I am a Rock.
A mix of conversations and soliloquy from the last two weeks and a new goal.
Somewhere in the past six months, my confidence fell out of my pocket like a forgotten bobby pin slips behind your bathroom sink. However, unlike a bobby pin that randomly reappears months later to your small delight, my confidence was not resurfacing. In fact, it began to steal other parts of me away with it in silence. My writing skills were the next thing to disappear. I didn’t get why this was happening, so I tried to retrace my steps and figure out what had gone wrong. Surely I had done something to scare off my ability to write.
Self-loathing and the way down.
A few months ago, I started a writing circle with a friend from grad school in which we would each write something and exchange it via email. Then we would meet up once a week virtually to discuss what we had written about, making sure to explain why we had made x, y, and z choices. Up until this year, I had only ever exchanged my academic writing with my peers for peer review and edits. I didn’t think this would be any different than what I was used to doing for classes, subtracting the classroom setting.
However, when I started exchanging work with my friend (who had a background in creative writing), I noticed immediately the way she could channel her emotion into her writing in a way that I could not do. I noticed that she was part of her writing in a way that I was not part of mine. I’ll say it: her writing was significantly better than mine. Her work read as sophisticated and wise. Not to mention that she actually had a strong voice. She wrote like a wizened old woman who had lived nine lives and spoke from centuries of wisdom. UGH. Suddenly, my silly little rant-filled essays felt juvenile and misplaced, like if I had stumbled out of a high school level language arts class with five paragraphs about parallel parking and submitted it to the New Yorker. (The irony is not lost on me—I am aware that this whole essay is reflecting that exact pattern of me whining about life. (LEAVE ME ALONE.))
But there was something else that was making me lie in bed and stare at the ceiling while hugging a pillow. After reading her work and returning minimal edits (I had grasped at straws because I truly saw nothing to critique or correct) it became clear to me that she was living and breathing her work. She treated this like it was her craft. Her brain was thinking in a way mine could not. She was stringing together sentences and conveying thoughts and feelings and creating characters, and little universes for each character. The creativity was astounding. I thought I was living on the creative cutting edge when I wore my blouses backwards to work.
Looking down at my work, I confronted how I compiled my bevy of complaints about my nine to five over and over. No characters. No plot. No anything. Just me, complaining into the abyss that is Microsoft Word in 12 point Times New Roman, single spaced. That was it. What was I doing sending stuff like this to people? We held four of our writing circles, and I wrote two pieces. One of them was a short piece in the form of a list (where I complained about my days and being a monotonous wreck), and the other was a short story about birthdays and centering women aging. I finished the first without too many negative thoughts…and then the second piece sent me into an identity crisis. (TLDR, I realized all the characters in the story were slivers of me at different ages, like if I had been sliced into pieces by a Time Machine/shredder. Rereading the story during editing was too trippy to process and I had to stop writing it because I did not recognize that they were all me until my friend pointed it out.) I concluded the writing circles and started using that time slot on my weekends for going on chaotic walks.
I was stomping around the city fuming because I couldn’t write an original character. And then I was despondent and standing in the shower with the boiling water slapping me in the face because that is the natural next step in the toxic piscean emotional tradition. Then I was indifferent; I crouched down and stared at my accumulated shoes on my floor because I had not built a suitable shoe rack yet, and staring at my children splayed out on the floor reminded me of yet another thing I had failed at. And then I was all of those things at the same time, which strangely left me in some sort of emotional hangover, so I sat in bed and watched Sex and the City for a few days as an emotional palette cleanser.
To clarify, I didn’t want to be my friend or compete with her. She did her own thing and was clearly incredible at it, and I wasn’t a fiction writer. What bothered me was the way I had to tear my hair out to write anything that was not an academic paper. After obtaining something as pompous as a master’s degree, you would hope to be decent at what you were trained to do, and you would hope to be able to demonstrate practical applications of said skills in other ways outside of academia. But nope! Here I was, with no sense of self in my writing, and nothing to show for myself but a few essays that all revolved around me complaining, which is an exhausting emotion to encounter in writing over and over. My work did not feel enjoyable, and writing always reflects on the hand that guides the pen, so I guess I was adding to my list of complaints with myself. So far the list said 1. creatively stunted and 2. seems really negative.
