I write to you at Sunday dusk, at the dining table by the window in my Brooklyn apartment, scared already that I will fail. Fail to get the words down, fail to get the story right, fail to tell it in a way that feels both truthful and dignified.
This table is one of the first pieces of furniture that my boyfriend and I bought for our new home, whose medium oak we have designed around, miles and states away from where we thought we’d be building a life together. If I were to try and place the disparate parts of our journey on its surface, I’d be left with exactly that—a mosaic of triumphs, frustrations, incongruities, harmonies, left turns, right moves, failures, and everything in between. Nothing glamorous to say the least, but a whole life.
A whole lot of life has taken place since I last wrote to you—all things that have changed its many possible trajectories. Whether it is for better or worse seems like a judgment call that I am not in a place to make, nor do I think it wise. Ostensibly, I left Wisconsin and moved to New York to be a writer—a line so cliché that it feels embarrassing to admit, even though it’s true, and even if I reached some semblance of success. Soon after graduating from my master’s program in Madison, I was hired as a staff writer at an online publication. Off to New York we went, the contents of our lives in tow.
Though I had the privilege of writing about some things that I cared about, the price of the job was costly. Because of the sheer volume of what I was producing and the rate at which I was producing it, I lost the sharpness of my voice, the intentionality of my words. More damaging though, was the loss of my own clarity and vision, writing daily to satiate the taste of thousands rather than what I myself found compelling and important.
Leaving that job saved my dwindling sanity, but it also left me with little purpose—If I had left Wisconsin (with its giving lakes and loving friends) to become a “real writer” and I no longer was one, then what was I doing in New York? If I was no longer a “real writer,” then what was I doing at all? Failure was—and is—the overwhelming aftertaste of that experience, and it’s an uphill battle still to tell myself that the best is yet to come when it comes to my writing career.
These days, I spend countless nights rereading things I published before starting my staff job—unable in the present moment to write anything—simultaneously in awe of the person who wrote with such precise and passionate conviction and downright terrified that she is so far away from who I am now that I’ll never be half as good a writer as her.
I’d given so much of my creative energy to the fulfillment of my capitalistic needs that I no longer knew who I was as a writer outside of work. Since leaving, I’ve struggled to formulate sentences, to follow through on ideas, to give them shape, to trust any intuitive processes I’d once cultivated. There are moments where I’ve fully convinced myself that I’ll never be able to write a single word again, ideas bubbling up inside of me with the discomfort of a rigid belly filled with gas, unable to be freed onto the page or screen.
During the worst of my ruts, I began watching the show Dickinson, the four-season TV series about Emily Dickinson, who is now one of the most famous and celebrated female poets in the world. She loved poetry more than life itself, but the conditions of her own existence in Civil War Massachusetts—namely, the societal cages brought on by her gender—made it so that her writing was only widely published and read after her death.
Despite this, she pursued writing and knowledge relentlessly, begging her brother to submit her poems to contests under his name, faking grave illnesses so that she could have time alone in her room to write, and once even wore a disguise to sneak into a chemistry lecture at the nearby then-all-boys Amherst College. She fearlessly and stubbornly defied her father, a person who loved her dearly but whose misogyny and political desires made him a staunch opposer of Emily ever having a career in writing.
I thought that if I could let these snippets of Emily Dickinson’s life play before me, often in the background while I was preoccupied by some inconsequential thing or another, that my own love for writing would be reignited. By simply being in the presence of Emily’s self-sacrificial flame, I wished for the wick of my own desire to catch fire, to allow me to write once more. But then I came across a quote by Audre Lorde, one of the Black feminist writers most influential to my work, and realized I was digging the wrong well. “You cannot use someone else’s fire,” she cautioned. “You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.”
Of course, she was right, and I was wrong. Emily’s fire, though similar, had nothing to do with mine. I began to feel guilty that she had real material hurdles that impeded her from writing, and I in comparison was simply staring up at a wall of burnout and a severely bruised ego, too devastated to even attempt to climb it. I know now that both of our conditions make it difficult to be creative, that the seemingly immovable absence of being able to write—freely and without constraint—no matter the reason, is a literal, physical agony. And even if she herself could not reignite my ability to write—lost under layers of exhaustion and a true fear of being wrong, or worse, uninteresting—Emily Dickinson at least showed me that we shared the same core desire, the same will to live, and if she found ways to chase after it, then I eventually would, too.
Exactly a year ago, I attended the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, a privilege that to this day still feels unearned. I envy the girl who applied to that residency, the version of myself who told all of you that she was “going after her dreams” and “betting on her writing with every fiber of her being.” Freshly out of the formal structure of the academy, I was hungry to be in community with those who shared my passion for writing. Throughout that week in Ohio, I was desperate to find out what it means to live a writer’s life, and more importantly, how. I came out of that stormy, humid June with some inspiration, but no clear answer.
I’ve been asked what it means to live an artist’s life or how to build an artistic practice again and again since landing my staff writer job, as if my paycheck then somehow made me the holder of all writing secrets. I’ve had the wonderful honor of speaking to classrooms of young writers about “how I got here,” but these conversations often left me feeling like a fraud, caught in the headlights of a life I’d fallen into by chance, and not by real merit. Even here, on the other side of it, I’m left with more questions than answers, and sometimes I’m scared that the biggest secret of them all is that none of us—not a single writer—actually knows how they got anywhere or achieved anything.
I confess this all to you not in an attempt to present a catalogue of failures, but to document the place from which I am trying to write today, and to treat it with kindness. After months of succumbing to such heavy, paralyzing doom, I feel hopeful that I can lay out these tiny embers of beginnings on our dining room table—starts and stops of stories, seedlings of ideas, both good and bad—and cobble together a new portrait of what a writing life can look like. Not what it should look like, but what it can, free of shame and brimming with possibility.
Love you so much! And I want you to know that I, too, have been in that immobilized writer state, not sure if I’d ever write anything again. That was much of 2020 for me. So just here to say that I see you, I know the struggle and, most importantly, I believe in you and your fire! ❤️🔥