Last weekend my partner Ethan and I ripped up what remained of our lawn with a rototiller rented from Home Depot. For hours we turn took turns draping our body over the machine whose tines dug into the dry crust of sod until it softened into soil, kicking out rocks and unearthing random debris left by recent inhabitants: a rusted bit of chain, sheets of black plastic, a tiny amber vial filled with a mysterious white substance. It was a big gas-powered step towards the idyllic garden I’ve plotted out in my head through insomniac spurs of late night mental over-exertion. Until that point, I’d manifested this scheme only in semi-cultivated patches. By the time daylight dwindled and we called it quits, the front yard had a leveled, even appearance. Random spindly tufts of weeds were replaced by a blank slate ready to be filled in with paths and garden beds.
The following night Ethan came down with fever and chills, and the purple line on the plastic at-home COVID test indicated the source of the contagion. I was behind him with milder but still stern and tenacious symptoms, presumably (though not confirmed to be) caused by the same virus—my first time with it, if so. Now I’m writing this through the fatigue I’ve heard so much about, which for me feels like an energetic scantiness, like deficient reserves. It also feels heavy and low to the ground but also lightheaded and buzzy; I’m moving in mental and physical slow-motion.
Even though I’ve taken time off work (tapping my deficient reserve of sick pay) and pressed pause on the garden project, I know I’ve pushed myself too much from inside of this fatigue-cloak. Overactivity is a psychological defense mechanism I’ve used for so much of my life; I am constantly learning or noticing more about how it shows up in my life and how deep its layers go. When I’m unwell, cast outside my regular pace, I often wind up tackling small projects or tasks that are too uninteresting to do when I have more energy, but which hardly count as rest. (In this case, I took a stab at cleaning my inbox and organizing my to-do lists.) And in the quieter space this illness requires, big writing and life ambitions—no longer crowded out by the clutter of other obligations—have crept out of their hiding places, making themselves known even if I can’t act on them immediately: my silent, busy companions.
Some of this is the timing. I’m going to Illinois for an 18-day artist residency at the beginning of October. It’s an exciting and luscious opportunity, and there’s a lot of shit I want to do to get (and feel) ready for it. Some of those things are logistical, like coordinating my arrival and departure. But I’ve also set the residency as a mile-marker for some writing-adjacent tasks like updating my website—things that would instill confidence in my identity as a writer and which otherwise lack deadlines and momentum. Among the many aspirations I’ve smooshed into September (as if this month I could smooth the jagged unfinished edges in all parts of my life), that set of tasks isn’t genuinely urgent. It’s just unsettling to leave undone, especially when measured against the “real writer” experience of an artist residency.
I’ve left a lot of those kinds of things undone this past year. I didn’t submit hardly anything for publication or organize writing workshops or complete a draft of a query letter or pitch reviews or post (many) helpful social media videos about the writing process. I’ve definitely done writerly things, including a few that are/were visible and outward-facing. But those things took all the energy I had for them, most especially activating my own writing practice after being practically taxadermied by chronic insomnia and other symptoms. I didn’t choose to prioritize self-care over other endeavors, but working to heal and create a more functional life was made obvious and necessary by my inability to do much else. I’m grateful for being nudged in that direction, even as some part of me laments putting so much on hold instead of celebrating what it means: that I was taking care of myself.
Though this latest illness might slow me down in new and different ways, I do think the residency will open a fresh chapter where it’s possible to move towards those outward goals without leaving myself behind. When I made out their distant shapes this past week in my sleepy, sick state, I remembered something I recently (re)learned in therapy about the neutralizing influence of shame. The “should”-based narratives and emotions that shame activate stand in for—and block—the primary desires and feelings that are behind it. Instead of feeling motivated to change my situation or to create something, shame causes me to feel bad about not having already done so, yielding forced urgency that goes nowhere (if not pessimism about my inability to change). Even though it presents itself as gritty and realist, shame obscures possibility and capability. It saps action.
Right before I got sick, a mentor and friend gave me a couple older issues of *The Chicago Review*, where I encountered an essay by Georges Perec called “For a Realist Literature,” translated by Rob Halpern. Perec’s essay was originally published in 1962 amidst leftist debates about the politics of literary representation. Perec argues for literature’s capacity “to make the radical transformation of our world appear obvious and necessary.” For Perec, rendering the world’s mutability is more truthful than jaded, cynical assessments about how things are and will be. He writes:
Realism is simply what literature is when it succeeds in showing us how the world works, and when it makes the necessity and the inevitability of our society’s transformation tangible. What we expect from such a literature is clear: it is the understanding of our time, the elucidation of our contradictions, and the surpassing of our limits.
I don’t want to conflate a therapeutic critique of shame with this polemic critique of literary cynicism, but I’m compelled by the ways they are both are invested in our capacity for change. As I gear up for the residency, I’ll be thinking about what kinds of awareness and articulation of a problem (and of potential) open possibility rather than shutting it down. What kinds of truth are big enough to hold the paradoxes of desire and capacity, to hold room for rest and waking pursuits? Big enough to hold the full scope of the creative process, with its deficiencies and interruptions, and also its driving force and stunning potentials?
Thanks for reading, as always.
Yours,
Siloh
P.S. If you are also observing Yom Kippur, G’mar Chatimah Tovah to you! While my observance is going to take an experimental form this year (as it often does), this meditation on change and commitment was influenced by this annual trek of introspection and evaluation. May your reflections be meaningful.
Culture list
Recent reading, listening, viewing, & eating
Sift by Alissa Hattman (book)
Everything Everywhere All At Once (movie)
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (audiobook; I’m slowly moving through it)
Sencha; elderflower and mint tea; chicken broth (drinks)
Offerings
Writing in Unknown Shapes — A course for ambitious writers working in ambiguous forms — I had fully planned to re-open enrollment this summer, but obviously that hasn’t happened. (See all of the above OMG.) I have plans to restructure the course and will be announcing it in due time; in the meantime, please let me know if you have questions. <3
Practice Space — Drop-in guided writing sessions — Same as Writing in Unknown Shapes
Experimental Practice podcast — Conversations about cross-genre and interdisciplinary work, culture, writing craft, and creative practice
Follow me on Instagram — I’m there sometimes
Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters