Hi.
It’s been a bit of time, I think, since I’ve been here. I’m in a hard season of my life right now, set off by an early pregnancy loss in late September. I’m not really ready to go in depth about it publicly—there’s a chance I never will be, honestly. But I do want to be forthright about what happened—it’s common, it’s devastating, and by not acknowledging it I think I’ve started giving off an ambient, toxic radiation.
The thoughts I had about what pregnancy loss would be like, and the reality of it, are so far from each other that it’s almost incomprehensible. Certainly inarticulable. And it’s put me in a space where I feel this urge to get down words about it. I think this goes back to what brought me to writing in the first place, this need to apply a sentence to a difficult experience with the hope of getting control over it. Or even better, turn it into something “useful,” something productive.
But I haven’t found any of the right words for the space that I’m in right now. In fact, my hardest moments have come from my internal attempts to fight against this lack of articulation. To write myself into a safe place. But even if I were to get down the right words about what I’m going through, it wouldn’t change the fact that I have to go through it. To feel what’s happening in my human body and let it change my life.
What’s funny is that I’ve dealt with this tension before, and I’ve written about this in my book: the urge to use words to get control over a situation and the need, in the end, to finally give in to the experience. An old friend who knows me well recently pointed out my attachment to the “grind,” of forcing myself through routines and hard discipline to “do the work,” or whatever. I like to justify my existence by being productive. But this friend also pointed out that’s not how my life works; it’s not even how my work works. When I wrote Little Rabbit, I talked about it as “something that happened to me,” not something that I did. In fact, I’d intentionally told myself to put aside writing, to focus on maintaining my sanity during lockdown in a one bedroom basement apartment. The surprise of Little Rabbit, of allowing the book to happen, turned out not to just be the process, but the point of the novel. We all want to gain control of the deepest parts of our experience, and we’ll break ourselves trying to do it.
So here I am again, fighting and losing, writing and giving in. It’s a lonely place, but also, I sometimes feel, very crowded.
Reading, Watching, Etc.
Things that are helping me move through this space are Roland Barthes’ The Mourning Diaries, Niina Polari’s Path of Totality, and Lisa Hsiao Chen’s Activities of Daily Living.
I’m also doing the Artist’s Way again. I did it once before—the “contract” in my copy shows that I finished my first round a few months before I wrote LR. I’m trying to take it more seriously this time, so I guess we’ll see what happens.