The worst part of this was that I was realizing that deep down, not even I liked me. If writing was this intimate window into my brain, then I was not a fan. Once I thought it, I couldn’t unthink it. I figured if I didn’t like me in my writing, no one else was going to like me, so I started pulling some essays off of the Internet, and left them in drafts, and in some intense cases, I deleted the drafts entirely from the internet and my hard-drive. I even tried dramatically tearing some pages out of my Moleskin, but the stupid thing is really well made so it didn’t budge. Slumped over on the floor of my room, I winced at the two fresh paper cuts that the Moleskin had left across my palms as its form of defense. Now not only could I not write, but my existing writing was trying to distance itself from me.
A bunch of maybes.
So that sums up the first steps down the path that led me down a Mariana Trench level hole of hyper awareness of my own shortcomings as a writer. Full transparency, I blocked my own Substack url from myself (yes, this literal website that you are staring at right now) to not look at my own work. I unblocked four days ago. I had to intervene and do this so I didn’t do something I hoped I might regret later. I knew my next target would be my old work brimming with high energy and hope from when I was convinced that I would be a writer for some fashion magazine somewhere: the essays I wrote at my writing internships. Part of me was itching to hunt them down and wipe them off the internet. But the angel on my shoulder reminded me that maybe one day I would find my old online work cute.
I dreaded writing anything new. I would go to coffee shops, sit aimlessly by the window, and aggressively swirl chai latte after chai latte, crushing the cups with white knuckles while demanding that the universe provide me with some divine inspiration. Then I would open a new Word document and type the word “the.” Then I’d stare at the rest of the blank page for what felt like forever, highly disturbed at the fact that now I had to decide how to fill the rest of the space with my thoughts.
So seeing as I was going down a dark road emotionally, I chaotically did the thing I never let myself do, which is to pay a visit to my archive folder on Google drive. My Google drive is a cemetery of drafts on drafts on drafts that I have never finished and will never circle back to. They date back to when I was maybe fourteen years old and I refuse to look at them; when I do, I feel disoriented. Seeing my own errors in writing, grammatical mistakes, and tacky syntactical choices gives me the worst ick, and I latch onto those superficial details because it is easy to do. Maybe it is because I can read the work and hear the voice of my younger self reading it back to me. Maybe it is because younger me was writing and speaking from a place I refuse to revisit because it is too painful to think about and ignoring her is by far the easier thing to do. Maybe it is because reading my old work confuses me and I am not able to tell if I hate my younger self, or if I simply hate what she went through. Maybe it is that rereading and revisiting those unfinished works makes me react explosively in a way I cannot pin down or explain effectively, so I choose to just hate everything about them. Maybe it is because the more I revisit my essays, the closer I get to younger me’s brain, and the closer I get, the more I know I might wish better for her. Maybe it is because I know deep down that younger me’s brain is not far off from my brain today, and that connection is something that makes me feel weak and soft. Maybe it is because I am not sure where current me and younger me got separated, and imagining where we lost each other gives me a headache. Opening that door again means opening floodgates to anger that I have to process…and I really don’t have time for that. Nor does it feel like it’ll be immediately productive. All that to say, I briefly peeked into the archive, and remembered how much I hated younger me’s grammar, and her annoying enthusiasm for fashion and womanhood. I managed to not delete anything.
Maybe current me was finally realizing what the required level of vulnerability was for decent and sincere writing to flourish. I didn’t have that capacity. I couldn’t see where my ability to write was anymore. I was too busy building walls in my brain to put off having conversations with myself.
Maybe I was actually as emotionally avoidant as my former therapist predicted back in 2021. However, she was saying that in reference to me avoiding other people who tried to get close to me and telling me that it was a defense mechanism towards external triggers. Avoidance had not been described to me as something that could be done internally. This begged the question: can we avoid ourselves? Is that a thing? I was definitely doing it. Could I survive like this, or was I a ticking time bomb? Could anyone around me tell?
Maybe.
