“I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy.

"Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is
strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I
am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”

- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

A typical plight of people who create art is that art stays at the forefront of their minds even when they’re not doing it. Call it obsession, call it focus, call it passion; it’s an all-consuming love, an all-consuming hate, or an all-consuming meh, depending on whether it goes well, poorly, or somewhere in between.

A bird is not a bird; it’s an inspiration for a song. A sunset, not a sunset, but a painting not yet painted. When it comes to self? Well, self is where it gets messy and complicated.

Over the past few months, I’ve been paying closer attention to how I think about myself, my emotions, and what I’ve experienced in my life. As it turns out, it does actually matter how the little voice in your head thinks of you, and letting it tilt too far into negativity (shocker) is not a great thing for your confidence! I’m trying to be better at being a person and a human who genuinely loves herself and is kinder about what she does with her life.

As well as this, I’ve been looking through past journal entries, poems, and book chapters, sifting through all that I’ve created to try and find something. Inspiration? A ghost? The secret to the next great American novel? More likely, it’s familiarity and some sort of drive that I lose sometimes, but what I’ve found instead are pretty words that only thinly veil what I was actually feeling at the time.

“I think if you threw me in

I'd sink to the

Seabed oh so soft

Far below

And my night skies

Would be distant

The paths of stars

Nothing to the currents.”

(Seabed, a poem from 2020, very much about being over-stimulated and sad)

I wrote myself as a plant, as a star, as a sinking ship. I wrote my pain into tied little bows and even more tortured sighs, and the more I read, the more I realized that rather than processing my pain as emotion, I took what I felt and spit it out as words on a screen. Never once was I just what I was— a twenty-something woman who probably needed a hug and a conversation with someone who cared about her more than she needed an empty page.

I turned to writing to do for me what connection should’ve been, or what self-reflection could’ve been capable of. In the absence of someone to rely on, I lunged for a thesaurus and the entry for “self-love” and ended up being told I should put “writing” in its place instead.

And maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you create stuff and have your life figured out and don’t mistake your editor bills for therapy ones. If that’s the case, good for you! Seriously, good for you. The price of a mind at ease is genuinely priceless. If all of that is the case, this piece is probably not for you, but I’m still jazzed that you’re here, and honestly, I’m trying to be a bit more like you.

I want to be able to write and be happy, and to feel things and not feel like I need to create something out of them for the experience to be worth it. To do this, I’ve had to question everything about how I write and how I feel, and how the way society and social media have made me feel like I need to create with an audience to sell it to in mind. In what subconscious ways have I taken the messages of the need for an end-product and how unhappy famous/historical writers often are, and made them my own opinions?

I’ve seen many calls for people to stop calling artists “starving artists,” as it perpetuates the idea that to create, you must always be struggling financially. I’m beginning to think the same can be said for the tortured writer, or if you’re of the Taylor Swift variety, the tortured poet.

It’s an old trope. Think of all the tortured poets and writers you can think of. The Virginia Woolfs and the John Keatses of the world are plentiful. Everyone ends up dead, but writers end up super, duper dead with a bold font and italicized. They’re worse than dead; they’re sad and dramatic dead. They’re dead, and they can speak to us from the dead, and everyone tells us that they died of tuberculosis, depression, but more so, of being a tortured writer.

To be frank, I will not be diving into those two writers and their demises here. It would distract, and there are already brilliant books on both topics. The important thing here is the descriptor of the tortured writer, the idea of someone who writes who is sad, struggling, and misunderstood. Is it possible that I read Keats and went: Actually, yes, my heart does ache, and a drowsy numbness does pain my senses as though I had drunk some hemlock? Probably.

Some people wanted to be firefighters when they grew up, and I wanted to be a writer. Unfortunately, the picture of a writer in popular media is split between Carrie Bradshaw and Edgar Allen Poe, and I’m pretty sure Carrie Bradshaw is still kind of tortured.

