Weeks ago, someone I love was talking with me about this blog. We were discussing what (and who) and how, and why, things are catalogued here — the differences in writing when you know it won’t be read (journaling), versus when you know it will, and when you know who will read it versus when you’re never really sure who all may. We revisited that same conversation today and so I find myself here, in the trappings of a meta cycle — publicly musing on the layers of publicly processing, which by its very nature hobbles one’s transparency, despite the clear desire to (publicly) share oneself.
It has always seemed a nearly impossible part of writing, to me: the balancing act in the public nature of it. Writing is not only what one chooses to say, but perhaps even more largely, everything one chooses not to.
The first thing I ever wanted to be was a writer. I remember clearly both things — the intense identification with the calling, and the clarity of the moment when I knew I could not be one. An unbearable realization occurred to me: what I wanted to say, and who might (surely would) read it. I was very, very young then, but my feelings about the subject haven’t changed much. Some day I may overcome that obstacle, but I am honest with myself that it seems unlikely. Vulnerability — and perhaps most honestly, comfort in revealing myself to not be how others expect, or want me to be — has never come easy to me. I have spent my life defining myself by what others want me to be. It is not easy to unlearn.
This space is not meant to be a container for all parts of my life; it’s meant to be a container for my work. But to pretend that my work is untouched by my life is absurd, if not somewhat obscene.
What the balance is between those two things in practice, I don’t yet know.
I’ve disappointed my own expectations post-commission, and rather than uninterruptedly completing something start-to-finish I have instead returned to this piece, already nearly a year into its own iterations. I find that I go through distinct phases with this piece, working on it intensely for long stretches — days or weeks — before finding it utterly unbearable, and feeling unable to look at it again for months. I relegate it to a drawer. Then the cycle begins again.
It feels important and necessary to document it, and simultaneously I am not ready to write about it. When I don’t write here each week, I find myself disappointed. So much of what I’m working on (and through) isn’t captured, as I try to parse the time I have away from my 9-5 into competing demands; all of life on one side, and art on the other. Choosing to spend time documenting instead of making is often a very hard choice to make. The weight of this work for the last few weeks has wrung me out a bit, and I have no desire to try to write about the process. Today, in fact, I am agitated, dissatisfied, and my mood is foul. Today, I am finding myself here somewhat spitefully.
It’s hard enough to discuss grief processing even in a general, unfocused way: a quilt for heartbreak, for loss, a quilt as representation of absence. And the details, honestly, even I have a hard time looking at directly; articulating them conscientiously, meaningfully, does not feel possible. Loss is universal; grief is isolation.
It’s been a week or two now of this quilt on my wall, this quilt I have been making physically since last September, but in many ways so much longer. It felt, at first, encouraging to find myself motivated to bring it back out. But I am finding it time to take a break again. Nothing about how this work appears on the wall right now is set; there are so many things it needs. I won’t know for certain what those things are until I put things together, put them up, look for a long time, and then perhaps take them down and back apart again. I am trying not to rush. I am trying to remember that grief will not be rushed. Not after a year, not in a lifetime.
It exhausts me.
