Are there days you don’t write? Tell me of the days that get away from you, where you’re spoiled with a room of your own, and at least 500 a year1, but the words still don’t come.
There are days I want to roast myself on a spit. I’m tired of wanting to be smarter. I keep writing down ideas that start and end with themselves. There’s no point in elaborating. I have nothing to say! Unless…
I’ve always been a writer. Which is to say, I’ve always written things down. As a child, I used lists to keep track of my worries and skills. I wrote over 28 different tricks you could do on a trampoline. I chronicled my OCD episodes, which were color-coded by severity. Purple was the worst. I kept an incredibly dry and occasionally amusing diary from ages 8-10, and ended each entry with “tonight I will go to bed.” I kept a slightly more juicy diary from 11-13 and ended each entry however I liked. I wrote two novels in my tween years. 300 pages double-spaced, and frankly, unreadable.
I’ve been a chronic towel-thrower. I lived in Montreal for four years and never learned French. I’ve played guitar for twelve and still don’t know the names of the frets. My mom is fluent in Greek, but despite her best attempts, I’ve stubbornly evaded even proficiency.
Greek class took place in a squat building behind the St. George Orthodox Church. The room smelled like markers, the walls were papered with inspirational posters and cutouts of cartoon children, mouths agape beneath hovering speech bubbles. From where I sat, I faced a blackboard that hung under a poster of a stormy beach, the waves churning a comic Sans quote from God. The same one who giveth and takeath away, and in this case, the one who was letting us learn Greek in his guest house. At first, the class was full of demi-Greek children and their eager, casually devout Greek American parents.
There are only a few years where language is easy to learn. Right now, my brain is one year away from permanence, the point where your neurons cement in their final Medusian posture. There are so many things children are better at than adults: excitement, being double-jointed, language, barter economies, building forts, storytelling. It’s honestly astonishing that we’re still in charge.
Over several months, Greek class dwindled until it was just me and the teacher’s eldest daughter. We were the same age, but she’d gotten the hang of the language a lot faster because both her parents spoke it. I didn’t handle this disparity well. Still, there were things about learning Greek that I loved. I loved that language was a formula. Words perform functions on each other, pronouns dictate a specific conjugation, the sentence structure emerges from adhering to the rules. I liked learning the direct translation of certain words. Fráoules = strawberries. Kounéli = rabbit. Knowing words was good for joke-telling. What did the fish say when he crashed into his brother? I’m psári.2 I liked that, once Greek class moved from God’s backyard into an empty classroom at the University of New Mexico, my mom would sometimes get me a strawberry frappuccino from the student cafe as a reward.
There were also things I didn’t like about Greek class, all of which were personal failings. I didn’t like the irregularities, realizing there was no real logic to the formula I thought I’d finally mastered. I didn’t like that I was the worst student in class, even if it wasn’t exactly a stiff competition. I didn’t like that I was expected to practice outside of class if I was expected to get any better. I faced a similar predicament when I tried to learn guitar.
I don’t play the guitar very well, but I took classes for a while with an old blues guitarist named Doug Rowley. His name always felt like one title, Dagrowley, because the first was never separate from surname. His office smelled like wax and old wood, and was flyered with guitar-related posters and paraphernalia. He taught in the back of a music store called Grumpys, aptly named because he got frustrated with me quite easily. I was nine and resistant to learning Greensleeves, but eager to learn Bob Dylan. Guess which one came first in the syllabus. When he got angry, he’d exhale, almost painfully, through his nostrils, rub his hands against his yellowed jeans, and stick a pick in his mouth; a bullet to bite in the absence of anesthetic. I scraped the strings with my scalpel. I never learned the circle of fifths.
I did eventually master bar chords, although I’ve probably lost most by now. The guitar was always a means to an end for me, which may be what frustrated Doug. I wasn’t invested in learning the instrument for anything but lyric accompaniment. I started writing accompanied songs at 14; before that everything I wrote was acapella, and consequently lacking in structure. I’d sing in the back seat while my mom and I drove to Santa Fe, and she’d complain because I changed the lyrics of the verses every time. Introducing the guitar provided some much-needed consistency to my creative process.
I wrote songs because I was a teenager and because songwriting twitched the same spot as desire. It was the feeling that wrestled me awake in the morning; that I might be able to write when I got home in the afternoon, while my parents were still at work. I was never able to songwrite when someone else was in the house. It has this in common with sexual exploration. Writing a song was like coughing something up. Satisfying, a little grotesque.
I was in awe of the early Spring. The air smelled green, and the sun was up when I drove to school, and I kept waiting to fall in love with someone. Aroused and restless, shifting in my seat to feel the seam of my jeans. It happened eventually.
Writing songs is a perfect way to exorcise desire. I was all lack back then, and so it was my medium of choice. Such a desperate, thirsty, embarrassing stage of life; my teenage brain kept a diligent record of transgression.
I wasn’t medicated until seventeen, and every morning there is some dormant teenhood for me to sedate. The pills make me sleepy with wine, they make me a spectator to desire rather than a participant. Maybe I’d still write songs if I wasn’t medicated. Maybe I wouldn’t write anything at all. My teen self would look at me and think I got everything I ever wanted.
I miss writing songs, but I can’t seem to make space for them. It all feels too oversaturated, too vulnerable. Maybe I’m not unhappy enough, wading in the sleepy SSRI equilibrium. I’m rarely racked with emotion, and when I am it has nothing to do with desire. Songwriting was packed with lust, but the throbbing feels alien now. Maybe it will find me again during menopause.
I write like this now, although it makes me feel like an imposter on most days. In school, I mostly wrote papers with a Methods section. I majored in Psychology because I thought it would be like filling out one long form. I’ve always loved filling out forms because they only ask me things I already know. I finished school and hit submit, nothing more to say.
Now, I find myself at another exit ramp. There are days when I don’t want to write, where the idea of writing feels like plucking through Greensleeves for the tenth time in a row. I feel dwarfed by everything I don’t know and by my inability to articulate the things I do. I have no credentials to present. I cannot, for the life of me, seem to write a decent short story. Each one just turns into a journal entry. At the root, I’m not as worried about being a bad writer, so much as I’m worried I’m not really a writer at all. I’m afraid of my own laziness, my sensitivity to criticism, my penchant for throwing in the towel. I still can’t tell if writing is something I must earn.
On Sunday, the sky opened over LA and coughed up a biblical drizzle. I tried to go to a cafe to write, but all the seats were full and the crowd was frenetic. No one is used to the rain here, so people shuffled around each other trying to leave enough space for the unwelcome wet. We have everything in common, damp and soggy and a little mean. I’m there holding my computer and broken umbrella, meeting pair after pair of unsympathetic eyes. No one is giving up their seat.
I walked back to my car, stopping on the way under a covered outdoor seating area. I tossed down my umbrella and unwrapped the ham and cheese, which was cold and dry and somehow $12. I sat and devoured and watched the rain trickle through the wooden slats of the shelter, and realized the word for this was lucky. My umbrella, belly up, starting to collect water. I thought about Montreal, where it also rains and there is outdoor seating in the summer, and where I lived as a stubborn Anglophone. I miss it fiercely. I graduated in June, but now, I practice outside of class. The water came down at an angle as I rearranged my arms: computer, wet sandwich, book, umbrella. There’s that ache of Spring; it’s a cold rain and the leaves are green. A sudden and unforeseen release of want. ☞
Shoutout Virginia Woolf.
Psári = fish.
i kiss the keyboard u type on
I loved this favorite bike-rider ❤️💕