I.
It’s a Tuesday evening and I’m sitting on the couch with a doona thrown over my legs, listening to Mac DeMarco’s One Wayne G album. It’s late July and the weather is cold. I’m wearing tracksuit pants, a woollen turtleneck, cosy jumper and thick socks. Liam is cooking our dinner with a little hint of chaos, as is his way, and I have decided to open my laptop and write.
I’ve been feeling exceptionally self-conscious and existential about the act of writing recently. In the weeks after I left my job as a primary school teacher to pursue work in my local bookstore, I found myself being increasingly asked about my spare time – a question that made me feel vulnerable and pressured to answer correctly. I defaulted to saying that I had been using my spare time to work on my writing, which was largely untrue, but tied neatly into the (problematic) productivity culture I had been adhering to since the start of my career. As a matter of fact, I’d been dedicating my quiet moments to rest, almost exclusively – and for that I felt guilty, as if I were doing something wrong. How could writing, something I associate so closely to my identity and enjoyment, not be my top priority when I was faced with the prospect of more time in which to do it?
I read a poem in 2020 that both blew me out of the water and sent me into a deep spiral about the purpose of my writing. It was a beautiful piece by Palestinian-American poet Noor Hindi, called Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying in which Hindi examines, with direct and reflexive observations, the function of artmaking and the erasure that occurs in the moment that poets choose their subject matter; what they decide to illuminate and what is subsequently ignored.
The line that positively floored me was the following;
Colonisers write about flowers…I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
God, even now, I feel it deserves a breath, a beat – a pause to exhale, then read it again.
I often struggle with thoughts about the necessity of my writing - I question the role of my words, stories and perspective. I am essentially, as Hindi posits, someone who writes about flowers, and holding space for that truth involves grappling with a great deal of shame and uncertainty. Reading Hindi’s poem prompted a period of paralysis for me, in which I examined the intention, justification and objective of my writing so severely that in most cases, I simply stepped away from it. I found myself in the midst of debilitating doubt, unsure how to move forward.
II.
A German woman visited the bookstore a few months ago and asked for her book to be placed on consignment. The novel was a memoir of her solo travels around Europe, which she cited as a wonderful way to learn about ‘foreigners’ and ‘exotic cultures’. The language of her blurb was peppered with casual racism and othering. I thought of Spivak. I thought of Hindi. I observed the woman’s confidence - her apparent trust in her vision and voice. I nodded as she spruiked her work with utter conviction. When she left, I had to walk outside and take a moment to breathe.
III.
I worry that my writing has aged poorly. I worry that my piece Routine as Ritual comes across tone-deaf. I think of Vanessa Hudgens and that stupid video she made during lockdown. I think of writers for whom quarantine was an opportunity to refine their craft. I think of wealth. I think of perception, of evolution, of change. I think of my digital footprint, I think of my experience of the world and I wonder who on earth benefits from hearing about it.
IV.
A few months ago, I read Men Explain Things to Me and Other Essays by Rebecca Solnit and began to consider my hesitancy to write from a gender perspective. In my adulthood, it has become more and more apparent to me the many ways in which I have been carefully socialised to tiptoe around and make room for the emotions and actions of cisgender men – the men in my workplace, the men in my social circles and, on occasion, the men in my family. I have become increasingly aware of how I speak around men in positions of power over me, how I soften my opinions with a spoonful of ‘does that make sense?’, laugh at quips I simply do not find amusing – how I tweak, adjust and modify my behaviour so as not to trigger upset or violence from my interactions, and how fucking exhausting and thankless it is to do so.
In her essay Men Explain Things to Me, Solnit states that women are raised in a world that is fundamentally ‘not ours’ and that our socialisation under patriarchy ‘trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported confidence’. Publishing my writing to the Internet means that people (including men) have the opportunity to read it, form thoughts about it and by consequence, form thoughts about me. I’m terrified of my writing being perceived as frivolous because it speaks to themes of womanhood and relationships to the natural world. Men are not the intended audience of my writing as they do not share my lived experiences and yet there they are regardless, in my psyche, in my subconscious – a consistent, ominous presence and threat of danger, even when they are completely invisible.
V.
‘The fear of violence limits most women in ways they’ve gotten so used to, they hardly notice.’ – Rebecca Solnit
VI.
When I do decide to propel my words into the void of the Internet, I wonder what the significance of doing so is, or if it is significant at all. With systems like Substack designed to build paid readership, I harbour a certain sense of defeat when I post my writing online and it fails to make money. I’ve been taught to assign value to my creative pursuits only when they are profitable and as such, sharing my work to the Internet simply to give it a home outside my head feels, at times, utterly useless. Moreover, as a young writer whose identity is in flux and whose thoughts and style are in constant evolution, it is slightly mortifying to think of my ‘paper trail’ – to acknowledge that what I penned 2 years ago may not be something I would choose to write today. To develop and mature online in such a public way seems so deeply personal and yet so communal – a contradiction that often materialises as a restless back-and-forth of internal monologues before I decide I’m being ridiculous (the easiest way out) and quickly press ‘share’. When I spoke to my partner about this particular element of my crisis, he said I was being quite postmodern about it all (in an inspiring, nihilistic sort of way).
VII.
A new email in my inbox, the morning after I post a poem to my Substack.
‘Morning 🙂
This is wonderful Sweetie.
I’m so happy to see you writing again.
I forgot to say that I LOVE the piece you wrote about a visit with Grandma and Grandad. I think I’ve read that before, but I still love it.
Xx Mum’
And maybe, just maybe, that is enough.
VIII.
I always struggled with essay conclusions in high school and university and am experiencing the same uncertainty now – what I’ve noted here is merely a collection of thoughts on a topic that I am continuing to explore and make sense of – I am in no way reaching an end point. I still feel apprehensive about the act of writing; I feel the weight of it each time I start a new piece. However, I know that I want to write – to annotate my experiences here, or in a notebook, or anywhere at all. I want to record what I think and feel and bear witness to, with an awareness of and engagement with other works and ideas that hold me to account and challenge my habitual ways of being. I know now that I can’t make any sort of commitment to writing more ‘often’ because if the creative process has taught me anything about its character, its that the only reliable thing about it is its unpredictability and fickleness. So, I’ll leave these words here, with no promise but the promise that they exist, and I’m glad I took the time to write them.
Photo Credit: Taken on my phone, on a walk on Gadigal country during winter.