“How are you finding happiness right now?” I can’t help it. Every conversation I find myself in recently, I am biting back this question, swallowing it to make room for words that do not upset. I am maintaining eye contact and nodding thoughtfully because I am so very engaged and all the while I am keeping my hands pinned to my sides so I do not grab you by the shoulders and scream in your face “How are you finding any happiness right now? Where is the place for it? How are you holding onto it?”
My god, I feel like my own grip on the very basic principles of joy has grown so weak. We’re at a clean table in a good restaurant eating good food I am blessed to have access to and we’re talking about what shows we’re watching and how we might find love again. On the way here, I walked through downtown in an early summer heatwave past a homeless encampment at the edges of a heavily policed protest against American participation in an overseas genocide. Which thing am I supposed to be present for? I feel I’m losing something either way.
I’m spending these late spring/early summer days pulling at my hair trying to figure out how everyone else is clawing their way through this bloody piece of history. How do you get up and go to work everyday without choking on the need to scream and destroy and unravel into loose thread on the floor? How are you all spinning this loud nonsense into a joy that withstands? I’d like to find joy in the simple things but I am a creature ruled by the complex. Everything I know rattles in my head at an insistent frequency.
I like to think of my writing as a way of making sense of it all. I’m trying to cut a path through all that I cannot control and remind myself what it is I do and why I do it. My therapist asked me recently what my purpose is and I said ‘to write’ without hesitation. Even a year or two ago, I might have resisted this answer because it still embarrasses me to a silly extent. My therapist pushed further and asked what is the purpose of my writing? I am humbled to know that I will always be learning.
I don’t know, I think it’s our job as writers to be able to see all the stringy little wires that connect everything. How each action is the result of a previous action that is predicated upon dozens of histories that came before us, histories that are built upon the systems that human civilization has functioned under. It’s impossible to spin a character without weaving in all these little threads about where they come from and how their place in time and space has made them what they are and what they will do because of these prerequisites. The nature of stories requires an acknowledgment of such complexity.
I overwhelm myself with the possibilities sometimes. I want to write about everything because I tell myself I see everything. Whittling down a story to just a handful of themes rather than unanswerable questions like ‘what has humanity done and what will we do?’ needs to be done with a gun to my head. I have a big ego in spite of all the shame I shroud myself in. I want to be the person who has the answers. At the height of my delusions of grandeur, I believe I can write a book that offers a path toward utopia and my genius is so large that humanity as a whole accepts this path and moves toward it. I don’t even find this funny, I truly carry it like deadweight shackled to my ankles.
But if I’m being honest–and I have to be–I am writing not for the world or the greater good of humanity or any of the things I tell myself I am capable of if I just spin my words into the perfect threads of clarity. What I write is nothing more than an offering to myself. A constant concession that I know hardly anything at all. Every word is some attempt to talk myself off a ledge of hopelessness, a reminder that this is the singular life I get and my paralysis in the face of humanity’s complexity will not bring me happiness and it will not solve all that terrifies me.
The purpose of my writing is to catch an idea in midair and work it into something that shows me why I am hurting. That’s it. It’s selfish I suppose but I’ve been hurt in so many ways I have not yet come to terms with and I cannot show up for the things that I care about if I’m constantly weighted down by these unacknowledged wounds. What I do with my writing is not the purpose but a byproduct. I can take what I’ve created, what has laid out a cobbled path for me, offer it up and hope that it shows someone else the way. If only one person looks into my words and finds a startling mirror into themself then I’ve done all I can.
How am I finding happiness right now? I’m not. I wish I was, and I wish that I could regurgitate my experience in the perfect self-help dialect, that it might hold you over for sometime. Happiness is a choice and one I do not know how to make at this stage in my life. I’m daily coming to terms with the fact that I am still very young and I still carry everything that troubles me as if it is my responsibility to fix it so that it might not trouble another soul. I’m still writing my way into the wound and often I’m just entirely crippled by the weight of the grief I hold for everything I cannot do.
I’m soaking up the wide grins of my sweet friends when I can. I’m looking up at the big sky and drinking up the necessity of my smallness when I can. I’m writing my wounds into something understandable, something lighter and sweeter, when I can. I struggled to write this today, stuck in the fierce vortex of fear. I’ve offered myself a measure of clarity in putting it all down on digital paper. All I can do now is offer it to you all and hope that something in it kissed your sweet little heart and told you there is space for happiness even if the path toward it is ugly and uneven. I’ve hardly learned anything from a straightforward path anyhow.
jw
And it's hard to write about being happy / 'Cause, the older I get
I find that happiness is an extremely uneventful subject
What I’m Devouring
I love folk music with all my heart. At its core, it’s just a different form of storytelling than the kind I do myself. Despite being a double LP, this is some of the most straightforward and simple folk music I’ve heard in a while. It’s not self-aggrandizing or bigger than it needs to be. It’s a collection of really lovely sounding songs in the shape of simple, relatable stories. It’s been filling me up real nice.
Although I do truly love nonfiction, I’ve been on a hot streak with reading pure fiction recently, and I’m reluctant to break it because good stories make me want to write good stories. Simply put. Ann Patchett is a phenomenal storyteller. She does a fantastic job of boiling down all those complexities I was speaking about and making it not digestible (it’ll still sting a bit on its way down) but understandable. The characters in this novel are so wonderfully flawed in the most selfish ways and yet it is impossible not to see yourself in them. This is a gift.
Collaging Round-Up
No collages this week. The burnout is real, unfortunately. I am sort of announcing the soft launch of my Etsy store where I am selling prints of my favorite collages I’ve made so far. I’m calling it a soft launch 1) because I don’t really know if there will be any interest in it truthfully and 2) because I’m scared to care about it. I sold one collage print last weekend at the local artist’s market and it’s sort of indescribable the melancholy-happiness that filled me with. I’d like for the art I make to mean something to people, however broad that notion is, and knowing that someone brought my art home to let the light kiss it on their walls each morning is a joy I don’t really know how to handle.
All that to say, it would make me very happy if anyone bought a print from my store. That’s all. The greedy rivers of digital capitalism are such that I really don’t stand to make more than a few of the dollars I’m charging for these after all the invisible costs, but it really isn’t so much about the money as it is being able to offer something beautiful to someone looking for beauty. Like my writing, I hope my art can hold up a mirror to the thing you didn’t know you needed to see.
Here are some photos I took in Providence this weekend. They make me happy.
I can't emphasize enough how much I related to this. Lately I've felt like I could just scream or explode, that it's absolutely insane for us all to go about our daily lives—work, grocery shopping, commuting, cooking, etc etc etc—while the world utterly falls apart around us. I'm both comforted by and extremely frustrated at the knowledge that we have no other choice. Jumping off bridges doesn't exactly help put roofs over people's heads, or stop bombs from falling on helpless civilians, or bring food to starving people's tables. We can take steps to help others, from volunteering to spreading the word, but in between, it's imperative that we cling desperately to whatever might bring us at least a little bit of joy or comfort. What else is there?