Creative Crisis

Dearest Stella,

I miss you. As you’ve told me, you’re taking a break from the blog, and I feel your absence profoundly.

I have thought about writing all week. I have tried to write. Without you on the other end, I can’t remember how to put sentences together. Nothing feels right. Everything is jumbled. The tenuous writing contract with the self has once again been revealed.

When I write, I imagine you listening, and I let myself live in the fantasy, I suppose, that my words might mean something to you, that I might matter. This is the big difference between the Idea of Audience and a specific person to whom one writes.

One of the many things I love about you is that you listen in order to try to understand, not to fashion a tightly wound argument or to show off your knowledge of such and such. We talk and write to share and learn. You make me think; you keep me engaged with the work of living. I look forward to your blog posts like Christmas morning. What will you show me today about this world in which I live? What will you make me think about? What will you change about the day’s make-up so that I discover it anew?

Dawn has been trying to get her students to understand the power of a creative crisis. Seasoned writers know that crises are part of the work we do and that they are necessary for a writer’s growth. We are as much psychological warriors as we are craftsmen.

And yet, each crisis feels as if it is the end of the road, even though each one before felt like the end and it wasn’t.

This crisis, too, feels giant, irrevocable. Yet even as the questions loom— Will our project together end? Will I write again? I know I must find a way to keep this going. Without writing, I lose faith in the everyday moments of my life. The big questions become bigger, and they swallow me. What is the point of bartending if I’m not writing about it and trying to understand the bigger picture? If I am just working and sleeping and using the money from working to pay for the house and gas and electric in the house in which I sleep and then which I leave to go to work?

I have to believe that the everyday has meaning, or rather, I have to do the work of making it mean.

Or what then?

When I suffered from paralyzing depression a few years ago, and my “work” was trying to get out of bed or brush my teeth once a day, one of the things that happened is that the external world was stripped of its resonance. When I’m well and I look at a tree, for example, it’s not just the thing—“tree”—but a kind of visual echo-chamber set off by the particular shade of orange or the slight bow of branches or the bright or muted light that falls upon them. As Virginia Woolf showed us about words in “Passing Russell Square,” these echoes, or non-verbal associations, multiply endlessly. I can neither record nor even consciously articulate the echoes, nor would I necessarily want to. I suck them up like a sponge to water; they expand me on a cellular level, each cell coming alive, fat and succulent with echoes of a life richly lived.

Depression depletes the thing of its resonance. All that nourishment, all that dimension—gone. The thing is revealed as only the thing. Tree. No life attached. And not just the tree, everything—the mug that holds my tea, the faux leopard print blanket that cradles me on the couch, my own skin, others’ skin. Empty shells, hollowed out of meaning.

Let’s fast forward to now, after battling the abyss, after making learning how to Live (with a capital “L!”) my “work,” I re-gained access to the echo-chamber. Miraculous!

The catch, of course, is that the underbelly of nothingness is also always there. Once you see the world stripped bare, the image lingers. Once you see that meaning is an illusion, what then? Some never come back from the vision of nothingness. Sometimes they can’t; sometimes they choose “truth” over “illusion”; sometimes human activity appears too shallow to be re-engaged in. I choose illusion. But not in a Matrix-I-choose-the-blue-pill desire-to-be-ignorant kind of way. No, I choose the red pill and I choose the work of making something out of nothing. It’s the hardest challenge of my life; I could say it’s the challenge of my life.

So today, I choose to write, no matter how difficult. No matter how stupid or worthless it feels, no matter that today I write into the abyss, against the echo of your absence.

I want to let you know how important you are to me. Because I don’t think you know it. No, that’s not true. I think you know it, but I don’t think you get it. How much the world needs you.

All this is to say, take your time, my dear friend. I’m not going anywhere. I will be here to listen when you are ready to write. I believe in you. I believe in us and our Project. This is not just a blog or a book we are making, but our lives. And yours matters to me.

love,
Stephanie