Now That We Can All Get Married, Let’s Talk About Divorce

On last week’s episode of the podcast Note to Self, formerly New Tech City, they featured a web service designed for couples who want to divorce peaceably, called Wevorce. It’s one of a number of alternatives out there for folks hoping to avoid a litigation nightmare at the end of their marriage. Along with the founder of Wevorce, the host spoke with a man who had used the service with his ex-wife to amicably split. I was struck by the first quote they played of his, which was the opening of the entire show. He said, “Nobody gets married planning on divorce, right? You get married planning on having a home together, having children together, building a future.” This is where I think I may be parting company with most of you, most everyone actually. When he said this, I thought, “Well, I kind of thought that.” I can’t say that I was planning on divorce when I got married, but I also felt like that was a real possibility, something that I should consider just like I would consider any number of other factors in deciding if I should marry someone.

from https://www.reddit.com/r/funnycakes/

This isn’t because I thought divorce from my partner was more or less likely than the other outcome, making it to the final finish line with that same intact relationship. It’s just that it’s a fact of life: some relationships don’t work out. Divorces happen. To lots of people…and, actually, it’s great that people can get divorced. Think about marriage before divorce. I don’t want to live in that world, especially as a woman.

Before the women’s rights movement in this country, it was difficult for women to get a divorce.  They had to prove there was wrong-doing on the part of the husband, they suffered financially to a much greater extent than men, and they often suffered stigma as a divorced woman.  Marriage for most of its history has been a pretty terrible institution for women, turning them into legal property of their husbands, helping to deny land and property rights to women, and limiting their autonomy and choices in life, including protection against battery and rape within marriage.  It’s not really surprising, then, that part of the fight for greater equality for women included the growth of no-fault divorces and, with this, greater access to divorce for women.  Even today, women do worse financially than men after divorce, in keeping with the ever-present wage gap and the fact that women still shoulder more of the domestic tasks, particularly child-rearing, that are unpaid and still frequently undervalued, but it is important to remember this is a great freedom to have – to be able to choose to leave your spouse.

from Someecards.com

So, I found it comforting when I got married that, if we could not make a life together that would be meaningful and positive for both of us, that we didn’t have to stay together. I married my spouse having already considered whether she would be someone that I could amicably split from, could functionally co-parent with, could maturely navigate any challenge with, even the challenge of splitting. You can’t really know these things for sure before they happen, just like you can’t know if your partner will be faithful or will stay healthy, but I had considered them. Maybe this is odd, but, assuming that splitting is a possibility for any couple, don’t you want to pick someone who you think can do it maturely?

Look, I know I’m not the tip of the iceberg here, but my feelings aren’t totally crazy. Part of what inspires my feelings on this topic is that I am just tired of the divorce stigma. Right after I graduated from college, I went on a Sierra Club service trip with my mother and grandmother. It was lots of fun, but one of the two leaders of the trip was a bit irritating. Chief among my complaints about him was the way he talked about his divorce. He’d been divorced for about a year maybe. He was worried that his kids were going to be permanently scarred. He talked about how his marriage had “failed.” I felt for him. I mean, I understand that feeling of sadness and guilt about the acute sense of loss you expose your children to with divorce. But, I asked him if he and his ex were able to co-parent, to get a long relatively well. He said yes. They had a pretty equitable arrangement in childcare. They were both committed to co-parenting. Their divorce had been pretty amicable. Then, I asked him why he though his marriage had “failed.” He looked at me like I was an idiotic kid for asking such an obvious question. (This made me more irritated.)  I hoped that the feelings of scarring his children would subside, and he wouldn’t burden them needlessly with his guilt. Of course a divorce can be a real loss for a child, but it isn’t always something that permanently ruins their life. In fact, it can be harder for a child to have space for their own feelings if a parent is consumed with their own anger, grief and guilt, projecting it onto the child. Harboring that view that you’ve failed can be really detrimental to both you and your kids.

I think it’s fine to feel loss, to feel upset and disappointed that a marriage doesn’t make it to the end of life, but how sad to look at marriage as something that you fail. Just because something ends doesn’t mean it’s a failure. When you really think about it, how absurd it is to think of something as complex and intricate, as nuanced and momentous as a marriage in simple terms of success and failure. I know people who made it to the end of their lives without divorcing that did not have a happy or healthy marriage. Obviously longevity isn’t the only factor in whether a marriage is a “good” one, yet it pulls a lot of weight when we evaluate the relative quality of relationships. I try not to think of any important life experience as a success or a failure, with varying levels of success. What a prison to put yourself in.

When there are children involved it’s certainly harder to sort out the harm that you might be doing. However, in the years since this conversation, I had other exchanges with a few folks who got divorced with no children involved who still talked about their marriages “failing.” I hoped in each case that this was a trope they used in that acute period of loss and sadness that they would let go of over time. Maybe as they got further from it, they would be able to look at their marriage as a complex life experience that shaped them, taught them something, enriched their lives, gave them joy…even if it didn’t always do these things and didn’t necessarily last. It’s a balance between allowing yourself to grieve and express difficult emotions while still gently acknowledging that viewing divorce as a failure might in fact cause its own grief and pain.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gay_Divorcee

I have hopes that this stigma is lifting. I now have several friends who have very happily gotten divorced. Yes, it was sad and difficult in some ways, but they are were pretty happy to get divorced in the end. In the three cases I’m thinking of, these couples did therapy, tried to make their relationships happy and healthy, tried to learn and be open…and it didn’t work. These three individuals all felt relief when they finally said, “Okay, I tried really hard, and now I’m done.” Two of them had kids and were still able to navigate an amicable end to their married relationship and beginning of their co-parenting relationship. So, knowing that divorce is sometimes a good option, an option that leads to greater health and happiness, what’s up with the way that we still talk about it all? I think part of it comes down to the value we place on marriage.

The host of Note to Self commented that, upon learning about Wevorce, she first thought it might make “divorce too easy, that people wouldn’t stick it out because they could just, like, text in their divorce papers or something.” First, of course, the end of a relationship is generally painful, so the worry that we might make it “too easy” is kind of needless. But, more importantly, do we have a vested interest, in our society, to make people “stick it out”? Is there some merit in this goal – to keep people married? Is it like getting kids to eat their vegetables? Is it really good for us? Who does this serve?

I don’t know about you, but over the years I’ve heard a lot of statistics about how marriage is good, not that it’s easy, but that it confers greater health and happiness than the alternative. It’s good for kids!  It’s good for people’s long term survival!  It’s good for general levels of happiness!  Maybe it even makes you a better person. Justice Kennedy explained, in the majority opinion in last week’s decision on same sex marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges, that allowing gay couples to marry gave them access to an ennobling act. Marriage equality allows all couples to become married people – who have, apparently, virtue that unmarried people do not. It allows people access to, to use one Justice Kennedy’s favorite words, dignity that they would not otherwise have. So, marriage is apparently pretty awesome.

from http://www.ariahfine.com and http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/370

Is it though?  Obviously, historically, it’s not so awesome for women.  But what about today?  These stats – about health, happiness, and outcomes for children – are all around. I hear them on the radio, read references to them in magazine articles. They’re often not questioned, just alluded to as fact: Marriage is good for us. Finally, after hearing yet another reference to children doing better in households with married parents, I decided to look this up.  This was essentially my irritation: when you take socioeconomic status, etc. into account, does a kid who has two parents functionally co-parenting compared to another kid with a similar background whose parents are still together really do so much worse? When you control for the impacts of things like poverty and presence of a both parents, does divorce matter much? In other words, if divorce doesn’t necessitate poverty or absence of a parent, does it have to be looked at as necessarily terrible, especially if it makes the two parents happier?

