The other day, I was at a good place to wait. I shuffled through my options and browsed a few job postings online. The job descriptions sounded inconceivable, leaving me tone-deaf. They were resoundingly plangent and eerily atmospheric like from a bad dream or an alt sci-fi world beyond me. They were lengthy and esoteric. Like, What does this even mean?
I’ve eaten the dust of trailblazers, envied the prosaic lives of my wealthy peers and known the ridicule of highbrow intellectuals. It must be common to feel like this: to live parasitically off others to satisfy, or at the least address, that pang of literary hunger, and to feel a tad dated with the slow, yet aggressive prevalence of artificial intelligence.
I am in this interim, but I was just here. I haven’t recognized whether to capitalize on what I know or deviate from a path I’ve been walking. Lately, it’s a lot of feeling stuck, waiting for any available opportunity to emote what this means. Opportunities these days mean a quiet empty house for a couple of hours, a good sleep and being aware of my thought patterns. If the opportunity presents itself as accessible, I’m lucky to string a few words together. A few years ago, I convinced myself to stop looking for meaning, but to start, to throw myself into the abysmal vacancy knowing I had nothing to lose.
I needed to humor myself.
I needed to write like them.
Move and shake like them.
a good place to wait
But I also needed to retire this idealistic view of where I needed to be and instead, identify the process.
I needed to write words on Post-its to keep words close to me at all. I found myself referring to dog-eared pages of books from seven years ago to recoil in emotion. My subjective attitude toward reality has always shackled me to this writer-life, far from a career that I found only exists in my daydreams or others.
I needed to continue feeling alive, despite feeling unwell. Recognize where the fount of my inexhaustible force, that zeal, is. Is it dormant in the continuity of thought and feeling? Found in the relentless quest of finding meaning? Is it deep in the crevice of struggle? Somewhere in between relationships or fact and fiction?
Lately, the world has been loud and infallible at cajoling me to move and live based on the grounds of logic. But as writers, we know that we are spurred by sensations and instincts, qualities we ration to keep our identities preserved, ourselves known or our sanity whole. It is our insanity keeping us alive, albeit brittle, and functional to seek greater depth in understanding and connection.
However, the disconnect, the chasm, never felt or looked so vast as it does now.
