I have resisted writing reviews of the books I read and the films I watch for literal decades (plural!) now and I’ve just figured out why.
It is not a good reason.
It is because in my mind to review a text is to pass judgement on it, and while I have a healthy respect for my own intuition, I like to reserve the right to change my mind about almost anything upon a compelling argument to do so. I’ve been convinced to find virtue in a great many thing that I initially disliked.
So the idea that I, in my vacuum life, will have some valuable perspective upon my first encounter with a text that can stand the test of time seems silly. I’d hate to write something that I might be ashamed of later.
But
But
But if I don’t call it a “review”?
If I call it a “response”? If I’m merely recording what my own interaction with the text was like? If I’m not saying that the text definitively is or is not worthy? My encounter with the text and how I understood it is much less loaded with judgement, and much more…. observable. I could do that.
I am in desperate need of a brain dump. I have been running around with such frenetic energy that I’ve been in danger of some genuine cathartic explosion, the kind laden with regret. I have yelled at my husband more than once, more than twice, more than thrice… daily…. for over a week. What, precisely, is the matter?
It’s always complicated to answer that. If I knew, with concision, what was the matter, I would amend it and call it good. But patterns are persisting that are eating me up inside. And the pattern, corrosive, is a pattern of what I am not doing. I am not writing. I am not living a life of the mind. Also, principally, I am not banging out an impressive PhD application as I intended. As I committed to, with accountability partners. As I reached out and asked for letters of recommendation for. The shame and self-loathing around my failure to make headway on this application, over the course of the last two (two!) months is substantial, it is also self-compounding, and it is, perhaps, itself, the problem.
I want, more than anything else right this very second, to be a person who can do this. I want to try for it so badly I could go cry on somebody’s couch if anyone volunteered such a service. Unfortunately, I am wired to be intensely sensitive to the emotions of the people around me, and I react strongly to them – which usually means being a peacemaker after a fashion. I do not try to remove problems from people’s paths, but I put energy into making sure they feel seen and acknowledged while they endure them. In general I think this is a good way to be, and I endorse my own behavior, but in my marriage it has gotten me into trouble. Being unequally yoked in empathy and in sensitivity to the emotions of others means that I generally move to accommodate the emotions of my spouse. I generally recognize his emotional state before he does, and I consistently make choices based on avoiding his resentment because, for me, resentment is the most painful emotional energy to absorb. I will recognize resentment from him months if not years ahead of when he will recognize it in himself. This makes it difficult to address, because if I say something head on, he can deny it. So my own resentment tends to build up into an irrational monster that emerges as the crazy lady I’ve been the past few days. I am cranky because I can’t seem to do the things that matter most to me because it is too painful to deal with the fallout of putting down the things that matter most to him.
So, pain either way. It feels like a miserable life. I don’t want to buy into the story that I’m doomed to a miserable life. I have lots of reasons to love my life, and I want to lean into them. There are genuinely a lot of things I love about my life. But this thing – this one giant thing – my need to be a writer, to spend the time it takes to create things with words and to edit them into something cogent, and to find ways to push them out into the world in ways that matter to someone who isn’t me – my husband cannot even comprehend the thing itself, let alone valuing it enough to invest the time it would take. Diverting it and calling it “pursuing a PhD” is easier for him to comprehend. He can see value in a degree (we valued his after all, and it’s proven a sound financial investment), and he can see value in the potential for employment at a University, in my ability to provide health insurance and tuition benefits, and contribute to retirement. He absolutely, 100% cannot comprehend the value in it beyond that. I doubt very much that he has applied any smidgeon of imagination toward what any of it would be like for me. The PhD program, the dissertation slog, applying for jobs, developing relationships, having discussions about things that never occur to him – any of it. Just like I very much doubt that he applies his imagination toward what my day to day life is like now, despite all the time I spend exploding about it. No matter how many times I try to describe what it does to my brain to be interrupted every 2 minutes all day long, how cut off I feel from the world, he insists he’s also interrupted all day long at work and shrugs me off.
I feel so invisible at home. I know there are places where my inner life would be seen and acknowledged and even supported, but I don’t know where to find them outside of universities. I love my family, but they are not capable of loving me in the way I need, and if I do not spend time in places that understand the way my brain works, I am going to break the way an engine breaks when it’s always running in a gear that’s meant for occasional use.
I require the “room of her own” that Virginia Woolf meant to mean space to breathe and to be and to feel the heft of one’s own priorities, to turn them over in your hands and fully admit that they are indeed precious heavy things. Right now I need time, and I need help with the things I’m most ineffective at. (Which, sadly, is most things related to housekeeping…. I can do them, and I can do them well, but I am not fast and I do not find fulfillment in them, therefore I never quite catch up.)
The thing, ultimately, about being a mother in a home… and I think this applies to both working and stay at home mothers, and all the mothers in-between…. is that the kind of work and labor that mothers provide in families is incredibly inefficient. Now, inefficient doesn’t equal unimportant, or unnecessary, but it can be maddening to spend so much of one’s bandwidth and get so very little accomplished with it. Every little need on endless repeat – all the picking the same toys off the stair, replenishing the toilet paper that nobody else seems to think to do, the thinking ahead (or failing to) to birthdays and halloween parties and homework assignments – it would be so much more efficient to do it in a way that wouldn’t meet the emotional needs of the humans as well.
