Day 3 #1000wordsofsummer
Insert quippy subtitle here
Today, I worked on an essay from my manuscript that I first drafted in 2018. It was one of the first assignments that I turned in during grad school, and it’s shifted and changed so many times since its original conception. I was first inspired to write it after reading Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden. I initially submitted the essay as a midterm and revised it as a final for the same class, and in the following years of school I revamped and workshopped it before ultimately including it in my thesis manuscript. As many of my readers noted, there were spaces in the piece that felt thin, like I was shying away and needed to go further.
I have a vivid memory of staying at a hotel in New Jersey during the summer of 2022 painstakingly combing through every note I’d been given about the piece. I highlighted and compiled, made notes in a single doc, copied prompts about what areas I needed to write into. I read more articles about my subject, refining again and again. I’m sure I kept working on the piece long after I checked out.
Still, I’ve only recently realized what the piece is actually about—I hadn’t just been hiding it from my readers, but also from myself.
Identifying the missing link was only a small part of the battle: it’s now my job to write into that instead of pulling away. Yesterday, I found a structure that fit better than the suites shape I’d originally been writing into. I know that most of the writing I’m doing for it now is going to be cut—it’s the getting it all out there phase. The same way most of the research I tried to squeeze into the piece in the beginning has fallen away in the subsequent rewrites, so to will much of this cathartic writing.
I couldn’t write into these previously missing bits because I didn’t have access to them. I used to try to bulldoze my way into working. I wanted to be productive and prolific, and I’d beat myself up for lacking the motivation to tell this story that I’d carried with me for so long and spent so much time working on, that other people had spent their time on. I realize that I kept getting it wrong because even if my writing skills were there, I wasn’t any where close to being able to tell the story as a person. There were so many truths that I’d yet to realize, that I hadn’t been ready to face. I’d been letting my child-self drive the ship.
No matter how disciplined I’ve wanted to be, I realize that I have never been able to be the person I want to be because I’ve been letting my scared child-shelf run the show. I was afraid to be mad, and even my hurt was misdirected. The missing piece feels clear as day now, but I realize that I’d been afraid to recognize what was there.
The nice thing about committing to publish a piece each day is that it’s reminding me of what I’m capable of. It’s a nice juxtaposition to working on a project that I don’t want to rush. Every version of the essay has been written by a different version of myself, and all of those versions of myself are inferior to the self I am now.