please buy my almonds
valuing myself and my work
I’ve just got back from a very cold walk around the reservoir and I’m feeling equal measures of gratefulness and a child-like annoyance that I’m confronting genuinely.
In the wake of getting just a little bit sick and the essential days of becoming unsick and all the mucus that that entails, I am perpetually fated to become a grumpy little goblin. A reclusive, isolated gremlin. Foundationally upset by anything. Easily bothered by everything. And righteously so! Getting sick is like having an evil divine hand reach down from the sky and remind you how little control you have over your big clunker of a body, how easily it can be knocked into an extended bout of exhaustion even deeper than the day to day fatigue of Working For The Man. But it’s not often that I let myself really hunker down in the grossness and the mire of my bitter feelings and I find there’s always something true to be found in all the muck and I’ve decided to let myself get annoyed about it. What a concept!
But first, the gratitude. Since I started this page and subsequently began asserting myself definitively as a writer, I’ve been unearthing a lot of repressed feelings about what it means to me to be a writer and what that guiding urge has felt like throughout my life. I’ve come to the painful realization that so much of my avoidance of writing has been truly self-imposed. Being a teenager (vintage) forced me to reckon with a lot of truths about myself and unfortunately I decided to do very little reckoning and a lot of avoiding. The easiest way to avoid myself was (and is) to stop writing. No matter what I write about, no matter how I alter the practice, no matter the prose or poetry, writing always leads me back to myself. In order to do the writing, the words necessarily move from my noggin, down the back of my spine, shimmy around in my heart for a bit and then make their way to my arm where my hand translates the words into terrible penmanship and utterly naked vulnerability. There’s no avoiding that my writing lives within me and has lots to say about the kind of person I am. I grow comfortable with this self the more I write but I haven’t always felt so capable of getting close to my heart. I’ve spent much of my life running from my passion and how I became the kind of person who needed to do that to myself isn’t so important. Only that I did and I have to face that reality now.
I did all of this running and avoiding and fear-mongering of the self in the face of so many people encouraging me to write. Always I have been told that I am a good writer and that I should pursue it because it fits me. I’m a solitudinous little fellow. I’ve got my plants and my books and my candles. I wear big sweaters and I’m prone to the occasional monologue. I’ve just got the writer’s disposition and the people around me have always noticed it and always tried in their ways to coax it out of me. I never could quite grasp how to explain how desperately I needed to avoid the truths inside of me that spill out when I write. I never wanted to be this gay or this soft or this full of terrible, pulsing need to be seen and adored and loved and desired. The paradox of course is that all my loved ones have done is see and adore the writer in me and he’s had to scorn them for it.
I gave up a lot of years of writing to my self-hatred and I’m doing my best to forgive myself for it, but part of that process is also giving my endless thanks and deepest apologies to those that have seen me and pushed myself to see me too and who I have isolated myself from for that very reason. I have so many people in my corner. I’m deeply lucky for that. I have made it very difficult to support me and my creativity and it fills me with a really difficult joy to know that my friends and my family have never given up on wanting the best for me even when I so stubbornly refused to give it to myself. Thank you to those who have watched me wriggle in the confines of my own self and never once made me feel ugly for it. Thank you to the ones who watch me force myself to say loudly and with feigned confidence, ‘I am a writer’ and haven’t made me feel stupid for struggling to have conviction. Thank you to the ones who have never made me feel like being a creative soul is something to be scorned and dismissed. Thank you to every single person who has seen me pick up a pen with a desire to write and said so, write.
I think of my grandpa and how when I was really young I said I was going to write a book and he asked me every time I saw him for years afterward if it was finished and could he read it when it was done. He passed when I was a sophomore in college and I never got to show him anything I’d written. I can’t live in debt to myself like that anymore. I have to move with my desires and give my passion every available drop of energy that I’ve got. I’m grateful to my grandpa, to my parents, to my friends and to myself for doing the work now, because I have to.