“And I couldn’t help but wonder, am I a tortured writer because I didn’t think there was another way to do this?” - Me if I were Carrie Bradshaw

Why can’t I just be human with no descriptor? Why can’t I be made of flesh and blood, instead of being likened to a star, a flower, a wave, or a story half-told? It is true, you can be a person, creator, and your own inspiration, but don’t mistake yourself for your muse and end up putting all of your energy into inspiration and none of it into whether or not you actually like yourself. You can’t write cool shit if your shit is falling apart, you know?

So I come back to this question. Why can’t I write and still be someone who goes to therapy and writes in a mindfulness journal, because writing what makes me happy and what I’m proud of myself about for the week makes me feel better? What if I’m someone who loves her long-term partner and her mom and her cats and her pajamas with iguanas in hats on them and things that don’t always lend themselves to poetry?

I think it’s because in this never-ending cycle of create, create, create, and focusing on the end-product, I’ve become more focused on making things than actually taking a deep look at the thing I’m making and why. Why do I want to write? Why do I want to make art? Why am I writing a poem where it sounds like I’m drowning? Is this the healthy way to deal with this?

Even in writing this piece, I am once more processing as if my brain is a typewriter. Clack, clack, clack, feel my pain. Clack, clack, clack, here’s some content for your feed. Are you looking for the sound of self-reflection? I’m pretty sure it sounds like crickets or the buzz of cicadas in the summertime, with a distant sound of a brain spiraling in the background.

I’ve often returned to Pride and Prejudice as one of my favorite stories, and the quote at the start of this piece is what I feel encapsulates something that must be true of self-love just as much as it may be true of romantic love. “One good sonnet will starve it entirely away.” One good poem will fashion you from person to content. Are you creating or are you using yourself as inspiration without giving credit where credit is due?

You don’t have to be tortured, and if you must be tortured to write, you probably should be spending some time thinking about why exactly that is. Why should you live a life of struggle? Why must your relationship with creating be defined by something that causes you pain or that is more about sharing it online than figuring out why you feel the need to share it with others or why you’re hurt?

When I write Substack posts, I often don’t know how to end them. I used to be better at conclusions, or maybe I just used to process endings more poetically. The moral of this story should be simple. Do something for you today. Not you, the creative, or you, the whatever other role you have, but you, the person who is you.

Call someone who loves you. Talk about things that your readers would find boring but make you smile. Write about why you liked your coffee this morning. Hug your pet. Spend some time thinking about what you want to do for your friend’s birthday without any thought towards what kind of content you want to make of it.

And if you want to, spend some time thinking about what it is about this life of a creative that makes it worth it, and try to leave room for the positive. This whole creative life thing doesn’t have to hurt.

I had never been a poet before, or at least I’d always been unsure about calling myself a poet, though I had written many poems. It’s unfair to think of it like this now, years after the fact, and with the benefit of having lived through it all. I’ve always been unsure about calling myself anything. May it be an artist, a writer, a thinker, a student, a worker, a daughter, a lover, a friend— I shied away from a label, not from being too avant-garde or “defying the norms”, but from not being sure if I measured up to the checklist of requirements involved.

I wasn’t afraid to do the work. I was afraid of being perceived as calling myself something and having the work not be enough or not fit the box it was meant to slip into.

In high school and college, I’d fallen into a group of friends that had specific ideas of what a poet, but specifically a Writer—with a capital W and bolded—was and could be. To them, a Writer was an artist who painted pictures with words, who let their thoughts stain the pages in the name of something bigger than them. Writers took risks that society would deem uncouth or far out and smoked cigarettes, died young, and probably looked a lot like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History1. Think, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but with an academic and vaguely sadistic twist.

It’s a key plot point of this story that they were also really, really cool. Or at least I thought they were initially. They were almost all older than me, wore leather jackets and designer clothes, and talked about philosophy like some people talk about Marvel movies. They knew everything, and their taste in everything was to be envied. They knew the best music and books, were from families far more wealthy than mine, had all the best ideas, and when they liked you— well, cults do tend to have charismatic leaders.