I get that, in large numbers on a societal level, we want kids to have adults who, once committed to a kid’s life, stay committed. We want children to not grow up in poverty. Maybe the biggest boon for kids in two parent households is that it decreases their likelihood of being in poverty. Single parent households are missing one or, sometimes, both incomes. Poverty, it turns out, is one of the worst things for children.  The outcomes for children growing up in poverty are grim in regards to scholastic achievement, lifetime earnings, substance abuse, survival and health. It’s also feasible that marriage keeps people in kid’s lives. Some parents still drop out of their kid’s lives when they split with the other parent. Marriage, on this larger scale, is an odds game. The odds are greater for kids that they won’t be in poverty and won’t be missing a parent if their parents are married. This doesn’t mean, as an individual, marriage is better, though. If you are in a situation where you can split from your partner, both remain as functional parents and ensure that your kids are not subjected to the difficulties of poverty…well, I can’t believe that marriage is better. That’s going to vary dependent on situation.

I take issue with this particularly because it highlights what our priorities are as a society. Should we just tell people to get married and believe some innate goodness comes from this? Or should we invest in social programs, education, and measures that help families mitigate the damage that poverty does to individuals, families and, ultimately, society? This is particularly important to consider because these “facts” about marriage being so great, particularly about children’s welfare, often obscure some problematic attitudes and social practices related to women.

When we evoke the “single parent household” that is supposedly so much worse for children, we are talking about mostly female-headed households.  Do these households do so much worse because it’s just essential to have a dude around?  Or is this because women still earn considerably less than men, and are more frequently left to shoulder the financial and parenting responsibilities for children?  Wouldn’t it, therefore, be more beneficial to change the conversation from how great marriage is for kids to how great subsidized childcare and preschool are, how important quality education is in breaking the cycle of poverty, and a real recognition that among the myriad other reasons to pay women equally for equal work, it is actually in the best interest of many of the children in this country to do so?  And, who knows, maybe if we had real social programs to support families and children, more couples with kids would be able to navigate the stresses of child-rearing and stay together in a relationship.

Additionally, many single mothers were never married to the father of their children.  There is often an undercurrent of judgement toward these women, a sense that these women are morally questionable.  Sometimes when people moan about the decline in marriage, and the inherent value it has for our culture, I suspect that there’s more than a little covert moralizing about loose women happening.  This judgment, of course, is still leveled at unmarried women with children and basically not at all at unmarried men with children.

Moving on to whether marriage is good for adults, it’s also a lot more complicated than often depicted. Men’s health and happiness appears to be more tied to their marital status, than women’s…but even this isn’t something you can easily generalize about. Some studies say that heart disease is less likely in married couples. Some say it’s not.  Some studies say married people are “happier” and may be less likely to report anxiety and depression symptoms.  Some studies don’t.  It may be that women are happier after a divorce than men, but that may simply be a temporary effect, with happiness levels about equal 5 years out.  So, what do we know?  A lot of this is probably variable dependent on each situation.

I don’t want to make light of the fact that divorce can be awful and terrible. (Of course, marriage can be too.) I also don’t want to give the impression that divorce is uncomplicated or easy to understand. On a societal level, socioeconomic status, gender, education, race, these all factor into marriage rates and divorce rates, perceptions of marriage, perceptions of divorce, impacts of marriage, impacts of divorce. It’s a complex subject.  Too often, though, it is simply referred to as merely that tragic counterpart of the sacred, valuable marriage.

On an individual level, divorce is also complicated. Obviously, some people are going to have an easier time negotiating an amicable, equitable divorce. I don’t want to say this is a simple issue, but letting go of a stigma around divorce, letting go of a shaming and simplistic view of divorce as a failure seems like a good thing. In this age of “changing marriage,” I think it’s important to change our ideas about divorce too, to make them more reflective of how life and people change, varying both over time and among individuals.  It’s also possible that with a more nuanced view of divorce, we can get a better sense of what marriage really does for ourselves and our society.

