It’s been months since I’ve written anything of substance: something other than a finely tuned cover letter, or an updated resume, or a pleasant-but-boilerplate emailed “thank you!” to an interviewer I’ll never hear from again. The job search has been tough, but the act of writing amidst my inevitable and unsurprising post-grad ennui has proven especially difficult. Even right now, I’m struggling to type, to think, or to do anything other than stare at the wall and eat a mound of oat-and-chocolate sandwich cookies that I bought from the IKEA in Red Hook while on my daily, meandering, three-hour walk through what feels like The Middle of Nowhere, Brooklyn, in an attempt to feel like a productive, or perhaps merely participatory, member of society. I do like to visually experience my community—instead of the interior of my four-walled tenement sublease in the basin of Manhattan—and to experience that feeling of being seen by others, like a nineteenth century flâneuse on a routine promenade. But I’ve been doing so in the same too-tight tank top from college and a pair of thrift store yoga pants with a hole in the crotch. What can I say? I’m in a funk. Someone hire me.
I returned from my research trip in Vietnam and Cambodia a little over three weeks ago. It’s been my instinct to think of the disorientation and general malaise I’ve been experiencing since returning to the States in the new year as unforeseeable, but I’m coming to a realization that the proper course of action when attempting to get one’s life back on the rails after two years of chaos is not to quit your job, nor is it to take up residence twelve time zones away. I quietly knew that to be true before I boarded my first plane. The trip was great, but I left New York with a pit in my stomach; first because of the sheer fright and subsequent panic that any international flight might instill in anyone with an anxious persuasion, like myself, and second, because I felt that I was hurriedly exiting a season of my life filled with relationship troubles, financial turmoil, and general emotional upheaval on dodgy ground. I think I expected an Eat, Pray, Love narrative for myself, and no, I haven’t read the book—maybe that’s demonstrative of my more overarching tendency to go about the world based on wide-eyed assumptions and preconceived notions. This is my first time in Southeast Asia, it will be amazing, it will be like Lost in Translation, I will come to know myself more intimately than I ever have before or ever will, and I will return to The United States a wise and globally-conscious storyteller with several newly-ignited passions and hobbies. I will completely overhaul my relationship with food and exercise and my body, and I will practice yoga daily, and I will come to deeply appreciate all of my Western comforts, and never take them for granted ever again. The voice inside my head is often ridiculous.
If there’s one thing I’ve tried most consciously to do since coming back to New York, other than, unfortunately, dieting, and trying to find another job that doesn’t make me want to off myself and everyone around me, it’s writing. I’ve been hoping to effortlessly fall back into the swing of things, to jot my innermost thoughts and feelings into impeccably crafted short stories personal essays, but I’ve been unable to do it. I can’t write. Not in the sense that I can’t physically string along a series of letters and group them into words and them into phrases, but in the sense that I don’t really even know what to write about anymore, or how to do it in a way that feels authentic to myself or an audience, or even the suggestion of a reader. I haven’t written anything new for anyone else in the world to read in almost a year, and even that piece—a weird, short, and generally unfinished essay about how I hated my job at a museum in Boston—wasn’t great. I did let a mentor, slash friend, slash drinking buddy, slash vaguely I Love Dick-ian figure in my life read an old piece from college about nannying Catholic schoolchildren, but that also wasn’t super well-received. That scenario was quite loaded, but the heart of the issue—the feedback itself—has been difficult to bounce back from. (Or, maybe I’m taking some guy’s criticism too seriously, as was suggested to me by my partner. He’s not a writer, and he’s also not a young woman on uncertain footing in life and work, desperate to find some sort of creative egress for complex feelings and emotions. Or, maybe I’m looking for attention, or validation. I don’t think that looking for those things through writing, especially personal writing, is necessarily fruitless or vain or whatever. I think that everyone who sits down to write memoir has, at some point, wanted a reader, especially one they respect or admire or have a secret I Love Dick-ian infatuation with, to sit them down and grab them by the shoulders and say something along the lines of, “I appreciate your story. Your story is special to me, and I want to thank you for being brave enough to share this part of yourself with the world. You are smart, you are interesting, and for the sake of it, you are a good writer, and that doesn’t have to mean anything outside of the fact that you are good at something, and something that so many people are so very bad at.”)
Mostly, the note I’ve been getting from other writer friends and critics I trust most often is that I don’t write in the current moment enough—that I lose the reader in my meandering reminiscence on a past they aren’t a player in—and that I need to figure out what I’m writing about, meaning the theme or the morale or whatever, before I actually sit down to do it. Or, more realistically, before I finish the essay. Personally, I think I need to figure out what it is I actually want to write about, be it my relationship with my body, my upbringing in the Midwest, my entanglements with men in various sectors of my life and their broader implications, my dead friends, my cancer-addled father, my present malaise in the wake of college (how long after my commencement ceremony can I refer to my depression as “post-grad”?), or deep seated creative insecurities. I can’t really figure it out at the moment. Maybe I’ll experiment, play around with words and with format. I’ll probably use this newsletter as a means of doing so.
I don’t have a perfect concluding point or, really, any idea of a suitable place to end my train of consciousness, so I’ll stop here. Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Carly