I wanted to belong. There are several stories for another time that boil down to why I did not belong, most reeking of classism, others relating to the fact that I don’t hate anyone that I do not know on principle.

Either way, at the time, I wanted to be part of their group of Writers, and I tried to agree with them and to be the kind of thing that could meet those requirements. I wrote essays about fate, read books about death, lied about my love for Coldplay and the color pink, and spiraled daily about how I could exist in the world and my course of study, and be so unhappy while having a 4.0 GPA. It is the plight of high achievers everywhere to realize that their worth does not coincide with whether they ace their test or not.

I told others that I was struggling, but to a select group of the population, being miserable as a writer is a requirement of the field. “Suffering is necessary for art,” they’d say. And so I suffered and hoped that art would happen.

That’s what you do when you’re trying to be a Writer or an Artiste (yeah, that e is intentional). You attempt to define yourself and match your peers, and go beyond. I tried to do that. I took every genuine interest of mine and tried to sharpen it or hide it, using each as a tool meant to go for the intellectual kill, but I never really wanted what I was after. There is no “gotcha!” moment in an essay. Believe it or not, if you shout into an empty cave, all you hear back is still your voice and never thunderous applause.

Either I was never meant to be the kind of person who found fulfilment in an academic circle jerk, or perhaps the “writers” of my early 20s were right all along, and I could not grasp their greatness. There is also a third option, where I simply didn’t like the view from the pedestal I was supposed to put myself on.

Those who once were my peers in college would not agree with me now, I am sure, but I’m not sure it’s possible to “go beyond” when you’ve never challenged the ideas you find to be self-evident. Even philosophy, even writing, even sex, drugs, Nietzsche, and Hemingway can be a bubble. It is okay to think a lot and write a lot and still enjoy Taylor Swift. I promise. It does not make you worth any less or any more; it simply makes you human.

We humans who write come in different styles, it turns out. Some of us write smut, some of us write poetry, and some of us write long treatises about the financial state of the world. We all deserve to be here.

It is this thought that eventually became a cornerstone belief of mine around age 24. Through my time in college, and then my life after, I learned that neither I nor the world ended if I wrote a corporate email or found myself enjoying a season of Bridgerton. I didn’t have to write the next great American novel to have my existence be worthwhile or for my life to be full of meaning; I didn’t have to know more than anyone about anything.

The world is vast and full of so many people and so many things that you and I will never know, and that is beautiful. To not understand, to not know, to not experience, is just as much a gift as it is to know things. There is no inherent worth in intellectualism; there is nothing one person can do to be more worthy of love or success. Worth is not connected to love, nor smarts; it is connected to your self-worth and your personal opinion, whether you find yourself worthy of your own regard, and that is about it.

I find the same to be true about writing, although I’ve been working hard to dissect the way I think about the way I write and how it sits in my head.

When I was a child, when I wrote, it felt like flying. I could go anywhere, do anything, say anything I wanted, and be whoever or whatever I wanted to be. It was an extension of my imagination and my hope for everything that life was supposed to hold.

Naturally, that’s part of why I wanted to go to college for English. I thought that to major in something I loved so much would mean I would be happy forever. I credit going to college with starting to ruin my relationship with my writing and my relationship with myself. I learned that not everyone viewed writing the same way I did. To some, it was this thing that separated the few from the many. It was a thing of quality that should be gatekept and coveted. I did not believe in that at all.

I do think it can be honed and used for good or ill, but for me, it’s more closely related to storytelling and the ease with which some people can tell their tales. Grammar and spelling have only been standardized for the last 300 or so years. Stories are far older than that, and so is our collective history with them. Writing is more than words on a page; it has more context, and therefore should be able to be many different things at once.

