Joy is...

Kind of stupid

And it totally matters.

Hitting a wall, both in the morning and on the page some Wednesday not so long ago, when the day began with nothing more unusual planned than the regular plans for such a regular day, but yet there is a newness. And it is ugly.

Ugly, as in the kind of ugly that only anxiety wears. I think of it as a cloak, used as a net, tossed over my person, hooking me like a slow-moving, weak-paddling creature and so disorienting my experience of, my experience. 

This happens with parakeets or puppies when their bodies or cages are covered. They can get a little squirmy and then they settle. I don’t, I shut down.  So I reached for my phone and I checked through my calendar and canceled with apology and maximum shame. I recovered my head. I did not sleep.Nor did I wake. 

I closed my eyes against the glare of the fear, too frozen to pray, too stagnated to start, and so went the day. 

Then, there is my writing. Oh, how is that going you ask? Shut up! 

For my writing is like my body in the bed and my day moving on and going naught. Later that week, and later this one as I do my damnedest to clock in creative time, my eyes will also squint. Instead of against the day - they will blur to block the light of the page and edits and the badly worded words that stain it. Please, Story, I know you are in there. Do come out to show your face, will you? I am so so tired, fatigued really. It is like a plague, the wording and rewording trying to get to you somewhere in all this inability I bring. 

The last few weeks with my creative work I feel like I have stumbled upon a huddle battle field. It just got so HARD! All was well and now I am dragging a knapsack of inadequacy with me everywhere I go. As easy as it is to disregard anxiety as a ‘thing’ or ‘sickness’ apart from one’s personality, I can’t help but think that the ‘it’ is me, at least in part. OK, now whenever I do feel creative or less afraid I DO think that is me. Point being, I want to separate my individuality from the parts that are less than positive and, conversely, align with the emotions that speak well of me. 

Creativity veers towards the kind of person I want me to be - I want to stand apart from myself and look back upon her and think “Ha! They were bunk; you are brilliant, bright, and able.” 

Frozen by freak out, I am the self-stereotype of the incapable woman who has so much “possibility” and yet cannot get anywhere because her “emotions” are more robust and she is forever lost in over-reaction. That identity  and the legacy it has hence become was first taught and second embodied. Like all shame shackles we wear about our necks and around our limbs, they came to us to serve the evil interests of those who stamp others in an act of avoidance of self-actualization. This is not a ‘me’ thing - this rings in a lot of temples and is true to many. 

So where am I? Not my work, but the ‘me’? Where is the ‘you’ doing and the not-doing in all that binary babble? Like, how can we all be in conversation with but not so beholden to execution, speed, nor product? So tricky, for at a baseline those are the basic barometers of the way it is taught to define the worth of … well, humans.

All of that, relatable likely, but also cool if not, does not address why we begin the creative endeavors that trip us (certainly me!) up. Joy. I LOVE to write. I love to love to write. I love some of the words I have written, narrative and thematic aspects I address. The characters I meet, the arguments I find myself making, and/or unmaking. If I let myself, I can forgo ‘good’ and ‘finished’ and be, for even the merest moments,  in the actual wonderfulness of the work. But it is not that at all, is it? It is not the work nor the writing that is so worth crowing about is it? It is the worker - the doer - the creative - the person playing at the page. A person who is trying to  make something fun and interesting, but she herself is actually that thing all the time. The words are the ingredients, the book or story is the recipe, and the grammar is the trimmings.

And yet, in the trenches of the execution and administration of the thing we have started because it was joyful, fun, and interesting it feels like a lot less. I am feeling like it is a lot less. I am feeling as if glee that first started the entire thing left so many moments ago, and I fear I would not recognize it if it returned.

Instead of saying ‘stick to it’ I’ll share what keeps me trying: you can walk away. Walk away. Walking away is very OK, for you can always come back. There is alway Grad School and Paris and New York City. The Alps, the beach, all the happy hours and open bars, investors and auditions. Each will keep being and coming, different from the opportunities that are here now, but cool enough, too. In all those venues, the doer, the person who started the company or the script, they are the magic and perfection: the creative, visionary, prophet.

My book, my simple but seemingly epic book, it will be great but it also can stop for a long time, forever, or a bit - I keep on. I keep on. In so, you may lose the job or work or the great one or even something totally unexciting, but please know it stinks and you may feel that you are fucking up everything. Know that you can stop, even if it once made you happy and even if you are really good at it, too. 

Very last thing, and you got me here hoping for this in myself, too, that not liking something and losing track of the enjoyment is a super good reason to step away, for that is an achievement of something even more essential - agency.