Structure and function
My year of chaos
Right now, we’re in that time of the Jewish calendar that’s earmarked for intensive introspection. Last Sunday evening was the first day of Rosh Hashana, and next Tuesday evening, Yom Kippur will begin. I grew up celebrating these High Holidays (as they are called), and resumed the ritual in my early 20’s. Because these holidays are observed on a lunar timeline, they line up unpredictably with the Gregorian calendar. I am not always so good with dates and planning ahead, and often my pre-Yom Kippur preparations feel slapped together: tossing stale rice cakes into Puget sound as my last-minute Tashlich (a tradition symbol of casting away the past year’s regrets), and quickly finding time for reflection amidst an otherwise inhospitable schedule (while justifying any absences to clueless bosses).
This year, late summer crashed especially abruptly into fall for me. Since July I’ve been in the forcefield of one minor catastrophe after another, mostly centering around the house where I am a tenant. There was a false(?) alarm about bedbugs (which I treated too credulously, in hindsight). Then, just after I’d begun pulling stuff out of the black contractor bags into which I’d disassembled my life, some uniquely extreme relationship drama (that I was uninvolved in) blew up. I won’t get too much in the details here, but I will say that the house group chat—usually reserved for communication along the lines of, “Hey could whoever left their laundry in the washer please move it? Trying to do a load. Thnx!”—began to read like a soap opera transcript.
So right now I am feeling extra unprepared for this year’s rituals of introspection. In inviting in early inklings of wide-lens contemplation on the past year, I had a couple thoughts. The first was that this past year has felt unsettled and depleting in large part due to my living situation: could I prevent that in the year ahead? The second was that trying to get organized is, for me, also often a source of depletion (and sometimes also chaos!).
That second issue—chaotic or depleting organizational efforts—shows up in my daily life, as well as in my creative work. I have this tendency to build up complex organizational systems, only to quickly break them down again for something new. (Hello, ADHD.) But I am realizing that I’ve also really worked on that around my writing—especially the past few months, amidst all this disorganization in my living situation.
What I’ve been working on in my creative work isn’t getting more organized, but bringing a lighter touch to questions of organization. It’s often too easy to feel like I’m waiting for the right system or structure to manifest, or that I need to “lead” with engineering one. Recently, I’ve heard two things I needed to hear regarding that tendency. I encountered an aphorism from Carol Maso: “Make notebooks, not masterpieces.” And Selah Saterstrom, with whom I’ve been doing a profoundly helpful mentorship program these past few months, told me, “You just need to get the writing into the container.” What I’m focusing on right now is grabbing a hold of language, instead of trying to make something shiny and perfectly fixed in place. Thinking of projects as notebooks, and thinking of notebooks as containers, feel helpful. There’s a looseness and play there, and also a kind of letting go. I’ve really been feeling (and finding) that surrendering to my relationship with the material I write about (rather than imposing structure externally) also a way of architecting form.
In terms of literal living arrangements, I’m in the process of making some giant, exciting, and frightening changes. (I’ll keep you posted!) There’s a lot that I would like to say about housing and the cost of living (whether monetary or other kinds of “costs”). The book I’m working on is deeply rooted in questions about having space in the world—it is, after all, called Home Remedies—so those themes are on my mind a lot. I’m feeling especially struck by the contrast (or perhaps uncanny overlap!) between the lightness I’m aspiring to around structure in my creative work, and the need I feel for stability around home/housing. Those things are not necessarily “alike” in their function, so I don’t mean to conflate them, but it strikes me that I might sometimes end up imposing a “real estate” mentality on my creative output: that its structure is at a premium, something that one can or should grab onto and maintain, rather than something which is free-flowing and inevitable. I have spent a lot of time learning about narrative structure, for which I’m grateful, but I’m lately reminding myself that this knowledge is something I tap into from inside of the project/process, not necessarily something that I use to draw up blueprints ahead of time.
In that vein, this year I feel surprisingly disinterested in using this cycle of reflection and contemplation to do things like generate lists of all the ways I want to be a “better person.” For me, right now, that feels too similar to building up a new system. I’m honestly not sure what honoring this time will look like for me this year. But I’m still hoping to make contact with the ever-present (but often ignored) awareness that this life is fleeting, which is maybe the main thing I get to touch during the High Holidays. I wonder what I’ll find out over the next few days just by marinating in that knowledge. What will be easier to say “no” and “yes” to? What stories will I be willing to tell—to gather up into containers and notebooks—in the year ahead, when I brush against the knowledge my mortality? What vows will I make to myself, to my work, and to those I love—human or otherwise? What unnecessary burdens will fall away, and what care and focus will replace them?
Offerings
Writing in Unknown Shapes — A course for ambitious writers working in ambiguous forms
Practice Space — Drop-in guided writing sessions
Experimental Practice podcast — Conversations about cross-genre and interdisciplinary work, culture, writing craft, and creative practice.
Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters