quite know or maybe I do on an intuitive level but can’t yet verbalise, narrate, conjure these externalised wisps of ideas into legible, palpable, emotive scenes. All this MESS, I think and want to hide it. But what will become of it when the final product is plush and ready, every sentence thought through down to a comma, when the typographer had already put the finishing touches to kerning, the ink on the page is dry and set into stone. As I realise that this might not happen for ages—possibly never!—my 2023 hope of keeping a Substack boomerangs back with a 2024 force. Yes, I think, more mess and less polish, hide the ruler and get out the crayons, and instead of asking mum for permission just go right ahead and make a mess of the walls. Mess, mess, mess, my post-Soviet upbringing is horrified, runs at me with a toilet brush and a gallon of bleach, but today I’m sleek, nifty, so I dodge.
*
When I think about the circles and the lake again, this post and the internet, the speck of our planet and the universe, despair leaves me for a moment, or maybe it just grows smaller, reaches a sub-atomic level and (almost) vanishes. Then, all I’m left with is the desk, the books and pen-nib as it moves along the flattened pulp of what used to be a tree and this maddening choice of activity, this puzzling labour of love which suddenly doesn’t seem so bad, and even not bad at all, so I let it continue, in this form, or whatever form it might take in the future.
Despair is, too, a door.
so nice to see this in my inbox (i havent read it. i just started to...–getting caught up...)