A writing acquaintance, the poet and memoirist Shilo Niziolek, often posts memes she creates using Winnie the Pooh characters to her Instagram account. This one seemed only too relevant for the cycle where I’ve found myself over the past few weeks.
In some ways, I envy people who detach from the world. They don’t concern themselves with information they don’t want to know or hear. They take in news that supports their existing beliefs or affirms their comfort zones. They get their information about the world from pundits’ sound bites and ratings chasing (or more dismally, social media and its unchecked misinformation), and anything that jars them is easily dismissed as being the fault of the media or certain entertainers, influencers, politicians, and whatever groups or individuals are the target du jour. (Those groups often encompass some of the people I admire and respect most or love best in the world.)
I do try hard to keep out some of the noise because I like to sleep sometimes.
In 2017, work kept me so busy I could shut down a lot of what was going on and I was too exhausted not to sleep. It was also the year our property and homes flooded, which consumed my energy for nine months. By early summer of 2018, I emerged from home and work preoccupations to take in all the madness of the world. In June and July, my only escape was to be creative. I did a series of paintings and lots and lots of coloring.
At the beginning of 2019, that wasn’t enough. I’d bitten my tongue, mostly held my counsel, and accepted there were simply people I’d never again discuss certain subjects with. For almost three years, I’d silenced my voice except in the relationships or spaces I felt safest.
For a writer to silence herself is self-obliteration. I couldn’t accept this, but I didn’t know how to regain or retrain my voice. Though it didn’t seem obvious then, a little time and distance has made it perfectly clear why characters I’d known and loved for decades came back to me at that time. Maybe they were my safest place of all. Maybe if I grabbed whatever time I could find to return their voices to them, they would be an answer and a comfort and a way to express myself with compassion, creativity, and honesty.
It’s been quite a journey since. I’m on the sixth novel of what I thought would be one. This writing gave me purpose and direction during a pandemic that kicked off with my being laid off from my job. Over those years–2020, 2021, and 2022–I lost some friends to death, and because of the turmoil in the world or their own pandemic struggles, I also lost (or kept, greatly altered) a few friendships to politics, philosophical differences, and sometimes what I could only see as a violation of the trust and respect needed to sustain relationships in challenging times. You don’t have to agree with me, and it’s a terrible idea to flatter me or lie to me, but if you treat me cruelly, if you use my past trauma, my capacity to forgive, or my creative expression against me, you aren’t being a friend.
Now is now, and I’ve moved on from most of that, but I’ve also faced challenges and struggles that leave me vulnerable to the noise of the world. It does, truly, get in the way of creativity. It makes me unnecessarily question my choices and doubt my voice.
I’m trying, and though I know posting coloring pages seems like I’ve wasted time, those pages mean I was thinking about my characters and how to write them. Or the writing playlist photos, for example–the kind of thing people skim right over unless they happen to see something they like or want to argue about–reassure me that I’ve written, even if it’s only two to three paragraphs a day.
To write is to maintain some equilibrium.
I’ve written.
And I’ve listened to things more healing and sustaining, too.
Most recently, The Neville Brothers, Uptown Rulin’: The Best of The Neville Brothers; Randy Newman, Sail Away and the 4-CD set of Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman.
ETA:
