A Time for Change
I’ve never felt this restless before. I don’t want to write at all this morning… I wish I could learn how to be thoughtless about it, run a long page of stream of conscious writing, leave it all unread, unedited, ugly and unrefined and be fine with it.
But I can let go, now more than I ever have. I can say truths and leave them undressed on the page. I can admit to a long list of regrets, mistakes, losses, painful encounters without the need to make it seem like all is well. I have no sense of direction in my life, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. I am drifting and in my aimlessness I am happier, more creatively productive, more imaginative, more honest than I have ever been in harbor.
But more than that, I’ve lost the ability, for good and bad, to answer simple questions straightforwardly. I can’t speak confidently about anything anymore. I have questions, and all the things that once stood as pillars in my life are driftwood in the sea. That’s why I suddenly can’t teach the way I used to. I can no longer pretend to be all the things that I am not: certain, grounded, hopeful, composed…
Like the houses bordering New Orleans, precarious and defiant as they cling to long pieces of wood, the gulf rising beneath them, most of the neighborhood gone, I live where no one could stay comfortably for too long. It is lonely, frightening, entirely uncertain, and, at once, exhilarating and right for all these reasons. I could stay, for long periods of time, where others see only danger and risk.
***
As I write, I feel the world growing quieter. Some of my restlessness is good, but most of it is an effort to make enough chaos so that the pain in me isn’t heard too well. Trauma needs distraction, and I’ve found plenty. But it needs, just as much, to be tended to, which is what I do here, in these quiet hours of writing. I need more of the silence, but before that my body has to believe it is safe enough to handle it. It can sit still and not hide in the very thing that was once kept me alive made it all bearable, which was my obsession and addiction to work. I think there’s a very fine and murky line between using work as escape and work as recovery. Perhaps for me it’s both, but regardless, I still need more of the silence.
And now that I am finally living the life I’ve envisioned, I carry an enormous amount of guilt. Work to me often feels more like play, which Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way insists is how it should be and how it should feel. But the need to suffer through forced work is still present in me, and the pleasure is new and, as I’ve always believed, not for me and not mine to have. For work to feel right and righteous, and for me to be relieved of the guilt I carry, it needs to feel like a sort of martyrdom, a killing of the self for the sake of something that needs to be made and completed. The freedom I’ve granted myself instead tells me the end-product is unspecific and entirely mine to decide. Certain ideas and projects need to find their end, but the timing is also mine to set. Truthfully, so so many artistic discoveries and beautiful accidents in my life wouldn’t have happened without that freedom.
But that freedom is just as much empowering as it is debilitating. With no one to tell me how it should be done and when it should be done by, I carry in me the freedom I’ve always needed to create without authority and opinion. But, also, without that, I receive no feedback, no response, no praise or disapproval. There’s nothing I can use to measure my work by, no one to direct me to slow it down or speed it up. The pace is mine, the end is mine, the final product, mine. But how can an artist step outside their isolation (which is too comfortable to begin any genuine effort of breaking out of) and find someone to participate with without feeling as if some of that freedom was compromised in order to receive what was missing in their total liberty.
***
I’ve had to let go, too, of my rigid definition of who I am and what I do. I was stubbornly insistent that I was a writer who could no longer write and therefore had lost all purpose in life. But what if I am not a writer but something else? And what if writing was something I used to save me when I needed saving and now that I’ve been saved I discover in its place a dormant, hidden passion to make art and films which keeps me far from the page on most days and leaves me feeling guilty for abandoning the other identity I’ve stuck to my whole life. Or what if I am all three, an artist, a filmmaker, a writer? Maybe each one of them takes turns in my life, and right now is not the writer’s turn. Or maybe writing will no longer play the central role that it once did, maybe the years of suffering through writer’s block was the writer’s way of forcing space for the artist in me who has always, always been trying to push through.
And there’s so many other rigid opinions I’ve forced on myself that I’ve now begun to question. It is hard though. My self-beliefs feel more like cement blocks and my questioning of them feels like an effort to revert them back to the liquid form they once held.
And my dreams, once so stubborn and clear as day, have suddenly become vague and not as forceful as I search through my past to figure out which dreams were mine truly, which ones were imposed on me, and which ones I picked up for the sake of being loved. And, just as I am losing all sense of self and clarity, there’s 25 years worth of art rushing out of me. I can’t keep up with all the ideas and visions that come to me. I am a slave to her, in me, who says do this and try that. It’s a voice more stubborn and childish than any of the other voices ushering me towards a path of certainty and financial stability. I can’t stop creating. Something in me was cracked open when I drove out of Florida last August and since then I have not been able to sit still. Even with the pain degrees lesser than it was then, I can’t not give myself to work the way I always have when I needed it to bare the un-bareable. Except this time it isn’t work, it is art, and it is saving me and claiming all that is left in me.