The New Year

I love a good reset. New years are the best at that. Somehow, in the middle of winter, here I come, ready to devote myself to some sort of discipline, some sort of change, an idea, feeling, a thought. I have been inconsistent, to be generous, to my writing practice. Some days— no weeks— go by when I do not have a single creative impulse. It might be even months, before I am able to scrape a single coherent poem, that is not just some garbled mess of the same rehashed feelings, and that doesn’t have “I” in the poem. (Try writing a poem about things you know without using “I” or “You”, it’s not so easy for people who all they know is the world inside their heads.)

I (there it is) wonder if there is such creation that doesn’t stem from the inner world of artists. Which is another way to ask: can an artist make art without suffering? I remember my first week in college, in a lecture with incoming students, Jamaica Kincaid was asked if suffering is required to make art that matters. In a similar fashion, Junot Díaz was asked the question in a reading he did at Texas State University, some years after I graduated college.

In a world that is ravaged by war, poverty, injustice, state-sanctioned killings of Black people, an exploitation of undocumented class, do our experiences matter in the face of these great injustices?

We’ve all been there, I hope.

We wake up, and know where our next meal will come from, usually. We live in (relative) safety. We have responsibilities, meetings, organizing sessions. We work. Yet, there is always that nagging feeling, a bias of survival. How come it is us that get to take another breath?

Jamaica Kincaid was perhaps more gentle, and had more patience for the person asking these questions. She mentioned that suffering, happens at all levels to all people. That it did not matter if you did not have a life that was damaged or full of pain. What mattered is that you and only you have your story to tell. That we are not copies, and that great writing can also come from joy.

Junot on the other hand, was visibly upset by this question, and offered a short and stark response: go out, live and travel. You will suffer. You will love. You will have things to write about, and things to create about.

I am torn by these answers.

It gives equal importance to all stories, to all histories, to all experiences. Yet, to deny someone the ability to come into their stories, their own lives, is one way to end up telling the same story over and over. It’s how we have The Hero’s Journey as the main story being told today. Maybe we need a new story, one that makes the heart ache at the slaughter of children, one that revels in the pleasures of the maligned, one that is about defeat, over and over and over, and yet we remain.

It does feel unfair, I will not lie. That I have been given this privilege (or is it more like a burden, sometimes?) of writing, even if only my friends read my work. I like to think that that you all care about the inner workings of my rage-filled mind. Maybe one day, it won’t feel like guilt to sit down and write about beautiful and terrible things.

These are some of the stories I tell myself:

“I am not the right person to be making this.”

“Nobody really cares what I have to say.”

“Art has to change the world (what an expectation!)”

“You are wasting away unless you are creating something.”

“You are lazy. You are dumb. You can barely take care of yourself. (Proven incorrect on the daily)”

“I have to be my biggest hater, because when some inevitably dislikes or hates something I do, it can’t possibly top my own self-criticism.”

Be wary of the stories you tell yourself, my mentor Roy tells me all the time. Do not believe you have to live them out. Think about why the stories are alluring, and even comforting. And why do we repeat these stories to ourselves, to our friends, and family? Some days, I do feel like the old stories of myself do not matter. Other days, they take over the narrative, and drive. A subconscious id and ego at the wheel.

Then there are days like today. Where I do write, and somewhere I feel a small spark. The old stories cloaked in darkness begin to scuttle away. It feels like hope. It smells like fresh coffee. It’s a cleared-eye vision for yourself, that for this eternity, this liminal state in between the womb and the tomb, the story inside us is greater than any story we tell ourselves. It might not change the world, but it can change you, and does change you.

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.” - Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler.