The fear is real and it is everywhere and it is constant, unless I’m doing the one thing.
I have always felt as if I’m behind where I want to be. Probably this is because I fell in love with Arthur Rimbaud when I was a teenager and wanted to do what he did: change literature by the time I turned twenty.
But, babies, I wasn’t Rimbaud. I couldn’t be. No one but Rimbaud could be and so no one else but him was.
It’s still in me, though. This need to always be writing. Every day I’m not writing, I feel lazy or like I’m forever behind where I want to be. It’s not helped that I come up with a new novel idea basically daily. I have folders full of novel ideas and even novel outlines and notes. Some of them probably way too detailed to actually be useful for someone like me, who just wings it the whole time anyway. I have dozens of unfinished and abandoned novels that I broke against or that broke against me.
And so when I finish a novel, I feel that sense of accomplishment and satisfaction and relief that everyone feels, but then the next day I’m back to zero. I have ten novels I want to get done today but I only have these ten skinny fingers on these two stupid hands and my basement is cold and my wife wants to hangout and my youngest just shit his diaper and my oldest wants me to read him a story and so in my head I’m still living in these dreamt worlds, these invented realities, visions kaleidoscoping round me, and I am always falling behind where I believe I need to be.
And I’m trying not to fail the people in my life who have shared so much love with me, who believe in me, who need me, who want only me to be there with them, in the present, alert and aware, and not faraway sailing unknowable invented seas.
I wrote a few months ago about productivity and how I get so much writing done. The truth is that I probably write more than you. I definitely write more often than you and I probably write faster than you, but I am always failing my own projected schedules. I know I can write 50,000 words in a week. I’ve done it many times. But, at this point in my life, it’s more reasonable for me to aim for 10,000 to 20,000 words per week.
I’ve done that many times as well.
But my son has an ear infection and daycare is closed and we’re going to a wedding this weekend, so I’m probably now going to only hit 3,000 words and though I shouldn’t think this way I usually end up not writing at all because what’s even the point? Why not just skip it and try again next week?
This is the same reasoning that keeps me from working out for months at a time.
I try to be realistic about it. I know I’m not going to actually write 20,000 words every week, even if I theoretically could. But so I try to aim for 20,000 words per month, because that really is quite a bit more reasonable. Anyone can do it, really, if you carve out the time.
Many of you reading this probably look at these numbers and just think I’m lying. Which is fine. If I hadn’t learnt to enjoy lying when I was a child I’d probably be doing something else with my free time now.
Probably I’d be happier too.
But even at this seemingly blistering pace, I will never finish even all the ideas I come up with this month. And I got some real good ideas, babies. I might announce one of them soon because it’s too good not to pursue.
And so this fear sits forever inside me. The fear that my words will all fall away, that I’ll never get them all down, that I will forever fail the dreams I can’t stop having.
I thought I’d be dead already, a long time ago. I nearly died twenty years ago and a weekend in the hospital where people described my survival as a miracle didn’t fill me with hope or give me a new wide-eyed appreciation for life.
In truth, I felt miserable. Miserable that I couldn’t appreciate this gift that was thrust upon me. This gift of chance and accident.
This accidental life that I have forever valued too little.
But I thought I’d be dead already. Maybe I should have died. And when I think about my death, which is almost always, the thing I think about is all the words I never got down, all the stories that will be buried with me because I didn’t have enough fingers and hands to type it all out as fast as I could, just trying to keep up with the dream neverendingly unfurling before me like a tapestry of all that I’ve loved and hoped for, all these visions haunting me.
I don’t fear death, but I fear the silence. The silencing of myself.
And it’s this terror that often informs my own words, my own visions. I write about people who can’t speak, who won’t speak, who don’t speak, and I try to capture the yawning silence that both awes and horrifies me.
Our songs will all be silenced,
but what of it?
Go on singing.
I spent my teens and twenties living stupidly in pursuit of an interesting life and I found much heartache and pain and sorrow as I filled my dumb chest with mountains of absurdity, but what I’ve found is that a boring life is a gift.
A gift that allows me to pursue the wild, worthless words I’ll waste my life writing.
I bring this up now because I’ve been watching Yellowjackets nearly nonstop since discovering its premise. I’m still behind so no spoilers, please, though I may be caught up by the time you read this on your phone or laptop.
I can’t stop and even though it’s good and I dig it and I want to (not) live in it, there’s this nagging fear forever breathing down my neck.
You should be writing.
You’re behind and you’ll never catch up.
I have only so long to live. Possibly I’ve already passed the midpoint of my life, or at least of my productive life (seems few creatives are really doing much past 70, excepting very specific people) and so I count the novels ahead of me and wonder if there’s even enough time just to get to the ones I’ve already mapped out, assuming I never get another idea again.
I could, instead, sit here, not dreaming, and just live my life. Watch TV and movies and play videogames and be the father and husband I want to be. Forget my words, my mountains of ideas and the seduction of the visions, the harrowing howling of my ghosts.
I could just be me, minus the words.
And maybe I should. I could, I think. Sometimes I even want to. After my first son was born and I went twelve months without writing anything, I wondered if I had outgrown my madness, outrun the fear.
It was neither relief nor happiness that came to me then. Not even resignation. Just the simple understanding that this might be who I am now that my son is alive and in my arms and becoming the person he will one day be.
But I relapsed like a junky, spilling out novels like they burned me, like holding all that inside me might scorch me to nothing but ash to stain the pavement of these Minneapolis streets that were on fire the summer of 2020.
And so now I live here with the fear, the need to run along my keyboard making this clackity music of the dream that has come to define so much of my life since I first spilled tears into a book I was reading when I was eleven, unaware, until that moment, that a book could do that, that words could hit me so powerfully, that these visions could mean so much to me.
It is fear that makes me run but it is love that makes it worthwhile.
And I love it.
I do.
I shouldn’t. Wouldn’t, if I could choose. But we don’t choose what we love. No matter how much we believe we understand about ourselves, our hearts will forever surprise us and our love will always refine us.
Terror and beauty; I wrap them round myself and try to paint my dream inside you, to make my visions visible for you, in your eyes when you read the dream I can’t stop writing, that won’t stop pouring out of me.