A year ago, I was deep into a relationship that was going nowhere and a job that was quickly going south. I was processing a surprising diagnosis and recalibrating my life accordingly. Writing, though, remained my lifeline, as it has always been. It was the way I made sense of my life but also the thing that allowed me to transcend my life, to view everything that caused me pain or discomfort in a positive light as future material.
Something amazing has happened since; my life has gotten a lot better. It’s gotten so much better that on some days, the feeling that I should be writing is the only thing making me miserable. I come home fried from work and I think, Now would be a great time to get some writing done, and I don’t feel like it, and then I feel guilty. Shouldn’t I feel like writing if I claim to love it so much? The best way, and the only way, to become a writer is to write. If I’m not writing, I’m not exactly a writer, am I?
You may have noticed that I haven’t written a post recently. I originally envisioned Torpor Chamber as a monthly newsletter, but the ugh field I was feeling in relation to writing fiction seems to have metastasized (turns out Torpor Chamber was a pretty good name, eh?).
In my last post, I wrote that I should probably push through this ugh field. Well, in the last few weeks of doing the Artist’s Way, I finally did. I drafted a (short) chapter of my manuscript, and I took other steps aimed at solidifying my commitment to the project, like enrolling in a novel-writing class at GrubStreet, finishing a one-page synopsis, and commissioning an artist I like to create character art.
But in spite of my initial joy at pushing through the ugh field, something else has started to change, and I’m ambivalent about it. I’ve replaced the things I used to do instead of write, like watch TV for hours—the self-destructive self-indulgence I wrote about in my last post—with things that actually feel meaningful to me. I’ve been spending more time with people I care about, in nature, and taking care of my body. Some of these things still feel like indulgences, but they no longer feel compulsive or self-destructive. They feel genuinely nourishing.
And on those days when I feel guilty about not writing, I’ve found myself not pushing through the ugh field to write but instead letting go of the desire to write at all. I’ve realized that I’m happier on weeknights when I come home from work and, instead of being my own tyrannical boss, I work out, make a simple meal, and talk on the phone with a partner. I used to spend the weekend doing self-indulgent self-destruction because I felt like I didn’t deserve anything actually fun if I wasn’t going to write. But now I simply accept that I’m not going to write and make other plans, like getting brunch with friends or going for a hike or lying in the park watching the trees moving in the wind and the light moving over the trees. I’m becoming happier than I’ve ever been, and I’m wondering whether writing has any place in it.
It reminds me of how I ultimately left organized religion. In touchy feely circles like group therapy or yoga class, people often say things like, “Take what serves you and leave the rest.” But it was my sense that I was leaving too much of Catholicism that was no longer serving me that led to my final break with the Church.
See, there’s this thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus. Theseus was the mythical founder of the Greek city of Athens. The Middle Platonist historian and philosopher Plutarch, in his account of Theseus’s life, writes:
“The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths and returned in safety, the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athenians down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus. They took away the old timbers from time to time, and put new and sound ones in their places, so that the vessel became a standing illustration for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.”
If every part of the ship has been replaced, is it still the same ship? If not, at what point does it become a different ship? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot in the past year as my life has undergone significant upheaval. When can it be said that you are still practicing something, and when can it be said that you have diverged from that practice? What parts of a thing are essential?
With Catholicism, it was my sense that I had basically rebuilt the ship that made me realize I wasn’t really a Catholic anymore. I had pulled out so many of the timbers—its condemnation of divorce and homosexuality and abortion, its checkered history in regards to the Islamic world and the slave trade and women, the whole sex abuse thing—that I was essentially left with admiration for Jesus and a few saints, and when that was all, it suddenly became easy to see that maybe they were just exceptional people. My belief in God simply fell away.
The same thing is happening to me with writing. I am letting go of what no longer serves me, which is the guilt and the compulsion, and I’m not sure what I’m left with. Does writing make me happy? I think having written something I’m proud of still does. I think the moment, which can sometimes last for hours, of being in flow, of feeling the words come faster than I can write them, still does. But I’m having those moments less and less, which means writing is making me less happy than it ever has before. I think I’ve toppled into a new equilibrium. I finally understand why people give up their dreams, and it’s not always a sad, raisin in the sun situation. Sometimes it’s because everything else becomes more meaningful, and the choice to let go of the dream is a choice to let go of the one thing that’s making them unhappy. The crucial timber is pulled out and suddenly they’re left with a different dream. A life of struggle and occasional victory becomes a life without the highs or the lows, a life of happiness and peace.
I used to care less about being happy than about being interesting. I used to believe that the lows made me empathetic, the highs made me driven. But as someone with a mood disorder, carving out a life without those highs and lows is something I’ve been trying to make peace with. I’ve fought tooth and nail for a life that doesn’t feel like so much of a struggle, and now I have it. Uncomplicated romantic relationships, a sense of self detached from success at work, days doing nothing but looking at the trees—I used to fear these things as signs of stagnation. I used to feel like there was more to life for those who wanted it. And maybe there is. Maybe I’m just not cut out for it. Because the truth is, I’ve started to enjoy these simple things more than the struggle of writing.
The Artist’s Way is supposed to help you recover the joy of creativity. Will that happen for me? Maybe; I still have six more weeks. Or maybe not. “It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top,” and I’ve started to make my home here, on the side of the mountain.
Artist’s Way Stats:
Morning pages: 35/42 days
Artist dates: 4/6 dates
Do you like the Grubstreet class? I'm debating joining one of their novel writing workshops
[I'm Senior Haus alum '17, I got linked to you by Alex List]
I am so glad you're feeling better! And being much kinder to yourself, it sounds like.
Now tell me where the photo is from – I want to go there.