The Muse is gone…but the Muse is also Me… Aka I meet the Caterpillar of Soho.
Lately, I have gotten into the habit of walking around Soho and popping into stores with no purpose or sense of direction. I find this much more agreeable as opposed to sitting at home in silence wallowing in self pity, which I find embarrassing. On the bright side, I have a burgeoning sense of direction in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, I do not have the funds to walk around there as much as I do. Regardless, I walk there enough to recognize some of the artists who sell their work on the sidewalks and street corners. I thoroughly enjoy talking to people when I am out and about and alone, so I went up to an artist who I had seen a couple of times sitting in a folding chair next to some photo prints. He was a photographer selling prints on some special woven non-toxic cotton paper, and all I knew was that I couldn’t afford any of it. I asked him some basic questions about his art, like what was the inspiration for X piece, was there a smaller version of Y print available, etc. He responded in a very direct French way (yes, he also had an accent, and I told him I spoke a decent amount just to brag). Finally I asked him if there was anything in particular that he looked to for inspiration. He very confidently declared, “I just look inwards.”
“Oh?” I was taken aback by how matter-of-fact his response had been. He didn’t need to think about it. He just was this way and owned it. “I am my own muse. My muse is in my brain. He is who I chase,” he continued. I nodded slowly but didn’t get it. “So your muse is an ideal version of you, and you are chasing…yourself…for photo inspiration?” I clarified. “No, like, I have a muse, and everything I can imagine is the Muse, and my muse is myself. But I befriended my muse. Otherwise my muse goes away. So you have to cultivate a relationship with your muse and your craft. Otherwise you lose it.” I responded, “I see,” but I didn’t see. Catching my bullshit immediately, he asked, “you create, yes? If you ask this, you must be some sort of creative, yes?” I leaned back on my left leg and started stretching the calf of my right by rocking back and forth on my heel, which is what I do when I am stalling to think. “Well, I mean hmm what a question… maybe in a technical sense I could be seen as a writer, but I don’t necessarily tell people I do that–” He raised a brow. “So you either write or you do not.” “Well no–” I retorted– “It’s not that easy. I don’t write anywhere or for anyone, and I don’t get paid for it, like it’s not my job or career. I used to have a blog but I don’t tell people about it–” I stopped when I realized I was rambling. I looked down at my toes poking out of the front of my sandals. Looking up, I sighed, “I guess I ask this because I haven’t been able to write anything for months, and I don’t know that I can create anything. You clearly are creating beautiful things, so I figured I’d ask.”
“Bon.” He whipped out a cigarette and offered me one, which I politely declined. He then gestured for me to sit, but as he had only his one folding chair, I went to the other side of the sidewalk directly across from him, inspected the steps of the nearest stoop, dusted it off a little bit, and sat, adjusting my skirt to not flash people.
He took a very long drag of his cigarette and I waited intently with my tote bag in my lap, feeling like we were roleplaying as Alice and the Caterpillar. He began, “You say you cannot write or create. Do you mean you literally cannot write a single thing down, or do you mean you do not like what you are creating?” I nodded, hugging my knees. “I don’t like any of it. It feels disingenuous. I lost whatever made me be good at it.” He looked at me intently. “Maybe you don’t like it because it isn’t honest work. You are not being honest with yourself, and your art is suffering because of it. Maybe you are your own obstacle.” What is it with the French and being so direct with their analyses? He wasn't wrong. “Okay, then how do I achieve that? Or how do you do that with your work?” He wound his hand in a circular motion as he spoke. “We come back to my Muse. He is me. I am him. We are friends. I feed that relationship and it allows me to be inspired without shame. I feel the feelings I need to create. I free myself.” I nodded again. “If you are not one with your Muse, or yourself, or place limits on what you can be or what you can create, you will never be satisfied.” I leaned into my knees and groaned loudly. “I guess I need to find my muse then and befriend her.” He cleared his throat and corrected me. “The muse is in each of us already. Just be willing to connect. Otherwise, you will encounter more frustration. And you won’t create.” He shuddered. “Beaucoup des problemes.”