In hindsight, it is not the college’s fault that I broke up with writing, nor the fault of the people I spent time with, nor mine. It was a time in my life when I was trying to find my boundaries and opinions, and found them only in retrospect. I let a lot of horrible things happen to me because I did not speak up, and I have learned the valuable lesson of the importance of being myself, even if others hate me for it.

While this essay has come easier than others I’ve written this summer, trying to find my way back to my more authentic and personal writing style has been hard. I have a lifelong dream of publishing a book, but as I’ve been working through my manuscript and my other ideas, I find they fall flat. Nothing feels the way it did before I started college, and the last time I felt connected to my writing was my time writing poetry.

At that time in my life, poetry was my sole creative outlet. I poured all of my pain, all of my worries, and all of myself into it. It reached the point where it affected the way I wrote my college assignments. The most common compliment/complaint I got in my last year of college was that my essays read too poetically, and my sentence structure strived for melody more than meaning. In this essay, you can probably see some of that residual poetry even though it’s been five years.

I’ve begun to think of writing as something done in degrees. Some writing is soft and meant for your soul, speaking to that intangible thing that only you can know it’s an answer to. Some, meanwhile, is louder. It’s meant for consumption, may it be a work email or assignment, or a story meant to be shared. For me, the two used to be the same. I could write stories and mean them, emails and mean them, words and mean them. Now, I write many things and mean almost none of them, except if it’s something like this essay or the few pieces I’ve written about loss.

That difference is what sings to me from across the great void, from far across the sea of time, telling me to keep trying. Sometimes I can hear my younger writing voice before I pick up a pen, but by the time I put those words onto paper, she’s disappeared.

The best answer I have for it is that sometimes, when someone hurts so much, they take the wounded parts of themselves and pull them inside. They take them out of the rain and out of the heat of someone else’s gaze, and they set them by the fire to mend. Maybe they are forgotten there, left to warm up but never to come home. I’d like to think that in my case and the case of many artists and writers turned from their crafts due to pain or distance, it will be more like the path of a butterfly.

I’m trying to learn how to write about the parts I’ve taken inside of myself in hopes that the stories that I know lie in wait will one day feel ready to come out. There are tales about granddaughters and grandmothers, sisters and friends, adventure and longing, dreams and fate, home and lack thereof, all kept under lock and key.

One day, they will be ready, but until then, I will continue to try to write the things close to my heart into the stories I mean to share, and maybe at some point, they will end up on here.

Admittedly, I’m not sure how to end this essay, but I suppose the main thought is that whatever kind of writer you are, know that you’re meant to be here and that what you write is worthwhile, may it be grocery lists or an epic series.

The trailers flashed between the episodes of my morning cartoons and everywhere around me, people were telling me I had to read the Chronicles of Narnia. This was a problem because I didn’t like reading that much. I found it frustrating and impossible, and I was more likely to try to memorize something being read to me to get out of reading than anything else—one is much harder than the other, but don’t tell seven-year-old Sarah that. Yet, it was Narnia this, and Pevensies that, and “oh Sarah, you’ll love it.”

So though I had barely learned to read on my own that summer, I struggled through The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. By the time the Pevensies tumbled out of the wardrobe at the end of the second book, I had become a reader and decided that Lucy was the best character that had ever existed. I’d never been more excited for anything in my life than to see that movie. To be frank, I probably haven’t been that excited about anything since. Not any of my graduations, not my mediocre prom— although maybe the day(s) I adopted my various pets. Jury is out on my wedding and the birth of my children. I’ll be sure to update this post once those happen in the distant future.

It’s pure magic to watch a protagonist so close to you in age on the screen, and as I watched Lucy step through the wardrobe for the first time, I wanted so badly to go to Narnia, too.

I lived (and live) in Maine, and as she brushed her fingers against the snow-tipped pine needles, I yearned for a place completely beyond my reach. I had pines in my backyard and snow was already on the ground outside the theater, but I didn’t have castles or fauns or beaver huts in my neighborhood. I also didn’t have grand adventures, but that was a whole separate issue.

