Nodding Terms

Writing to find myself

I’m trying not to choke out any momentum in my writing process. My aim is only to keep writing. I am pleased to report that I am doing so nearly every day, but it’s usually not something easily packaged into a newsletter. Recently, I wrote 3000 words on a house I never lived in and the friends I made there and how sweet it is to still be together after all this time. Every time I visit this draft to try and shave it down, I have something to add. I’ll remove 500 words, and write 1000 more. 

It turns out I have a lot to say.

Yesterday, I scrolled back through my old writing trying to piece together something to send. Last week's newsletter started from an abandoned draft. I was able to add to it, but 30 minutes before pressing send I decided to cut out the things I had previously written. Eventually those ideas will make their way to you. They’re rich, but not ready. I take solace in knowing that everything I write doesn’t have to be published now, because I’m in this with you for the long haul. 

In mining the writing of my past, I was hoping to find something profound, or at least something to build on, but there wasn’t really anything ready to publish. I spent over an hour in conversation with previous iterations of myself, visiting with the ghosts of feelings past. I realized I have been hundreds of versions of myself, while strangely remaining exactly the same. 

This deep dive reminded me of my favorite excerpt from Joan Didion’s, On Keeping a Notebook:

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."

And then I remembered another draft I’d written about Joan Didion after her funeral, and I did find something that spoke to me now, and felt worth sharing.

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As Jia Tolentino spoke at the memorial, she gave the most beautiful speech about what it means to understand Joan Didion’s work as a writer. She quoted one of her favorite pieces of Didion’s writing, which also happens to be one of my favorites. 

“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

It’s complicated to be a writer. I wonder all the time if there’s a point to continuing to put down words, just to allow people to peer in at them. It feels exposed. It feels raw and uncomfortable, and I struggle to find a point in it at all. 

When I come back to my writing practice, and back to my reading practice, I am reminded that really, it’s for me. 

I don’t understand myself well unless I work through my thoughts and feelings on paper.. I need to find a through line with my thoughts. In writing down the words I find honesty, truth, and a way forward.

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It’s come to my attention that I am hopelessly hard on myself. I view who I am through the lens of a critic worse than my meanest bullies. I tell myself that I am vexing, annoying and burdensome to those around me. I am working actively to debunk those things, and I only share that to say this: I have a persistent narrative about myself that, because I don’t write every day, I don’t have a steady writing practice. This makes me feel like I am missing the mark, and it has made writing a hill to climb, rather than something to return to. 

I have a narrative about myself that has persisted for some time that I do not keep a steady writing practice because I haven’t been able to consistently write every day. As I flipped through the hundreds of documents of words I wrote over the years, I realized that narrative is false. Despite my worst attempts to stifle myself through unrealistic expectations, I have had a consistent writing practice. I am resolving to be less hard on myself. I don’t want to make it any more difficult for me to do the work worth doing. 

Writing is about returning to yourself, and I’ve never believed that more than I do now. I write to know how I’m feeling, to cut through the ways in which I’m supposed to feel and get to the other side of what is actually happening in the swirl of clouds in my skull. I write to find myself. I write to pinpoint where I am in the process of my own becoming, my own search for what is real and what is true. I write because I always have. I write because I always will.

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