To Seek

a craft essay

Preface

Everyone has been rejected in one form or another. (And if you haven’t please don’t show your face around here or we might all lose it) This essay got rejected. I thought about trying to submit it to other places, to try to find it a home, but maybe the home was meant to be here, in a substack. I don’t know. I am learning, and know rejection is a core part of the process, but there’s something rejection does to the lens. After I got rejected I reread this essay and saw it through the lens of failure. I saw the flaws of it, I saw how cringe it was, and was immediately embarrassed. I thought to myself, this should have been left in the drafts. I remembered what Hayden told me the day before I submitted it. I had several people read it and give me their thoughts and edits (including him) and finally I was done with it so he read it one last time. I was sick at the time and went to bed early. In the morning I woke to the printed pages and a note from him that said it was perfect, he loved it so much he read it 3 times. When I got rejected I was hurt, and told him so. He told me then why he loved it so much. He said he saw himself with music in the essay. He said it brought him comfort because he understood the pain of wanting something and being afraid. It was then that I decided to make it a Substack. Sometimes all it takes is one person to believe in you, one person who it means something to them. That was the biggest compliment to me, that he related to it in his own way. That’s all I ever want with my writing. I sat back down to look at the essay again and reedited it and restructured it to this. I am grateful for rejection, I think it was meant to happen all along. It taught me to keep going, look more critically at my work, and it showed me that no matter how many rejections, I still want this life. I could go on but really I don’t want this to be a sob fest or some self transformation post, so I’ll leave it at that.

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The word repetition comes from the latin word repeate. Re means back and petere means seek. Repetition has always felt like something I am looking for. There’s been this persistent voice in my head since I was in 6th grade, “I want to write.” They have been burned in my journals, they sound like harmonizing voices that sing;

“I want to write a book.”

“Why is writing so hard?”

“All I want out of life is to finish a book and publish it.”

“I want to write.”

No one ever told me that if you repeat something enough it loses its value but I have heard that sentiment before in movies. Maybe some people do that to dull the pain, exposing themselves enough times to become numb to the hurt. But I’ve always thought the more you do something the more integral it becomes. Like the more times you etch your name in a tree trunk the more likely it is to stay. 

In January 2008, the first goal I wrote that I wanted to accomplish was to write a book. Every year after that the goal still remains at the top of the list. I have 20 journals that I can count right now that feel like echoes. I thumb through the days that are pages, the ones I have shelved and no longer think of. I see that I have the same dreams, the same anxieties, and the same routines. Things vary, like age and place and mental foresight, but mostly, I am the same. I wonder why I think repeating something every day would make me someone different? When I look at all these journals, I am alarmed at how many chunks of my life are missing. What was I wearing? Who was I with? What happened that day? Did I cook, or go out to eat? What was my family doing? Instead I am mostly left with incessant pages of self loathing.

When I’m not writing I’m thinking about writing. It stretches beyond the days and turns into months and years. It's more of an obsession really, one I am both eager and scared of. It sends me spiraling sometimes. I often feel delusional, like it’s a pipe dream, one that is impossible to attain. But what is it to have a dream anyway? Don’t they all feel delusional? It feels the same to me as when people say they want to be famous. A million in one chance. (Though I don’t know the actual odds.) I become fearful when I’m not thinking about writing, like my whole identity can be unraveled in an instant and I fret over all these hours and days and years I’ve wasted on a dream. And perhaps the dream, the mantra itself has become my identity rather than the act.

Some days writing looks like waking up to the anxious thought of, “I need to write.” It looks like staring blankly at the computer screen, then turning to my journal and writing how much anxiety I have, then going back to staring at the blank screen. It looks like grabbing my phone, as if my hand had a mind of its own, and scrolling aimlessly, and bitterly through various forms of social media. It looks like literally ripping my phone away from my hand, throwing it onto the floor and turning back to the blank screen. Eventually I end up writing something. Some days it’s a paragraph, other days it’s 1,000 words, other days it’s revision and erasing those 1,000 words.

Some days writing looks like a perfect cup of coffee, buzzed and inspired, my fingers flying on the keyboard. My headphones are on. I’m dead to the world. Those are good days. But more often my days look like staring at my bookshelves saying to myself, “I need a reference.” A tool to show me how to write is what I mean. Some days it feels like panic, like fight or flight in my nervous system. Some days it feels like dread, some days it feels like love and desire. Some days it feels like happiness, a sigh of relief. 

I have no idea when or why the desire to write became my ritual. I don’t know when the thought of becoming a writer entered my mind or what sparked it. I didn’t know any writers growing up and I didn’t know how to be one, in fact I didn't know writing was an attainable career. Whenever grown ups asked what I wanted to be, I never said “writer.” That was a quiet whisper I left in my head. No one ever talked about it as an option, neither at home nor at school. One time, when my mom and I were browsing the bookshelves at Target she said, “Who wants to read someone else’s thoughts? What makes them so special? I can write my own too!” I didn’t know where to place what she said. I wondered if I should leave it on the shelves with the memoirs, but I guess I took it home with me and now her words also echo in my head. 

There have been too many starts. I have mastered the craft of starting. Maybe the beginnings of things are what I keep repeating. It's the middle and the finishing that seems to be missing. That's why I enrolled in Houston Community College for a third time when I was 25. I wanted to learn how to write, but taking math classes and history and all of the other credits didn’t teach me how to write. I had already taken my English course and that also didn’t teach me how to write. I was beginning to feel like it might not be something that could be taught. Or maybe I was missing something.

