Resisting

on blinking cursors and permission to write

The world gives me heartburn, so I stare at a blinking line, watching words emerge and retreat like waves on sand. I rearrange, delete, and sit in silence, cursing their inadequacy.

They aren't enough. They aren't special. They can't fix this.

Meanwhile, planes fall from the sky, and I cancel my flight to New York City, requesting one hall pass to be irrational in this era of collective anxiety. "We can't let them stop us from living," people say, but I think about my friends who worry about the legality of their marriage, their personhood. My friends whose funding has been frozen. My friends who worry about their brown-skinned children existing.

And so I sit, resisting the words inside me, making lists instead:

All the things I do not want to write about:

• Society fracturing, people heartbroken and traumatized, wars here and there, loss of or threat to basic human rights

• My own grief and healing and stories too tender to throw around

• Politics + Religion

All the things I am thinking about:

• Society fracturing, people heartbroken and traumatized, wars here and there, loss of or threat to basic human rights

• My own grief and healing and stories too tender to throw around

• Politics + Religion

[I have never claimed to be fun at parties.]

I have resisted writing for years, so part of this is not unfamiliar.

So to climb out of this rut, I look at my history…

Seven years ago, I quit writing after doing so somewhat publicly in the year after my son died. I didn't want to be a "grief writer." I wanted to be a writer. For many reasons, including my own mortification, I hid away and told myself I had been silly to want such a thing.

In those years of silence, I told other people's stories instead - through film, photography, documentary work. I wrote a feature screenplay. Four years ago, while in edits on that, I returned to a piece about my own life. While tucking my daughter into bed and tapping out letters on my tiny phone screen, words extracted a core substance from my soul - a feeling I couldn't name but burned inside me. Like tongs in the open flame, the writing pulled out that live ember.

“In his life, I was his beginning and his end. So how was he just a moment in mine?”

For the first time, I could examine it, turn it over, and study its angles. In that alchemical moment, a piece of me healed.

I had a taste of the magic, but I wasn't ready to return to the page.

Then I found Melissa Febos's Body Work, and her words stopped me:

"While I sometimes resist the work of writing, I resist my own psychic suffering more, and writing has become for me a primary means of digesting and integrating my experiences and thereby reducing the pains of living, or if not, at least making them useful to myself and to others."

I knew someday I had to stop resisting.

Last year, I tried to return differently. I would write only fiction - no more navel-gazing. Yet I found myself drawn back to my own stories, realizing I wasn't done examining this life I inhabit.

I want to write nonsense. About the straggler goose honking in the sky. About the rasp in my daughter's voice. About how my twelve-year-old mirrors another version of me. About the catalog of my husband's inhales I've collected over nine years. About the infinite universe. I want to write for no reason. I want to write because my brain requires it. I want to write.

When I get stuck now, I remember my documentary years - sitting in strangers' living rooms, being moved by their stories. Every person: fascinating and intricate. Never once did I think someone sharing honestly didn't deserve to take up space. Not everything made the final edit, but every authentic moment shared was sacred.

Last week, feeling stuck again, I returned to Febos:

"Writing is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work that would like to withhold it from those whose stories most threaten the regimes that govern this society. Fuck them. Write your life."

So for anyone else staring at that blinking cursor - remember to write your life. Find your nonsense, your truth, your stories that need no reason. You have permission to tell the stories that live inside you.

Stop resisting. “Fuck them. Write your life.”