But, well, I’m a little bitter too. As an exercise, any time someone asks me ‘what I do’ or what my profession is, I’ve taken to saying ‘I’m a writer’ first and foremost despite it not being my main source of income (or any income, really) and that my forty hours a week are spent working for an institution I really rather loathe. Because of this, I’ve been telling lots of people I really don’t know very well that I’m a writer. ‘I write books,’ I say when they inevitably ask what it is that I write. And then, I’ve noticed, the almost instant response to this is most often: ‘Can I read one of your books?’ And it doesn’t even occur to the person asking that this is something that maybe they should consider paying for and it’s only just occurring to me that I should be asking these people to pay me if they want to read my books.
This is coming from a place in my heart that is growingly protective of my work. When I write–especially when it is a novel–it comes from a really delicate place inside of me. In every book that I write, there is a center to it that looks sort of like an almond and this tiny little almond isn’t always apparent to me when I start writing a book or sometimes even when I finish it but that almond is a thing inside of me that needs healing. The act of writing the book is placing the almond somewhere deep in the text and everything that surrounds it is an attempt to heal it. Penning a novel is a deeply personal act, one that I have to do in order to remain close to myself and to heal the layers of wounds that are constantly revealing themselves to me. When I write a book, I am giving a form of healing to myself. When I give that book to someone else, I am showing them my open wound and offering them the chance to heal themself too.
If someone were to hand you an almond that could heal an internal wound that you didn’t know existed, would you give them something in return?
And I’d like to emphasize, my first reaction to someone expressing interest in my writing is gratitude. It means the world and beyond to me that anyone sees me living my silly little life and cares what I have to say about being a person. But support, especially when it comes to creativity and artistry, has got to go beyond kind words and interest at a certain point. Partly, this is me calling for others to respect what writing a book actually entails and me calling on myself to demand that I advocate for myself in these kinds of matters. I wish there were a better way to put it but writing is work. Whether or not I take anything from the process is up to me but I have to give a lot in order to make it happen. I wrote and edited my last book in three months which of course sounds like a feat but it took a measure of obsession to get it from point A to point B in that time. When I’m in the book, I will write for six hour stretches at a time if the words are coming to me freely. I am balancing the writing with the work I am actually supposed to get done at my job. But it’s all work. And the end product is something so full to the brim with emotion and meaning and devotion that when I truly sit back and think about it, it feels insane that I should ever let someone have access to that carefully crafted world without some sort of compensation. I don’t like sounding capitalistic! It makes me very sad that we do not live in the sort of economy where I can barter a self-printed copy of a book I wrote for food or rent or travel! But–and it feels so obvious to me now–when you go to a bookstore, you find a book that you want to read and then you pay for it–why should it be any different because you know me?
What I’m getting at, and what my ibuprofen-riddled brain will not allow me to let go of, is that I want people to consider what goes into the art they see every single day. I don’t believe that anyone has ever maliciously tried to manipulate me into handing over a book that I’ve poured life into just because they greedily wanted something new to consume. I am expressing this all through this broader lens of deep gratitude. I am grateful that my work means something to you. The nature of America requires me to ask: how much? Gimme a number. Ball park, as they say (I could never sit still in the ballpark. My dad would pay to get us into Fenway and I’d make us leave halfway through the game out of boredom. You can do the same thing with books, too.) In an era of fast fashion and streaming and poor quality shit being sold at astronomically inflated prices, I’m asking you to consider what a piece of creative work is worth to you. When the artist is dredging up the very depths of himself and clawing at walls of repression to craft something built to heal and connect, can you hold it in your hands and truly see the value in it? I’m asking this of myself, too. I sit here with two books unpublished, racking up rejections from literary agents, a third book well under way, and I have to remind myself too that what I do has value. That my work is worth something.
I’m still working through the endless supply of mucus that my body continues to offer as a solution to my mild sickness. I’ll always be working through the matters of my heart and the ways that I withhold myself from it. None of it comes easy and it wouldn’t be worth it if it did. The healing demands the writing and the writing demands healing. One thing I can confidently say after twenty seven years of shoving my Self into the dark recesses of my body, is that I am a writer. It’s in my blood. And my head and my heart and even all this fucking mucus. Have you considered paying me for it? I’ve got books with little almonds in them that I think you’d enjoy.
jw