Out of Office
Starting this newsletter was the easy part...
Writing: Eniweh Yuh Tun Maka Juk Yuh
Why is it so hard to write? Why is it so hard for me to write? I ask myself this question at least daily. Here I am, living my life, observing the world, and like sunlight shining through parted clouds, I have an idea. Sometimes, just a germ of an idea. “You should write about it, Jda,” I tell myself with excitement. And just like that, the clouds return. The sunshine is gone. And another day of me not writing. Not doing the thing I claim I need to do.
When I started this newsletter, I wanted it to be about my cultural reflections and my journey as a writer. But the latter is so much more personal, and I worry about how it will “age.”
But I also know that it’s okay to change, in fact it’s encouraged and necessary. (For example, Facebook reminds me of my decade-old thoughts and musings, which elicit something akin to embarrassment. But it’s only a fleeting embarasment because I recognize that I still did the thing I set out to do: share my views with whomever would read them. Now, however, the same goal inspires trepidation. Why? Is it the changed medium? Am I the changed medium? The questions continue. This is how I stop myself before I even begin. This is how I talk myself out of doing the thing that I claim to need to do.)
I know enough about myself and about this work that knowing why it’s difficult won’t make it less so. As Gwendolyn Brooks so rightly obsevered: “There’s no muse whisperig in your ear, telling you what to say. You have to work at it.”
The Myth of Perfectionism
People often claim perfectionism as a way to explain their attention to detail; as a way to say dem ting nuh chakka. But perfectionism’s insistence on meeting exacting self-impoased standards is really a stealthy manifestation of the fear failure (which is ultimately a fear of rejection). I no longer describe myself as a perfectionist when it comes to the difficulty I have with publishing my work because I know, at the root of these standards is being afraid to be vulnerable, to fail in public.
But what does public failure look like for me? By what measure will I determine that I have tried and failed? If failure is the act of not achieving one’s goal, and my goal for this newsletter is simply to publish my writing regularly, the only way I can fail is if I do not try. And so, by my own measure, I have been failing for the last two months—and quite publicly—precisly because I have not been trying.
A Rose By Any Other Name
It’s Good Friday. The horoscope advice I’ve gleaned from social media tell me that this waning moon is important and that house it’s in has significance to my decisions, so I best be about my business. No more trying, just doing—the two are in fact the same.
Gwendolyn Brooks ends her reflection on writing with: “Writing is a delicous agony.” It’s ice cream when you’re lactose intolerant. Or spicy food when you have IBS. Or certain kinds of sex.
I’m making a new resolve: to remember that not trying is failing. I need also to remind myself that I do not need to be unfraid, that I can still be afraid and do it anyway.