I’m Not Here

If we write to say to the world, “I am here!” what does it mean if we’re not writing?  That we’re not here?

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Where do we even go when we’re not here, wherever that figurative here is?  And if we’re not there, transported elsewhere like the three children following Mrs. Whatsit in a Wrinkle in Time, is there a way back to your here-ness?  How does one drop enough bread crumbs to come back when they’ve taken a period of time to not be in their here-ness?  It’s so hard to come back into being yourself sometimes, as if you’ve locked yourself out of your own house.

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I haven’t been here; here being an imaginary me-shaped space that only we can fill.  I haven’t been inside my me-shaped space for a bit.  If I had to define where I was, I would call it a mental martello.

I once visited a friend in Dublin and while I was in the air, flying to him, the transportation workers went on strike.  No buses, no taxis, no public transport of any kind, so we walked around the city for a week, going anywhere we could get to on foot.  He took me out to the strand to a martello.  They are these squat, stone, circular structures built by the British for defense purposes.  They were worried that Napoleon would invade Ireland, so to protect the coast, they built small forts which could hold about 25 people.  They contain no windows — it’s a solid wall of stone — meant to be able to withstand cannon fire.

That’s what I felt like in the not-here-ness.  I felt like I was in a martello constructed out of ideas; the strength of those ideas more powerful than the person inside them, even if they weren’t necessarily true.  That’s sort of the thing about stones: you can’t argue with them.  They hurt if they hit you, and they’re immovable if they’re large enough.  And circular stone ideas feel the same way.  They keep looping, and their circularness is their power: there is much more strength in a seamless structure.

A martello constructed out of stone ideas keeps everyone else out, and it’s fairly lonely inside, as musty old stone structures usually are.  I’ve always wondered if James Joyce saw the martello he lived in with Oliver St. John Gogarty as a cozy space, keeping the elements at bay, or a semi-prison.

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There are so many times when you can be somewhere and not really there.

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I’ve always written.  Before I could write by myself, I would dictate stories to my mother and she would write them down for me.  And then I went through a phase, like the ChickieNob is in now, where I produced thousands of stapled together stories.  By high school, I wrote an on-going serial — a paper soap opera — that people passed around.  I wrote stories for the literary magazine and articles for the newspaper; I took two writing electives at once.  And then I went to college for a degree in writing and finally graduate school for a degree in writing.  The only time I didn’t write was the first time we were doing treatments, when I was so depressed that I couldn’t type words.

Even now, I write all the time.  I write here, on this blog, and I write on BlogHer.  I write books.  I write short stories.  I jot down ideas on post-it notes or send emails to myself.  I talk out stories into voice memos if I arrive somewhere early, sitting in the car so it looks as if I am just talking on the telephone.  I write during work hours and when I’m starting to fall asleep and even on vacation, working things out longhand.

I’ve written my stories in the margins of other people’s books.  I’m like one of those drummers from high school who always needed to drum on every surface.  And you thought it was just because they were thoughtless or were trying to be annoying.  But maybe the answer is that they had to drum, in the same way I have to write.

The best way I know to hurt myself is to stop putting down words.

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If we’re to believe Malcolm Gladwell, we need to plug away at most tasks for 10,000 hours before we get any good at them.  And even then, we can’t really rest once we reach expert level.  We have to keep plugging away lest the hard work done becomes mushy; too ripe and blackened.

I watched the documentary ¡Cuatro! on YouTube, and in it, the lead singer talks about his decision to push ahead with writing more songs despite the band  feeling at the end of their rope with the previous album.  As they took a break, he continued to write during the month off.  “I think sometimes taking time off feels dangerous to me because I just like playing music, it’s just what I do.  I’m addicted to it.  And what I’ve noticed, what happens to bands that quote unquote take time off: they’re not as good when they come back.  For us, it’s just keep that evolution going.  Let your audience grow with you, and grow up with you.  And at some point, grow old with you.”

I could relate to that desire to create, to not want a break from creating.  And part of me agrees with him; when you take time off — really take time off — it’s very hard to get back into that creation mindset.  It doesn’t feel as natural.  It’s like stepping outside after being inside a windowless stone martello for days; the sun feels too bright, unmanageable.

Later in the documentary, they talk about the strength that comes in numbers, of being part of a band instead of working as a solo artist.  Of having that posse behind you, not only for collaborative purposes and the feedback you get bouncing ideas off of one another; two heads are better than one.  But more the sense that when you step out, when you present your ideas to the world, you are presenting them as a team.

Book writing, blog writing, all writing is a lonely process.  I know there are some people who can group write, but I’m not sure how they do it.  Or if I’d even want to.  But overall, it’s a lonely process where you either believe in yourself and your ideas, or you don’t.

You either write, trusting yourself.

Or you don’t write.

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The problem, for me, is never the writing.  The writing I can do.  It’s the releasing.

The twins raised caterpillars to butterflies, and they finally needed to let them go after observing them for weeks.  It was hard for some of the kids in the school to watch their hard work fly off.  They caught them in their hand again as they floated around, cupped them, saying they wouldn’t let them go.  The twins were jealous that their butterflies had defied capture and were fluttering off someplace else.  But really, I convinced them, where they were in the process was so much better.  Butterflies are meant to fly away, and holding them in cupped hands doesn’t change the nature of the butterfly or what needs to happen.

Even recognizing our similarities, I gave myself another few days to wallow in how cupping my hands around my creation, my work, my life, my ideas was different.  And then, after making it harder on myself than it needed to be, after crouching inside my mental martello and yelling terrible things at myself there, after feeling disappointment in others and frustration with situations and despondency at the universe, I released all of it.

It took me a little more time to flutter away, by which I mean, return to my here-ness, wherever that may be.