Characters

I would like my characters to do a little more work, a little more of the heavy lifting. I am always having to tell them where to stand, what to say, where to go next. It is very tiring, and I am not even certain about my directions. I think their input would be helpful. I am not a micromanager; I would be open to their ideas, non-judgmental. Unfortunately, they are taciturn and petulant. They require ever increasing amounts of attention and offer little insight, comfort or camaraderie.

“I cannot do that,” they scream when I decide that one of them must join the others on a quest, a mystical exploration that will, hopefully, yield meaning and adventure. “I am not a questing type,” they each tell me, one after the next.

“What shall we do then?” I ask, bitterly, without really wanting to hear their answers. “Shall we all just sit in a room, stewing in our own thoughts, tormented each by our own crises, our own fear and doubts, never reaching out to another, never sharing, never discovering the transcendent power of story, of common, universal experience? Where’s the narrative in that? Where’s the fun?”

“We don’t want fun,” they say and turn their backs on me.

And what can I do? Nothing. So I sit and wait until one of them, finally, tentatively, reaches out. Even then, I am not sure what will happen, if anything, but there is nothing else to do but wait and hope that something will happen.

Impossible

I have been extolled for years by inspirational posters, bookmarks, those little tags attached to bags of tea, to believe that nothing is impossible, that if you dream it, you can make it happen.  Rationally, I don’t believe this.  I know that there are impossibilities in life.  But I am still also susceptible to that fantasy, that American Can Do, optimistic dreaming.  It would actually be a relief to believe that some things are impossible, not simply very, very hard.  That way, I could feel that giving up was the realistic, healthy thing to do, rather than it being a failure of perseverance and vision.

I should see some things as impossible, should just accept that they cannot come to be.  For example, I think there is so low a chance that I will ever leave the surface of the earth, that I should consider this an impossibility.  I have neither trained as an astronaut nor do I want to begin this training.  I am also not wildly wealthy and contemplating a trip on a tourist excursion out of our atmosphere.  In fact, this is extremely unappealing.  In short, I have neither the opportunity nor the inclination to leave the earth, yet I cannot quite rule it out.  It could happen.  You never know.

With all these possibilities, basically anything you can imagine, the world is crowded with unfinished business, crowded with dangling strands of work, languishing and unattended to, like vines in a wildly overgrown jungle, thick with undergrowth, snarled and stymieing.   I would like to clear this out, fantasize about clear cutting, slash and burn, then planting orderly rows of sweet, calm domesticated crops, reclaiming the wilds for order despite the fact that ecology has taught me that that soil, that land, is not tameable in this way, that this scouring, sanitized order leads only to death.  Still, I sort of yearn for these drastic measures.

But, instead, I work.  I sit down despite the mess, the disorder and work on a project that feels impossible, though it is probably only lightly impossible, impossible in the way that every hard things feels impossible – requiring hope and faith that the doubt and confusion is worth it, even if nothing tangible will come from it, even if what I get is not anything that I expected or wanted in the beginning.  In short, it is simply very hard and has no certain outcome.  It would be a relief to know this was impossible, that quitting was the reasonable thing to do.  But, I don’t know that.  So, everyday I sit down to work despite the fact that my work seems thin, poorly executed, cliched and groaning under the weight of my implausible imaginings.

I do this because other people have done this.  They assure me they too felt that it was impossible.  They say, don’t think about the end goal, do the work, experience the journey.  So I try to pay attention to the variation in the days, try to “stay located in the present,” as they tell me to.  And I see there are moments – dizzying, euphoric moments – where everything seems to work, everything flows so naturally.  But I also find that there are other moments where the work seems like a dental visit, all drills and discordant sounds, scratching and pinching, strange unnatural discomfort, always with the deep, disquieting possibility of pain.  And there seem to be far more of these moments than the other kind.  It is very hard to work at something that seems impossible.  So, what I would like to know, then, is how you discover something is impossible.  Do you keep at something until time and death deny your finish?  Or is there some way to discern earlier on that you should, finally, abandon that work and try something that seems a little more possible?

