guest essay: on practicing not looking away from life
or, how i stopped comparing my creative process in order to actually write
dear reader,
this week, I bring you an essay by my brilliant friend hannah who I bring up on this publication often. if you would like to revisit the conversation I had with her many a spring ago, it lives here. I’ll be back with writing on my own soon after I finish my weeks of solo service while my colleagues are away at grape harvest.
if you’d like to pitch a personal essay of your own for publication in my newsletter, get in touch. I welcome any and all topics, as long as they’re filtered through your own lived experience.
in the meantime, I hope you enjoy hannah’s wonderful essay on creative comparison.
a recurring thought, during this month I’m spending alone: if it’s just me, I’ve got no one to tether myself to. no one’s talent to pine after or habits to mimic. I wonder — how useful or detrimental is it to always be looking at someone else?
to make it less abstract: I love and live with a very disciplined person, someone who’s startlingly intense in his creative work. nothing is done haphazardly or without a desire for mastery. his latest two pursuits were building a canoe from scratch with very little prior woodworking experience and picking up the drums after not playing them since high school. when he was building his canoe, I wouldn’t see him for days on end. he now drums for a minimum of an hour a day, sometimes up to three.
this is my illusion of his practice, at least: the singular focus, the uninterrupted work, the adding up of the minutes and hours and days spent actually doing the work he wants to be doing. he plays outside our home at a woodshop in town, meaning that his drumming is always out of sight and earshot. from a distance, it looks like everything I cannot bring myself to do: sit down, work, then let myself off the hook. up close, well, I try not to think about what his practice is actually like. I’ll admit: I prefer squinting at it and making up stories, maybe because that’s what I’m supposed to be doing in my own work.
maybe this is how it always is, and always will be, the most trite thing in the world: comparison. for me, and I imagine many others, it often results in an insurmountable inertia, a “why even try” mentality. why even try when I can’t even imagine spending half an hour doing the thing I want to be doing — writing —let alone the three hours my partner is able to dedicate to his craft? why even try when instead of writing I could putter aimlessly around our apartment, not freeing myself from its confines to go for a walk or socialize, but also avoiding my desk, the place that would actually result in me writing?
my partner is currently gone for a month, essaying another strenuous undertaking – thru-hiking the 500-mile colorado trail with no prior backpacking experience. in the face of such an attempt, it would be easy to take the time I’ve been given alone and use it to fuel my tiresome “why even try” mindset. but the distance of his practice is further away; completely out of sight, if not out of mind. and so, I am using this time to interrogate my constant comparison of our creative practices. I am using this time to wonder: what would my days look like if I wasn’t always mirroring or shadowing someone, if I instead allowed the work of writing to draw me in, rather than finding every reason under the sun to avoid it?
there’s another person whose creative gravitational pull has long had me in their orbit: esmeralda, this newsletter’s author, who graciously offered me this space to work out my thoughts on creative comparison. when I pitched her this essay, I knew I’d have to confront the ways in which her writing practice has both spurred me on and stopped me cold. as with my partner, the mystery and fantasy of how she spends her time reign supreme. it’s both a closer and more distant range of comparison than that of my partner. while she may live an ocean away, we’re both after the same craft, while my partner’s is more foreign to me.
instead of considering the facts of what I know her writing life to be — similarly riddled with doubt about whether the time spent not writing is procrastination or just part of the process, or a bit of both — I’m fabricating stories again. goddamn it, against my better judgment, I’m picturing her writing by candlelight like some brontë again, haunting the streets of rīga and finding inspiration around every corner, in every graveyard and gothic church. [an aside from Esmeralda: YES i am riddled with doubt and not as committed to my craft as id like to be and YES, I do indeed mostly write by candlelight like some brontë. i contain multitudes!]
I’m reminded of a feeling I had before she came to visit me in spring green for the first time, an ugly feeling that seemed to be articulated in her voice before I recognized it as my own. imagining the simplest caricatures of our lives — her the cosmopolitan european drinking the good wine that I, an american country bumpkin sommelier wanna-be, could only dream of — I wondered: will she think my life here is too small to be worth writing about? of course, the real question is: do I think my life is too small to be worth writing about?
the answer I guess, as with all truths, finds itself somewhere between yes and no. if nothing else, it’s the life I’ve sought for myself. I’m drawn to the mundane, the repetition of actions, the doing something over and over while being aware of the tiniest changes. it’s this worship of the small that both drives me mad and makes me feel most myself. when I hear someone tell the same story they’ve already told, I listen for a shift in tone, new details, something I missed the first time, or the second, or the third. maybe all I owe myself is the same attention to detail, seeing how my own narratives, are constantly in flux even when it seems like I’m circling around the same idea ceaselessly.
but the days feel so long when there are only the little things to attend to. a recent vignette: I’m in the kitchen, in my blue undies, with the outline of a red lip, checking on the peaches in the oven, wanting them to be more acidic, though I’ve no idea if the jam will be too bitter once it’s cooled. I add more lime juice and zest, let them go for at least another 20, maybe more. I don’t want to rush them, but I also have to laugh: the epitome of my work in the kitchen and in my writing is giving myself seemingly hands-off projects that don’t allow me to walk away. why spend 30 minutes stirring preserves on the stove when you can let peaches turn to jam by themselves in the oven in just over 3 hours? I am lingering, once again, in the space between not done, and done. I may be looking away from the task at hand, letting it stew in its own juices, but I am not fully walking away from it either.
and maybe that’s what we don’t see when we fantasize about other people’s creative practices. we imagine other makers alert at every moment, working furiously, not taking breaks, tearing hair, gnashing teeth, sticking with it. spending all day hunched over at their desk, at their drum kit, taken over by a constant, thrumming creativity. a glorious unmoving portrait of an artist at work, a phantom who toils without interruption. but I’m interrupting them now, my own thoughts and maybe yours as well. I’m interrupting them like the timer on the oven, reminding me to check on the jam, then let it go. to trust that the long hours of nothingness and frustration, the not-making and not-thinking-about, the doing tedious things over and over and over, will make the end result all the more bitter and all the more sweet.
Don’t look away. Keep digging. You and Hannah are treasures. ❤️❤️❤️❤️