First, a quick repeat of the intro to the previous posts in this series, ICYMI:
I’ve been off Substack for just over a year now, because I’ve had bigger fish to fry. By fish, I mean essays, and it’s not so much frying as lots of stirring and mixing and baking and defrosting and baking again and baking again and slicing and dicing and simmering. One of those essays is becoming a fully fledged book, and I just arrived a few days ago at a one-week writing residency, where I’m immersing myself in working on it. I’m keeping a daily journal as a kind of warm-up practice, and I figured, why not share it?
Here are the diaries from days 0-1, day 2, day 3, and day 4. Onto day 5!
DAY 5.
Finally, a good night’s rest. I feel like a whole new being today, and a lot less saggy and puffy. It’s my second-to-last full day, and I’m like, “let’s DO THIS.”
I pull cards, as usual, getting “courage” and “gratitude.” Gratitude’s an easy one. I’m already grateful for the balm of proper sleep. I’m grateful I have all day to write in whatever ways I want, again. I’m grateful to wake up with zero access to cell service or wifi, again, and fairly certain that the inability to stuff my head with the dizzying voices inside my shiny phone screen at the start and end of every day is, like, changing my life.
Courage, I decide, probably means I need to be a big girl writer today. I need to work on the hard stuff. The less fun stuff. The stuff that’s been scaring me, even if I don’t know it because fear’s good at disguising itself as avoidance or procrastination.
Down at the house with my hot coffee — today’s big white mug says “Caffeine QUEEN” in swirly black cursive — I chip away at an application for something that requires me to write an artist’s statement and a proper description of my current project. Writing is fun, but writing about one’s writing is not so fun, suddenly having to unearth some kind of comprehensible logic to explain your quirky creative interests, the nuances in your style, and the intuitive ways you puzzle your pieces together. It takes a while. I don’t do a great job, but I do a good enough job.
I make myself a pretty corn tortilla toast for another 1pm brunch, and then I decide I want to work from my cabin for a bit. If I’m going to write more hard stuff, I’ll do it better with no distractions and no internet escapes, swaddled by the sweet symphony of the woods.
I slide open the cabin’s back door — there’s my cricket friend on the screen — and prop myself up on the bed, my legs triangled just like those of my bug buddy to make an easel for my laptop. For hours, I work to iron out the kinks in my draft, filling holes in the architecture, making more sense of the sloppy notes I jotted yesterday. It’s 3pm. It’s 4pm. It’s 5pm. It’s 6pm. It’s all hard and fun at the same time, and I’m getting somewhere big. I’ve solidified the mold. Tomorrow, I know what scenes and stories I need to write.
I feel like I’ve been MIA most of the day, disappeared from the world. I never responded to the voice memos my partner sent me in the morning. That feels right though. After a deep sleep, I got in deep to the work I came here to do. The sun’s going down already, but my body (and my blood sugar) are begging me for, you guessed it, a run, so I set off, definitely turning the way I’m supposed to turn this time. I need no adventures today — only to stay laced into myself and the intimate crevices of my brain.
I start my jog at 6:49pm, when everything’s getting gilded. By 7:06, the sky’s turning to fluorescent peach. At 7:20, when I stop, I spot hot neon red splashed across one small slice of the road, before the trees swallow it up and everything goes to shadow. I snap so many photos, unable to restrain myself. The sun really does make the brightest show of herself as she retreats and emerges each day, like she’s excited to withdraw and just as giddy to return. It’s how I feel between bouts of deep, focused, solo writing. Fierce and flushed.
I shower and send a quick text to my partner, which essentially just says, “Sorry I’ve been incommunicado, been so concentrated, and also, goodnight!” Now, I’m about to eat my black bean pasta and a pile of roasted vegetables for dinner again, for the fifth night in a row. Yes I am. Because I can. I have the illustration from this 2020 Jia Tolentino piece pinned up over my desk at home. I cut out the headline from the print edition for my *~*vision board*~* that year, and still, it’s permanently etched into my brain: “Will Write for Pasta.” The whole essay, I love. The reclamation of pasta and of my own voice are intimately tangled up for me (like spaghetti, if you will), but you’ll have to wait until I finish writing this project to hear that story. In the meantime, here’s Jia:
“When you’ve spent all day wading through the swamp of your own inadequacies, there’s no absolution like spaghetti dripping in pepper and cheese. And it was the spaghetti that reminded me, before the writing did, that the way we do things matters. If we cook the way we want to, we eat the way we want to. If something is absorbing to produce, it will be absorbing to consume. And even if you don’t end up with anything you ever want to share with other people, you’ll still have made something—and this is all you can hope for—for yourself.”
Anyway, are you craving pasta now? I am so, so grateful for my nightly pasta, and for the fact that absolutely no one can see it or judge me for it. I am grateful for making things, and for all the incredible privileges and intentional choices that allow me to make what I want, be it linguini or long-as-hell essay.
On my walk back to the cabin with my pasta tupperware in hand, I see a chipmunk skitter off into the brush, chattering at me like I’ve intruded on its private moment. I notice that I haven’t noticed as much today — not as many critters, at least. Mostly just my cricket. I’ve been much less aware of where my body is, because I’ve been immersed in my own head — and wow, how cool is that? I’m so grateful for that. I’m grateful for the humming, buzzing, whirring symphony of birds and bugs whose names I don’t even know, but whose generous performance has provided the perfect writing soundtrack all these days, so soothing that I can tune it in and tune it out as I please. I’m grateful for the courage to be with my own mind and heart for hours. It is no small thing, to hear yourself, to sit with your memories, and then to feed yourself well after, like even your worst, weirdest, most shameful sides you’ve just faced do deserve nourishment.