death rattle of my dreams

GOSH I am SO dramatic....

I recently spoke with a friend - another creative type, let’s call her Josie (thanks, NYT crossword) - about the maddening nature of creativity. It sounds so pretentious when I phrase it like that, when in reality the gripe is, “I just feel like my work is going nowhere and is bringing me no joy and maybe I’m just done with it all.” In this case, she was talking about comedy. She’s a stand-up comedian who hosts a monthly neighborhood comedy show in Brooklyn and who I personally think is very talented and funny. She, however, said she was starting to feel bitter and annoyed and hopeless about comedy - something I am all too familiar with about my relationship to writing. 

There was no way she could know that, just the day before, I was talking to my therapist about grieving my dream of being a writer. I was feeling similar to how she felt - hopeless, bitter, joyless. I felt like maybe the universe was giving me sign after sign that writing is just not the path for me. Maybe it was always supposed to be a dream as elusive as fairy dust, something that maybe a past life of mine had pursued or maybe an alternative timeline version of myself was meant to accomplish. Maybe I would never have an essay published, let alone a book, and my scribbling was only meant for the pages of my journal. 

My therapist is the one who said it sounded like I was grieving. “To suffer,” is one definition, and at that moment, it felt like she was right. I was suffering. Suffering at the seemingly unmovable force that was my writing. If I was lucky, I thought, maybe someone would read my hapless musings and say, “huh, she had some interesting thoughts,” before deleting the Google Drive folder or archiving the Google Keep note or placing my many journals in a box that lives in the attic. 

It sounds so dramatic. And honestly? It is dramatic. I had uprooted my life to move to NYC with the goal of being a writer. I uprooted my now husband’s life to pursue that dream. I went into debt to earn an MFA to pursue that dream. I went to readings and bookstores and joined online communities and participated in book clubs to pursue that dream. I did a whole cycle of The Artist’s Way and did three months of Morning Pages. The exhaustion! The fury! The futility!

So, on that day when speaking to my therapist about potentially moving on from that dream, I felt like I was grieving something that had been embedded inside me since I was a kid. I told her how reading others’ personal essays made me feel bitter, that looking at my overly stuffed bookcase with works from women I admired had made me feel resentful. I didn’t want to go to readings anymore because I could only imagine myself on that stage, at that bar, reading a piece of my work, to people who were listening. That thought - the, “maybe this is where it ends” - that had whispered quietly inside my head had begun to pound louder than a bass drum and disguised itself as the new steadying force of my life. I felt myself give in. 

But when Josie came up to me that day, and told me about her experience with comedy, I surprisingly found myself defending comedy to her. I said to her that maybe it’s just a “not right now,” not a forever goodbye. When she complained about her ideas seemingly being pursued by others, and feeling like she had nothing original to say anymore, I told her about the metaphor by Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic about ideas being the universe's seedlings, looking for a vessel. And how sometimes, ideas flee to a new vessel if you don’t act on it, that we just aren’t the right vessel, and that’s OK. There are plenty of seedlings in the universe, we just have to be patient. 

We parted ways, and I went about the rest of my evening replaying that conversation in my mind on a loop. Why did I feel so defensive about her abandoning her art, when I felt similarly just the day prior? Why did I feel comfortable thinking about her relationship to comedy as a valid creative pursuit, but not my relationship with writing? Was that just the death rattle of my own dreams? 

I realize, now, that everything I said to her is what I needed to hear. I craved validation for the struggle, proof of concept for the pursuit, a sign - any sign - that I shouldn’t quit. 

I don’t think I’ll ever get a sign - at least not the kind I would like. I probably won’t receive a magical acceptance from a journal I submitted to six months ago, or be inspired with an idea so forceful that I have no choice but to act. Instead, all I have is a choice - how infuriating is that??? 

I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s the context through which I will be pursuing this project which I’m (tentatively) calling Art Monster Magazine. Don’t ask me what it is yet - I’m working on it - but for now, I can say it’ll be an outlet for exploring my relationship with my writing/creativity and all that entails. I’d like to write about some books, films, or television shows I find to be inspiring, with an (all-but-exclusive) emphasis on female or nonbinary writers/producers/directors. Really, anything that inspires me, on the off chance that someone, somewhere can relate or feel inspired, too. 

And if you don’t like it you can blame Josie for having that interaction with me and causing this reflective moment in time. Thanks for being here, xo.