I’m starting this text on the subway, emerging from a slow, unscheduled morning at home. I spent a good portion of it writing: pages in my on-again-off-again diaristic endeavor, a letter to a friend that ended up being mostly another diary entry, short emails, bits of paragraphs for a Big Project as they came to me while I was practicing. I spend a good portion of each day telling myself I need to write more. That aforementioned Big Project, you see, and the countless little elements that it will engender and that will engender it. Not to mention the other Big Project that is my doctoral dissertation (oh yes, right, that). An infinite list of administrative responses and requests. Articles, reactions, personal statements. And so forth.
And so forth everyday, thinking much about all the output I’d like to have, and putting out little, slowly. Torturously if often lovingly. So what I’m writing now in the notes app of my phone is a complaint. I might call it an admission, but it’s also definitely kvetching. I’m complaining about myself externalized as a sort of beloved but erratic daily companion: oh Sophie, she’s really wonderful, I love her, but damnit she does these things that drive me absolutely bonkers. I’m complaining about the nature of creativity and practice (you have to actually do things). I suppose I’m complaining about it being late January in New York.
Perhaps I am admitting that I’m scared, because too many things around me seem too big to properly fathom. I let that seep into the things I can — or could — wrap my head around. I let the endless list of duties keep me from picturing a broader arc, and I let the broadness of my desires remain nebulous and unmanageable.
Whether by admitting or complaining, I’m trying to do much the same thing. I want to reify the queasy feeling and tear it apart to expose its anatomy. And I want to do it publicly for all the reasons we like to tell people about our foibles: I want you to unburden me of part of my self-perpetuating lethargy.
I want to unburden my own damn self. I want to look at myself coolly and compassionately, to tell myself, “You’re fine, I love you, now get to work.”
Luckily, the form my purging takes is also the action I’m struggling so much to accomplish. That’s tinily tremendous: to formulate and set anything down in words is some victory, and any act of writing helps to focus and propel me. And because my two largest projects explore composition, interpretation and creation, writing about my process of staring into the void and trying to make something out isn’t strictly unrelated. Still, it isn’t the actual thing. It may be useful work — as in ongoing practice — but it isn’t the work — as in generated opus — I’ve sought out to make.
The blurry transition from doing to making/creating needles me. I realized only recently that part of my difficulty comes from years of extremely specialized practice doing as a porte-parole of other people’s work, but seldom thinking of myself as a fabricator in my own right. And what do you know, breaking down that distinction just so happens to be what I’ve decided — or more accurately, felt a growing compulsion — to produce things about.
So perhaps I’m not just kvetching because the creative process is difficult and requires discipline, and because I want to hibernate. I am admitting the comfortable groove of my fear of my shortcomings regardless of season and, especially, my comfort in being disappointed in myself, painting myself with dissatisfaction like a base coat of gesso.
If this is an admission, am I seeking absolution? Often. How many times I’ve uttered some variation of the following: “Could you tell me it’s okay I didn’t do very much? Could you tell me I’m not useless? Could you tell me I’m allowed to be useless?” Am I apologizing to you for my lack of output? I have the common tendency to do that, too — a tendency I’ve been stripping off me over the years because it’s seldom useful or really meant.
But do I apologize to myself? Rarely. Is that act as hollow as over-apologizing to others? It might not be. Maybe it goes along with dissecting my habits and fears. Forgiveness isn’t reliant on apology, but apology helps when forgiveness isn’t a well-trained muscle. If I honestly apologize to myself, I can forgive myself, too.
And yet, once again, admission or apology isn’t a redress. It’s the blank slate I hope will allow me to work unencumbered and as such with more focus. With this in mind, forgiving myself in my failures is an act of faith and exigency. You’re fine, I love you, now get to work.