(dr) molly tov
bombs in bottles
don't mind me, just having a midlife crisis (it's my jam)
Week 4 of The Artist's Way includes a week of "reading deprivation." It's exactly what it sounds like. One does not read for a week, on the premise that blocked creatives often keep themselves that way by stuffing their heads full of other people's voices instead of listening for their own.
The Artist's Way was first published in the early 1990s - a time when whiling away hours in front of Internet forums, social media, algorithmically-driven automated content delivery, and infinite-scroll pages were simply not things. With this in mind, I decided the "no reading" rule applied to anything I would ordinarily do as mental "white noise." So no forums, no reading the news, no streaming anything. (I decided movies and TV shows I already own are okay, since those don't auto-play or seek to monetize my attention.)
I spent a large part of last week cleaning and rearranging my basement. It's where the very large TV lives - the one that was my husband's and that I rarely if ever use. I also hooked up the DVD/VCR deck I scavenged from last year's high school band room cleanout. I took it because the Booster president swore to me it did not work. Since it was already headed for the dumpster, I figured a detour through my basement wouldn't hurt it.
Reader, the DVD deck works fine. I haven't tested the VHS, only because I don't have a tape I am willing to let it eat. (I will thrift one next time I am out.) Also, component-to-HDMI cables cost $25 at my local big box store and let me hook the DVD player to one of my computer monitors. You know, for funsies.
(Oh: I also moved the tower and multi-monitor setup to the basement, the better to play Starfield off the PC on the large TV.)
I also got a large hard drive so I can download all my video games at once and also store TV and movies on what is now basically my personal streaming box. Because I'm no longer toying with getting rid of the broadband; I'm doing it as soon as DCI season is over. (Gotta get my money's worth out of my FloMarching subscription first.) Another thing I did this week was discover just how little I need broadband.
(Protip: Mint Mobile doesn't seem to be able to identify when a Sony Xperia 10iii running Sailfish OS is hotspotting. All the data I've used this month has come off my plan, not off my hotspot allotment.)
In the middle of all this, thanks to The Artist's Way, I'm also realizing: What I thought I wanted my whole life, creatively speaking, is very likely not what I want.
This hit me extra-hard while reading a column in Current Affairs just now, which begins with the line "I have called The Atlantic 'the worst magazine in America'...."
Let me back up.
I have always known I needed to write. Not "I want to be a writer," not "I want to have written." I need to write. I need it to function. I am a words junkie. It doesn't even matter particularly what the words are, as long as I do words.
Naturally I ended up doing it for pay, because I was good at it and because churning out slop takes the edge off that incessant need. But even as I did that, I have always felt there's something I'm not doing with writing that I "should" be doing. That feeling has pursued me through dozens of published poems, three published books, multiple peer-reviewed academic papers and book chapters, an NPR interview, and one - just one - byline in the worst magazine in America.
Yeah, I'll second that description. I wrote a piece for The Atlantic several years ago. I thought it was to be a crowning achievement, The Thing I Was Meant to Do With Writing after making a living off it and winning several awards from it and putting out multiple whole-ass books of it and being paid to give talks and teach classes about it and being cited by other major researchers in it failed to be The Thing. I thought I had threaded the magic needle: I managed to write something that excited the Acela corridor fauxtelligentsia (and, more importantly, impressed my family) without completely selling out my personal values. I thought I had grabbed the brass ring.
Reader, brass ring is brass.
No, writing one column for The Atlantic did not magically change my life. And, because my other superpower is internalizing everything, I thought that was my fault. I thought feeling uneasy about writing anything in The Atlantic was my fault. I thought not really wanting to be one of the Acela corridor neoliberal darlings was my fault.
It's not my fault. Of course I don't want the worst magazine in America to be my home. Who would?
That one sentence in Current Affairs encapsulates what this whole week has been for me (apart from moving furniture, sneezing basement dust, and raising chickens in the spare bedroom, because that's also a thing I do now). Just reminder after reminder after reminder that WHAT I AM IS NOT WHAT I HAVE BEEN TOLD TO WANT ALL MY LIFE and most importantly THAT IS NOT A FAULT. THAT IS NORMAL AND OKAY.
...So what do I want to do? What is The Thing I'm Supposed to Do With the World's Weirdest Lifetime Addiction? I have no idea. I have chickens, though.
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