Intermediate Friends

There are those friends, those intermediate friends, who connect me to someone I end up liking better.  These friends are not, in themselves, bad, but I sometimes feel very negative about them.  I am not entirely sure why this is.  Perhaps I could be a bit more positive about them, a bit more grateful.  Take my friend and her ex-boyfriend.  At first, of course, I did not know her at all.  He was my friend, but, through him, I became friends with her, much better friends than I was with him.  Now, he has been her ex for many years.  She mostly doesn’t think about him, though occasionally she may feel a bit contemptuous of him when she hears of one of his foibles.  I would say she feels a very light, remote kind of disdain for him.

I too no longer think of him much, while I think of my friend often.  Though we now live far apart, we both think of each other frequently and fondly, regretting that we cannot see each other more often.  He and I drifted apart, most likely due to the fact that I had become so close to his ex-girlfriend.  And, while I do not have negative feelings about him, I do not have positive feelings either.  Let’s say that I am reserved, that I reserve judgement.  I believe it is because, in falling away from each other, we both secretly wonder if I rejected him or if he rejected me.  There is a trepidation, an overly cautious, gentle aspect to our interactions now when we happen to run into each other.  It is too polite for real friends.

And so it is with many intermediate friends.  There is something uncomfortable in feeling the excitement of this stronger, natural attraction to the new friend in comparison with that person we knew in common but do not regard as highly as each other.  Perhaps it is immature, but, for me, there is some inherent comparison that I make that casts the older friend in a pallid, unflattering light.  Or perhaps I am too hard on myself.  Perhaps many of these situations are simply strained by hurt feelings and small jealousies on many sides.  Perhaps some people just get a long better than others.  Whatever the cause, I have begun to think that I could simply try to see these intermediate friends as helpers, as inherently beneficial, worthy of my gratitude, just not necessarily in the way I expected them to be at first.

Entropy

Chaos, in its own way, seemed extremely ordered. This confused us. The professor asked us to consider entropy as the dispersal of energy. Without hindrance, energy would spread throughout a system, throughout the various microstates of matter that made up the system. The energy, as we pictured it, was evenly spread, not because work was being done to spread the energy evenly, but because that energy would naturally unfurl, move, spend itself into the least restrictive, least arranged configuration. We began to picture the entirety of the universe like this, every bond holding bodies together against their natural inclination to dissipate, to react, to release breaking. All the molecular-level kinetic energy spreading out completely, nothing left to do any work, to hold any of this together, everything dispersed into a meaningless oblivion.

We said, “Wait, isn’t this order, a kind of perfect, terrifying order: a grid of matter with only the faint hum of vibration and the occasional collision of molecules? Isn’t life with its tight coherence of atoms into bodies into potentials, into gradients the most disordered, the most unnatural? How can this be?”

The professor told us we were picturing it wrong. “No, no,” she said. “Don’t think of it as disorder or chaos. This is confusing. Think of it as dispersal of energy.”

But we had long thought of entropy as chaos, as disorder. It was a concept that even the popular imagination flirted with. Entropy was wild and seductive. We too had loved the image of the chaos scientist in black, representing the dangerous, untameable aspects of nature. None of us wanted to picture chaos as the geriatric spreading of molecules into the least restrictive shape, the slow sag of matter into an easy and unrefined body. This was terrifying, like death is terrifying, like the slow inexorable movement toward the extinction of consciousness is terrifying. It was not seductive like the threat of death is seductive, the thrill of just surviving, the adrenaline rush of barely making it.

She tried, in vain, to discuss the thermodynamic understanding of entropy with us, the tempered and nuanced view of a distribution of energy at a specific temperature. She said, “With this approach, changes in entropy can be quantitatively related to the spread of energy of a thermodynamic system, moderated by its temperature.”

We did not listen. We did not want to hear this. We were busy imagining the coiled energy in living beings, the danger of unpredictable reactions that always, always struggled back into relation, into coherence, into life.

And So I Will Not Go to Medical School

There is a reason I loved him
poet and doctor,
wanted to be him,

quietly and without pretension
dismantling the formal and high
language of poetry in favor of something
stripped down and human.