I’ve streamlined a lot of processes in my home. I’ve stripped a lot of unnecessary “shoulds” from my life, and still I am left with days strung together of such jagged fragments. I know that I am made for deep work, and without a seismic shift in how my household functions, I cannot shoehorn it into my life.
There is hope, of course, that it will be “easier” when my youngest is in school all day, which is either one or two years away, depending on the fate of full-day kindergarten, but 9am-3pm is a 6 hour day, not 8, and it’s really only 9am-2pm because the older kids finish earlier, and that would be 25 hours a week, except there’s early out day once a week, so chop at least an hour off – down to 24. Then I can’t spend all 24 of those hours working – I need to exercise at least 5 of those hours – down to 19, and then there’s the email catch up and the budgeting and the housekeeping – which could easily eat up more than 19 hours a week, but could possibly be wheedled down to 6. So maybe, if I’m lucky and insanely efficient, I could squeeze 13 hours a week to work on things I care about – but I work best in giant blocks of time. Like full days. I get into a groove and I’m on fire and I go and go and get so much done. But this literally never works out for me.
Once, years ago now, Renn took all the kids to visit his Grandmother hours away while I worked on my Master’s thesis. I got more done during the two days he was done than I did in weeks of working piecemeal during evenings. Did I mention how inefficient motherhood is? This is part of it – and I don’t just mean being interrupted in a “coming to talk into my face while I’m in the middle of composing an email” way (though that happens every time I try to write an email) – but in the sense that my time is never my own and I’m never free to use it in the way that works best for me and the things I need most to do to work toward my goals. I have to patch it all together with whatever is left and it is heavily, mightily inefficient. I spend a lot of that time trying desperately to get into a frame of mind where I can work or write or think at all. I could not possibly overestimate the discouragement it brings.
So, I’ve arrived at a point where I know big, fundamental shifts have to happen. I cannot keep shoving my own needs in the corner and neglecting them. The resentment that builds toward the people I love most is toxic. But (even if motivated by love) getting my people to be willing to consider inconvenient change is painful. Getting my husband to be willing to financially prioritize my needs has never gone well for me. I’ve quit everything I’ve tried to do for myself since we got married – with the exception of my Masters program, which I only didn’t quite because it ended on its own, but I didn’t use the momentum of finishing toward anything that could have helped me, because his resentment had grown into something that hurt me every day at that point. I know he doesn’t see this, and he certainly doesn’t see his hand in this, and he certainly certainly doesn’t see that things could have gone drastically different directions if he’d been able to show a modicum of enthusiastic support. We’re still stuck in the “I don’t need your permission, I need your support” conversation on rinse and repeat.
Is there hope for me? I have to believe that there is. But will that hope hurt before it heals? Inevitably.
I’m asking the universe, God, and my fairy godmother for words of wisdom and preferably the perfect words for my husband to have an empathetic breakthrough. What would it take?
The Passion of Creation by Leonid Pasternak (19th century)
I’m having the surreal experience of midwifing my friend through his writing blocks when I have more of my own than he does. My writing blocks come down to, really, my incredible thin-skinned-ness. I pour my heart and brain into something, anything, and even my sloppiest work, if I believe it holds any value, feels like putting one of my children out there in the world to be nitpicked or ignored, and it is painful. I don’t mean painful as in awkward, or as in embarrassing, I mean painful as in anxiety so paralyzing that it hurts my physical body to hold it.
If, imagine, I could learn to care less about how my work, especially writing, is received, then I would be incredibly freed up to focus my energy on creating things I want to create. This incredible impulse to care, though, is just one of a dozen ways I am a walking contradiction. Every gift I potentially contain seems to be foiled by an equal but diametrically opposed foible in me. I remember learning about P2MR Brain types, and realizing that while I somewhat appreciate not sharing their particular weaknesses, I am in awe of their strength of being able to be impervious to feedback. The ability to not care sounds kind of amazing to me.
The extent of my self-defeating behaviors is humbling. I trip myself up hourly, at least. Even now, I am staying up too late when I know it will make the morning harder. Contradictions, every minute.
I want and need a place to think and to create. This place is for me. Largely because my memory is proving endlessly fallible, and there are things I do want to be able to recall. This in addition to the heightened awareness of my mortality and how many things I won’t get around to before I am gone. I lost my grandmother this month, and there are many many things I shall never have been brave enough to ask her. I’m glad I have some concrete memories around her death, even if I arrived 10 minutes to late to have been present for it. I still witnessed her color changing, I helped to dress her, I tried to help fix her hair. I need to talk it through with my friend Kim, she’s done this complicated grieving. I also feel I need to interview my aunts and uncle and get their thoughts as they grieve. That’ll be awkward to ask for.
This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.
You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.
Why do this?
Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
Because it will help you focus your own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.
The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.
To help you get started, here are a few questions:
Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
What topics do you think you’ll write about?
Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?
You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.
Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.
When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.
This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.
You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.
Why do this?
Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
Because it will help you focus your own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.
The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.
To help you get started, here are a few questions:
Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
What topics do you think you’ll write about?
Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?
You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.
Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.
When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.
This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.
You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.
Why do this?
Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
Because it will help you focus your own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.
The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.
To help you get started, here are a few questions:
Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
What topics do you think you’ll write about?
Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?
You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.
Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.
When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.
A Poet Is Somebody 