“D’accord,” I replied and nodded. He nodded back. That was that. I got up and thanked him profusely for the advice and the good chat. I then lied to him twice. First, I told him that the next time I passed by I would purchase a print. Second, I told him I would go and work on my relationship to my Muse. I said goodbye and chose a longer walking route back to the train and tried to imagine meeting my muse along the way.
So according to him, losing the muse was a surefire way to lose the skill or lose the art, so this meant I was running against a clock with limited time to fix this. But what, did I scare my muse off or something? Where the fuck was she? Was she in my head somewhere? Was she fucking HIDING? I have a big ass head, she could be anywhere in there. Me being the visual thinker that I am, I began envisioning a woman who looked like me walking next to me, standing with me in the kitchen and stealing bits of tofu off of my plate when I cooked dinner, sleeping next to me when I got into bed. She was comprised of alternating images of me: me on my walks, me doing my routine blow out, me roller blading down a driveway at ten, me writing in a notebook at fifteen—and all of a sudden I was imagining my younger selves walking with me. It was like I was a mother with 27 children, but they were all mini mes. Oh god. I came to a hard stop in the middle of Little Italy in front of a shop window full of cannolis. Was my Muse actually a younger version of me? Was she some hybrid of my inner child merged with current day me? I was not in contact with my younger selves, so that concluded my first brainstorming session on how to reconnect with my Muse as a fail. I stumbled the rest of the way to the train.
What did I have to do to make her talk to me? How does one cultivate a relationship with their muse and craft? I didn’t consider writing my craft. I am not sure I have one. I also do not talk to myself.
I guessed that now I had a place to start from. If I was following the Caterpillar outside Rand McNally’s philosophy (I forgot his name), then I had to respect myself enough to speak better about my writing. Maybe speaking to myself more kindly in general was a more pressing directive. Maybe this was why my muse was pissed off and left. Maybe she felt disrespected. I could not blame her.
Did she like me?
Imagining an abstract thing like a muse in the form of a human woman was confusing me, and it was getting harder to think about my Muse being this separate entity when I felt that she shared my likeness. Now all I could see was myself looking back at me, like if I had cut myself in two, and I was two halves trying to hold hands. Or I was at the mirror, looking into it but avoiding my reflection’s gaze. I couldn’t shake the idea that this other half of me was looking at me, trying to get my attention. She was urging me to acknowledge her.
Did I like me?
This was a lot. I could also just choose to not write again and repress all of this. I could just ignore myself.
But the more I sat with the theory that I was my Muse, the more it saddened me to see myself split in two and unable to connect because of many thick walls that I had personally built up brick by brick. I was also getting a splitting headache from this mindfuck, because the more I thought about wanting to write, the more I was encountering the thing I did not want to do: address my younger self. I knew that finding my specific way back to writing required intimacy with myself.
More than wanting to be able to publish something new soon, I wanted to know what it was like to be in touch with myself. I knew there was more to this than being able to create honestly. It was about skeletons in my closet and compartmentalizing myself into oblivion until I felt nothing and was an isolated speck. Emotionally, I was in a high security level fortress. But I was—I am wincing as I write this—lonely.
Maybe it wasn’t the end of the world if I said that I missed myself. And I do. I miss myself. Younger me. Child me. Teenage me. Maybe no one is actually judging me for missing me, and for admitting that I don’t know myself that well. Whoever She is and wherever She has been in the last decade or two, (when I was repressing her and shoving her away from me in order to feel safe) and whatever she thinks and dreams about, and whatever she loves—I wanted to know all of it. I want to know her. I want to care. I want to hug her and apologize. But finding her is not that simple.
I have been obsessively laying bricks down between me, myself, and I for twenty seven years without pause. Jumping into a lion’s den sounds much safer than trying to reconnect with myself, but I think I am ready to address whoever is on the other side of the wall—if she still wants anything to do with me. Assuming she is still waiting for me and willing to forgive me for shutting her out and abusing her in myriad ways. I can only hope.
Let’s find my fucking muse and find something genuine to write about then. J'y vais!
"I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died
If I never loved I never would have cried
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
I am a rock I am an island
And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries”
- Excerpt from “I am a Rock” by Paul Simon, 1966.