I Never Want to Write Again

Another letter about suffering

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”

―Woody Allen

Some days, it feels like it'd be a relief to never write again.

If I stopped writing, I know that it'd kill me in the way that retirement and the death of children kill people - with the sudden stutter stop of a body drained of its purpose, a vessel that can no longer carry its own weight now that its center has been culled. One of the few times in my life I feel at peace is when I’m suspended in the act of writing. I sit in front of my keyboard to make sense of the world. It’s a way for me to sort and organize the data of life.

But writing has brought me so much suffering. I’ve spent so many hours crying over my writing. I’ve wailed and drank and rolled around on the floor. I've hinged my self-esteem on the success of my writing, on whether I can make a specific sentence sing. I’ve used my body as a post to crack a whip against, over and over again until the psychic damage broke me. I’ve tried to write despite other obligations and lack of time. I skipped out on socializing most of my 20s to write and felt the frustration that comes from the loneliness that resulted.

Over the years, I’ve learned coping mechanisms to deal with some of the stress and anxiety that comes from writing. I no longer hinge so much of my self-worth on story rejections or praise. I’ve found ways to coax out my inner voice when it’s blunted and dulled, and the words won’t seem to come without resorting to crying and rolling around on the floor. I’ve recognized my relationship to the void, the muffled sound, the space before the words appear, is not a sign of my inherent flaws, but a part of the process. My job is not just to put one word before the other like a mechanic. I am also supposed to wait in the quiet until I can hear the machinery of the story’s hidden rhythms.

The anxiety of needing to write is ever-present, following me whether I'm enjoying a matcha eel roll at a sushi bar or playing at the park with my daughter. You need to be a writing. It's a haunted voice that lingers in the sunlight, reminding me of damp, forgotten places.”

You need to be writing. You need to be the best at writing. Reviewing past work, I often wish I could inject more blood into each sentence. I yearn for my writing to be juicier, more profound, more evocative. I know I’ll never be the best, but the desire always keeps me on the edge of my abilities, always striving for more.

I fantasize about simpler jobs, like being a cocktail waitress or an office worker. I could clock in and out. I wouldn't have to wake up in the middle of the night, blind-sided and panicked because I’m hearing a chthonic voice, and I don’t know who it belongs to. I'd probably make more money too. Fuck this novel business. I could sit by the side of a pool in a red bikini, in the parabola of the sun, and actually enjoy the warmth instead of trying to repackage the experience into words to convey it to others.

Sometimes, I even fantasize about being a poet. I'm jealous of the poet’s porous and trained eyes and the way they collect new vocabulary words, like tools, polished and precious. I'm jealous of their unabiding curiosity and love of simple things. They find beauty in tablecloths and socket wrenches, in accidents of nature, in cracks and oblong symmetry. Everything ordinary can become majestic under their sweeping gaze.

Poets are allowed to wait for inspiration to strike. They have the freedom to sit for hours staring at bad weather through streaked window sills, or go to strange parties and drink blood orange cider while flitting around from group to group, or take a pottery class. They do not chain themselves to their desks for hours a day, driven by a demonic urge to churn out 400-page tomes every year and a half. They come out with slim volumes every six or seven years, books that are easily tucked into a purse or a bookbag — petite objects that can be obsessed over like rosaries or jeweled brooches.

I used to think that “Find what you love and let it kill you” was the desperate creed of an old, drunken poet. He didn't understand how to love, so he equated it with suffering. In the end, suffering was all he knew he could do well.

The Buddha sought to find a way for humanity to escape suffering, and his solution was to cease to desire. He’s not entirely wrong. But what a way to live, cloistered in a monastery, dressed in robes to hide yourself from your sight, to try to quell the passion inside of you that is tearing you apart. And for what? Is suffering really so terrifying that you're willing to give up everything to avoid it?

And when that Buddhist monk, after years of practice, is stung by a bee on their neck, do they not feel pain?

Maybe there is no escape from suffering. Maybe they’ve just reduced themselves to small sufferings and small desires.

I’d rather go with the philosophy of the drunken poet. I would rather find what I love and let it kill me.

Yesterday, I went to a child’s birthday party with my daughter at the town swimming pool. After the birthday girl opened presents and we ate cookie cake, we converged on the pool. As I grasped the railing to get into the pool, I found myself hesitant as I anticipated the bite of the cold. I didn’t want to go into the water and experience those few seconds of stinging pain, even though I knew that it’d subside and I’d get used to the temperature.

I’d been swimming thousands of times in my life, and yet I was still hesitant on the verge of pain.

I return to the subject of pain over and over again in my writing. Even as I can see there's no escape, I want to escape. I flinch in anticipation of the cold. I have sensitive nerves and an anger problem and hot girl IBS and I drink too much coffee so I usually get a headache by 3 p.m. in the afternoon. In the moments when I regret my third iced Americano I often think of a quote by Epicuris:

"Pain is either bearable or it isn't. If it is bearable, then endure it. If it isn't, then you don't have to endure it for long because you will die. Thus all pain is either short-lived or chronic but mild.”

I can’t escape the fact that I’m a writer and the pain it causes, but maybe I can learn to love the pain, to embrace and welcome it when it comes, because I recognize it’s there to remind me there is still something I care about. I am alive, and there is pain everywhere. It crouches in the crevice of pleasure.

Maybe when I anticipate the cold before getting into the water, I can think, yes. Yes. Yes. Here we go again. Here comes the relief that follows the bite. Here comes the silky touch of the waves all around me. I am alive. I am alive.

I am alive. 

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb (With a new Epilogue) is now available! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.