Over the past month, I’ve been traveling through Thailand, Vietnam, and now Tokyo at the end of my trip. I started off the trip excited and my sense of wonder has only grown, although there have been uncomfortable bits along the way. Notably, I told myself one of my goals on this trip would be to finish another large chunk of my revisions for my current novel.
In my first weeks, I struggled, much like.I have back home, to sit down and get the right revisions out. The anxiety of facing the mountain of my book was felt deeply, although I knew I had to push through. Many writers feel this dissonance or as The Artist’s Way puts it - “the resistance”
Julia Cameron, in said book, writes…
In order to work freely on a project, an artist must be at least functionally free of resentment (anger) and resistance (fear). What do we mean by that? We mean that any buried barriers must be aired before the work can proceed. The same holds true for any buried payoffs to not working. Blocks are seldom mysterious. They are, instead, recognizable artistic defenses against what is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a hostile environment. Remember, your artist is a creative child.
The “resistance” can take many forms and can occur for many different reasons. For me, lately, it’s been a byproduct of many life changes, like moving once again and working more in my other gigs as an artist/educator. Although very fulfilled, I’ve had to carve out writing time differently and adjust my expectations, which I’ve gotten closer to doing and in the last days, I’ve felt a shift. Let’s talk about some of the creative realizations that this shift has brought…
Maybe I was always meant to be a writer or my dedication to stories made this fate more possible.
In Vietnam, I went to a new town for a few days and treated myself to a nice hotel room (for cheap). After an awkward text exchange with one family member, I ended up talking to my mother for a while about her life, my life, what we’ve been through, and how she’s viewed me as soon. She sang me many praises; among them being… “You never really caused any problems and it wasn’t until you were a teenager that I realized how good of a writer you are.”
Although this was a compliment, for many reasons, it had all sorts of undertones that I explore in my memoir. This validation and sense of clarity from my mother was refreshing, but for a long time, I’ve seen things differently. I loved books as a child because they gave me a sense of adventure that I was often protected from as a Black child in the inner city. I started to love writing because I wasn’t given the right amount of emotional space to express myself elsewhere. Telling stories became a life raft, a way to express my dreams.
And on this trip abroad, I’ve realized this more than ever. I tell stories in many ways, whether to my friends with jokes, or how I document my life with videos or photography, or how I use my words to express the political or social things I wish to change. Through all the chaos, whether familial, personal, or political, stories have been a vehicle for life to me. And I take that seriously.
Writing is always one step at a time.
I mostly haven’t felt the pressure to be amazing in how expediently I write or sell my second book after When They Tell You To Be Good. Of course, I hold myself to a certain standard as a child bibliophile and writer, who was dedicated enough to publish a book by 30. What I mean is that I don’t think I have anything to prove to anyone other than myself, and this is precisely why the resistance comes up sometimes for me.
Not having. clear peers or allies can be a confusing thing in such a hierarchical industry. It can cause undue jealousy or false expectations of another artist’s life. We assume they have it easier or their bills are paid with ease or that the publicity means other things are alright. All of this background noise fogs the page when you arrive at it. This is also another form of resistance.
How I recover from this, even on my worst days, is to realize that writing is one step at a time. We do not need to sit down for eight-hour days to write masterful chunks. Nor do we need to squeeze genius into a forty-minute writing session. We do not need to feel healed right away either. But instead, to know, just like life, writing is one step at a time.
Sometimes life does not feel good, but we go through our days anyway. Sometimes we have weeks of wonder that later turn out to be periods of emotional escapism. OR what we sense about the greatness of a passage is accurate. The main point is that progress is meaningful simply for the sake of progress. It gives your future self more material to work with, revise, and learn from. It gives your future self a chance.