Sometimes I feel like I have to write or I will explode. I get sidetracked though because I get preoccupied with the wanting to explode part. I wonder, “Does everyone feel like they will explode? Why do I feel like I will explode? Why is it that I have this desire to write? Why is it that my life is preventing me from writing?”
Sarah Ruhl writes that “life is not an intrusion” and to view it that way is wrong. Brenda Ueland quotes a long passage by Vincent Van Gogh that a person “feels by instinct: yet I am good for something, my life has aim after all (…). There is something inside me, what can it be!” There is just, lately, so much life to deal with.
It’s not just that kids are home, now and into the foreseeable future, but that I imagine I should be doing something more than distributing printed sheets, overseeing writing assignments, keeping tabs on homework and making supper.
Maybe I feel cheated? Only a few months ago, I was, for the first time in ten years, all alone in the house after the school bus had made its pick-up. There was time to think about gradual next steps. There was the illusion that bursting forth was next; a professional flowering, an exhale of pent-up energies. But maybe this was too narrow a vision. I’m mistaken: not a corpse flower, but a vine maybe, with the energy and flexibility to grow over all the hard things, making Bahaus-like outlines softer.
I miss solitude. I miss solitude so much that I wonder what is wrong with me. I’m ashamed about wanting so much to have solitude. My shame folds back in on itself and makes me feel impatient and sour and sad. I crave hearing of other people who need solitude because for the moment, I feel flawed. Ueland prescribes it, as though people have a harder time understanding its benefit than defending its use. She writes, “inspiration (…) comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude…”
I need solitude, I say, because I need to make something, I need to prove something to myself! And I want to cry! Don’t you understand? But while I’m lacking solitude, these expectations are making the pain worse, and really, it would be better to let them go, just to ease the tension a bit.
So I’m lowering the bar. Inspired by Sarah Ruhl, I’ll write 100 essays right here, Covid-themed. I need to focus on quantity to get over the paralysis of quality and the plague of perfectionism. So here’s a start.