Throughout the movie, I sat enraptured. The costumes, the music, and the bond of the siblings drew me in, and each of these could all be subjects for another post. I still listen to the soundtrack.

Yet, when it came to the part where they returned home, something peculiar happened.

When I’d read the book, I hadn’t really grasped all that they’d left behind. I didn’t realize they’d grown up and by returning to the Spare Room, they’d lost the life they’d lived in Narnia, and lost Narnia altogether. Sitting with an empty popcorn bucket and tears streaming down my face, I grieved for them even though they didn’t.

Much like this was my first experience with a truly gripping story (Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings would come later for me), this was also my first experience grieving the life that could be lived within a certain setting and it solidified for me the wonder that comes with a setting well developed.

Granted, I definitely didn’t think about it that way at the time. I was eight. It was more like “oh no, not the castle and the dresses!!!! What about the horses???” But I still cried. A lot.

As I’ve gotten older, setting has remained a main interest for me. In every book I read, every movie I watch, and every play I see, setting is one of the major aspects I enjoy the most. It will stay with me long after the story is done, and I see the settings I’ve long since left in my day to day life. Maybe it’s snow on the pines, city streets, or castles but it’s my most photographed subject.

This is part of what me wanted to start when I’m tentatively calling my “Adventure Venues” series. In each episode or part, I hope to dive into a particular setting I’ve visited and the ways in which it inspired me and maybe can inspire other people to write magical, wonderful settings that make eight-year-old girls cry. Or maybe not.

Photos will also be included, as will some travel tips for if you were to go there and some writing prompts that are setting related. Basically, a one-stop shop of inspiration and also hints on where to get some pretty decent wine and snacks when visiting ruins in Sicily.

The first episode will be out a couple weeks from now, but until then you can vote on what the subject should be:

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In May, I began to read Ursula K. Le Guin’s book of essays, No Time to Spare. I’ve never read much of Le Guin’s books. I’ve given Lavinia a try (spoiler— didn’t finish it), considered checking out The Left Hand of Darkness, and ultimately didn’t finish anything from her Earthsea series. When I came across No Time to Spare, I decided to give it a try because I’m often accused of not finishing books that are non-fiction or memoir, and thought perhaps a book of essays would be more my style.

I utterly devoured the book. Either Le Guin’s writing finally decided to make itself at home in my mind, or it is that I’ve entered into a period of my life filled with doubt, introspection, and change that makes essays about cats, narrative, music, growing old, and so much else feel particularly resonant.

The main feeling seems to be that perhaps I, too, have “no time to spare.” To misquote the 2005 rendition of Pride and Prejudice:

“I’m twenty-seven years old. I’ve no money and no [job] prospects. I’m already a burden to [myself]. And I’m frightened. So don’t judge me, [Substack]. Don’t you dare judge me.”

I’m at a point in my life where it makes no sense not to simply go for whatever it is I seem to think I want to do in a given week. In the past two months, I wrote and edited my first novel, got engaged, lost my dream job, and then said goodbye to one of the most influential people in my life forever, a mere three days later. I’m looking at two multi-thousand-mile moves in the next three months. My life is change, and change is me.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of doing something like starting a blog. A blog on writing, on travel, on food, on history, on book covers, on how weird this current existence can be. Usually, I have a good excuse not to, or at least a reason that I repeat often enough that I talk myself thoroughly out of the venture. These days, I don’t have an excuse and have an active interest in distracting myself from things that creep into my head in the quiet moments.

Is it grief or grim recognition of the world and where it’s at? Maybe, yes.

However, if Le Guin could start a blog and write (seemingly) about anything she wanted, why can’t I?

Well, other than the fact that she was and is one of the most incredible writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and is the mother of American Sci-Fi. Who am I in comparison to Ursula K. Le Guin?

I guess I am a 27-year-old cat lover taking inspiration from an 87-year-old one. Stay tuned for blogs on writing, history, travel, food, and whatever fresh chaos I decide is worth putting pen cursor to paper post.

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