I too wanted to stand over that uneasy divide
between rigorous fact and intuitive fantasy,
one pulling the other, each more
robust than when alone.

I wanted to want that. But I don’t.
So I let go of one dream.
But, if there are finite choices you have in life,

to let go of one can be freeing,
can allow the self to shed just a bit more weight,
to move ever closer to that lighter, truer self.

To Words

There is something so rigid and inflexible –
almost violent or oppressive
about language, the way it requires you to fasten,
to bind your thoughts into something
hard and unchanging
when sensation itself is
the opposite, almost unknowable, certainly
unnameable at times and,
when pinned by language, it flattens –
you lose half of it as you grasp the other,

so mine is a syntax of commas, of endless
dependent clauses
modifying modifying modifying
each phrase wriggling in closer to some
whole meaning, allowing space for the thought,
the sensation to move, to become, if not wholly mutable
not quite so firm, so adamant as the final fixed text.

I write
because I love words despite
their tyranny, despite the exacting pressure
of choosing one after the next, each choice obscuring
all others, demanding fidelity, monogamy to that
one vision. Despite this, I serve them, follow and
supplicate, winnow and winnow
away the meanings. I vow
to words, and to words I give my breath.

What Is

You avoid
and I seek. How tiring
for both of us.
I can imagine 17 ways to see this,
theoretically,
I can analyze your perspective and mine,
our behaviors and the reasons thereof,

but sometimes it is reassuring simply to say
I want this
I need this
and to rest in the solidity of a sensation without
too much examination,
just to be at home
in what is.

in the woods

I write myself keep
one eye closed against the light
preserve my night vision
catch the edge of darker pine against
lighter star dusted sky
alone and the wind
alone and the trees
alone and no one but
this empty land
no birds even
a no man’s land
the brambles, concertina –
barbed and scissored through the air
marking no passage marking
no way back
but this

Journal of the Obvious

I am three months into this experiment, which started as a goal to post every day, or nearly every day.  This changed, in January, to writing everyday without the pressure of posting every day.  This has been, generally, great.  Every book about writing that tells you that the most amazing, wonderful thing you can do, if you are interested in writing, is to just do it.  Just write every day; this alone is transformative and satisfying.  Well, it’s true.  I can’t claim this to be a very surprising or novel revelation.  I am joining thousands of voices before me – much more articulate and gifted voices, no doubt – in saying this.  I suppose that sometimes the most obvious but truest things are the things that bear so much repetition.  (Stay tuned!  Next week, I’ll reveal that exercising 5 times a week really makes you feel better and it’s great for your health!)

It is also nicer – to be obvious again – to write to some purpose.  I just listened to this Bullseye podcast episode with Lynda Barry.  She was discussing how journaling and drawing can be fun to look back on, but not if you just express feelings, disembodied from action, character or narrative.  She told the story of her friend who was so excited to discover a stash of journals he kept from high school – he is now in in his 50s.  But, upon reading them, he was very disappointed.  He said that all he had written about were his feelings.  His description of his disappointment was great.  He said it was like discovering a first hand account of the Battle of Waterloo but written by a monkey.  You didn’t get any sense of the action or descirption of events, it was all just bananas! bananas! bananas!

So, now that I’ve established how great writing every day is, I am going to add the completely contradictory and still obvious observation that it is also sort of awful.  I sit down to write.  I find that I resist even opening the documents on my computer.  I have to, while I mentally prepare to do this, open up my web browser.  This is, as I am sure we all know, a great mistake.  Sometimes I just pull up my blog, allow it to be open in case I need to upload something.  Occasionally this is distraction enough, this satisfies my desire to avoid, and I just dive into my documents and start writing.

