There are two things people can’t copy you:
your experience
and your perception of it.
I taught a writing class today at Soho House. It’s probably been where I’ve felt most relaxed speaking about this topic. Speaking about writing with people who value it and know the experience of doing so, is like playing ping pong with strangers where the ball is each of your personal mental health stories. It gets too intimate, too quickly and you can’t stop, nor want to.
No one is yet copying, everyone is coping. Differently. Finding similarities feels more like a synchronicity in modus operandi or books we’ve read.
Writing is as pleasurable as it is painful. Mostly, the process is pain. The result of undergoing it is pleasure. Much like exercise. The relationship we have to it is directly correlated to our inner environment and how we dabble with the things life throws at us. How we navigate through resistance and doing the one things we know will make us feel better. Our desire to create stories, poems, novels or share our thoughts and imaginations in any way, is a mirror of the creative permissions we give ourselves. I believe we have a creative self esteem that differs from our usual day to day confidence. Although that, my brain today tells me, is not to be trusted.
I have been writing a lot lately. The kind of stuff that you don’t know where to put, who will read it or what to do with it. It is also the kind of writing that I enjoy the most.
I am so entranced by the private percentage of my practice and a little nauseated by the public/social media-ey side of it. May you know, I don’t consider this social media. I feel like writing here is like sending things out into the ether. Although my exes can access this ether and find very familiar and unfamiliar things at once. I hope they don’t, but every time I do share parts of them, they do.
So writing is also a practice of ignoring. Of focusing on your beloved, true reader and crossing your fingers no one else is prying. And if they are, I truly hope they can separate me and my work from their experience with me. May they know me as a human in the world, not as the woman in their gaze.
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