More often, though, I really need to look something up, something quick – it’ll-just-take-a-minute quick – something I was thinking about the afternoon before, something that will simply drive me mad if I don’t look it up right now – say the Wikipedia page for Suzanne Pleshette.  Unfortunately, I do not go to Wikipedia and search within in the site.  Instead, I google her name and “Wikipedia.”   This is another mistake.  Now I have her Wikipedia page, but what’s that below?  Her L.A. Times obit?  “Suzanne Pleshette, Sexy Star of Bob Newhart Show, Dies at 70.”  Well, that’s sort of a mildly irritating title, “Sexy Star of Bob Newhart Show.”  Was she?  I guess.  Why not “Funny Star?” my Woman Studies 101 self growls mulishly.  I should probably click it and see if the whole obit makes me holler or if it is just a stupid title.  Plus, when was that she died?  What was the cause?  I have a real need to read this obituary, obviously.  Nevermind that I can get that information on the wikipedia page.  I will definitely get back to that.

I open up a new tab in my browser, dive into her L.A. Times obit.  This is another bad idea.  Now, after a little perusing of the obit, I find myself, almost with no memory of getting there, on HuffPo Celebrity looking at 27 Celebrities Who Don’t Drink.  (It’s bad for your skin, says J.Lo.)  I miraculously avoid clicking any further links here.  “4 Youtube Channels Gay Parents Must See!” (Are there any Youtube channels I MUST see?) or “Tunisia Assures Star Wars Sets are Safe from ISIS” (Whew!  We can all breath a little easier now.)  But, unfortunately, I have to look up Bradley Cooper.  He was first on the list.  I guess he had a drinking problem.  When did he say he stopped drinking?  Was it before he was getting much work?  These are very important questions, establishing a timeline of Bradley Cooper’s life that…is somehow critical right now.  This takes me back to Wikipedia.  Finally, after looking at Bradley Cooper’s Wikipedia page, I decide to just read that Suzanne Pleshette page and force myself – absolutely force myself – to start writing.  Ignoring the buzzing need to look at that other listicle I have just seen, “25 Celebrities Who Are Totally Bisexual.”  I love these titles.

If I am lucky, I really  do open up whatever document I am actually working on.  This is when the really upsetting distractions start.  I have started to make a list of things I need to, in loosely Vipassana-inspired talk, “notice” and let go of, without rejecting but without clinging to these thoughts while I work.

1. William Gibson was so right.  Writing is about ignoring revulsion to my own work.  Part of this is
2. not focusing that much on the bigger picture of the actual work while trying to write a little bit of it because
3. the perspective I have on any project is so critical and negative that it is effectively useless, so
4. it’s better to simply focus on one little bit at a time and
5. trust that the picture will emerge.

Lynda Barry, from that same podcast interview, explained that adults are sometimes inhibited when trying to draw because they approach it assuming they need to know what they are drawing.  She said that many children approach drawing as an experience of discovery – oh, it’s a fire truck I’m drawing!  No, it’s a monster chasing a bumble bee!  Of course, this is true of writing as well.  Writing is thinking, you have to go through the whole, often ugly process, to actually make up your mind, figure out what you are saying, etc.  This is a freeing observation.  And a horrifying one.  It’s terrifying to undertake a long, draining process that will probably turn out very, very differently than you thought.  I, for one, like to know where I am going.  I like guarantees.  Sadly, life and writing are inimical to this attitude.  Too bad for me.

So, to round out my trip through the obvious, writing every day is great.  And sort of terrible.  On the upside, it feels gratifying and clarifying, in a stepped-back, take-a-deep-breath-and-enjoy-the-process kind of way.  It makes me feel courageous and strong to face the cognitive dissonance that is creating something, to take this risk on something that may seem totally pointless later.  Sometimes it’s even fun; sometimes you can create something very fluidly, very easily, just by starting, by getting out of your own way.

On the down side, it sometimes feels very non-fluid, like paving the whole world in tiny paving stones that are wildly uneven and idiosyncratic.  Each paver must consciously be measured and laid down carefully, painstakingly, by hand.  And you always have so much more to do, entire continents of uneven land to work your way over, one frustrating cobble at a time.  I guess you just hope it will be useful or, at least, picturesque when you are done.