I can’t seem to think of things repeating without time. Yesterday I wrote 311 words. The day before that I wrote 631 words, and before that I no longer remember. “Necessary for improvement” is what Hayden tells me when I ask him what he thinks about repetition.

I have listened to Hayden play the drums everyday for 10 years. He is proficient at the drums, but he is just beginning on the Rhodes piano. He has been practicing every day. He tells me shyly, still, not to judge him when he’s learning a song on the Rhodes because he has to repeat the same parts over and over again. I smile at him and nod. To me, they always sound different every time, slight variances that make it sound like a new movement each day I get to listen to. Perhaps repetition isn’t a circle but some other shape I haven’t figured out yet. The same movements, the same acts, yet are always slightly different, always improving, telling us something new about the day or about ourselves. 

As I write this, I notice small marks of repetition around me:

The daily walk, the daily car ride to the office, the daily upkeep of an office to keep it running, the daily talking of improving, the daily talks with friends or family so we don’t disappear from each other's lives, the daily scrolling on IG and Tiktok. The daily need to be inspired or motivated, or something to get excited about. The daily occurrences that seem to tell us that things never go our way. The daily walk into the bedroom to see a mound of clothes in the closet and on the floor from trying on too many outfits and always needing to do laundry. The daily empty Polar Seltzer cans on the kitchen table, the daily toys Gordy leaves strewn about in various locations. 

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I’ve been stuck in this pattern, or this labyrinth like in one of Jorge Luis Borges stories. Why do repeating acts feel like a maze somehow? Maybe I am too zoomed in. It sort of feels like when you watch your feet walk and then when you look up you realize how far you’ve gone and where you are. Or you run into something. Either way, you eventually look up to see the whole picture. There's a creeping feeling of fear in my peripheral vision. It holds hands with the dream of wanting to write, it doesn’t say anything specifically, but instead has an impenetrable shield of disappointment. It sort of feels like there's this little pebble in my pocket that is weighing me down, the pebble is the shape of hopelessness.

Everyday I pick the skin on my fingers when I write. You can tell how much I'm thinking just by looking at my hands. Sometimes I won’t even know the damage until the next day when I catch a glimpse of them while I’m washing the dishes. I will see the red, rawness of skin on my thumb all the way down to the carpal bones. Or sometimes when I stand up from where I’m working, I’ll find myself in a puddle of skin I’ve picked. Every thought I’ve had has been shedded onto the floor. I wonder if I pick them up and count them if they would equal the amount of words I’ve written. And maybe if I scrap them together, I could form a book.

Natalie Goldberg calls this anxiety, monkey mind. Which is not something she made up but is actually a Buddhist idea. It's this concept that we all have a monkey in our mind, or some chaotic force inside our minds that bounce around and distract us or tell us we suck. Society tells us to eradicate that part of the brain first in order to achieve anything, but the Buddhist practice is to learn to live with the monkey because they know that it never actually leaves us. We are the monkey mind, and the monkey mind is us. We must learn to silence it enough to focus on our work. I think about the monkey that lives in my brain a lot.

The way I repeat writing is not in full circles or streams. I start and then stop. And then start and then stop. It seems like when it starts to get hard I stop, pause, give up. 

This daily habit has taken many physical forms. From leather bound journals, to typewriters, to desktops, to laptops, to my iPhone. There have been notecards and smaller journals. There have been post- it’s and napkins, (because I once read some writers will write their ideas down on napkins.) The post it’s and napkins hardly work for me, for those moments I usually just open my notes app on my phone.

The scenery for writing has changed over the years too. There was the upstairs loft balcony in Apt 414. The one I would leave the balcony open door, and sit on the gray couch while I clanked away on the typewriter. I started a novel in that apartment, and I hope to finish it one day. There was the front porch in Nashville, staying with my friend for weeks at a time, doing timed writing exercises in my journal. There was the time Hayden and I lived at The Greyhouse apartments where I sat at our new kitchen table, journals and books spread out while I wrote while drinking tea nonstop. There was New Mexico, New York, LA, Mexico, and Tennessee where I would squeeze thoughts into my journal any chance I could in between family gatherings and sightseeing. There was Galveston where I rented a room to write and read and did mostly nothing but feel sorry for myself. I wrote stories in my head there and walked around and listened to what everyone else had to say.  Then there’s the house Hayden and I live in now. I started on the kitchen table, and then we built a library and now I write there. And in the very beginning, it was my adolescent bedroom, my back to the door as I scribbled away in my red Paris journal while sitting at my pottery barn kids desk.

It is Annie Dillard who said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” If I spend my days writing, I am a writer.  And while the obsessive tics of repeating the same process over and over again can seem gruesome, mundane, or even insane sometimes, I don’t know how I would survive. These ritualistic acts I take part in every day have given meaning and reason to who I am. To write, is to seek, and I will spend all my life looking under the words on the paper if that means I might find an answer.

If repeating things are part of cycles of our lives, then I think it's safe to say that they eventually evolve. I’ve come full circle in writing an essay about all the times I've said the words “I want to write.” Repetition brings comfort, like making a coffee every morning or turning on the TV every night as you eat dinner, and maybe I even saw comfort in writing those same words out every day. Writing those words everyday has led me to this point, which is me trying and not quitting. The sounding board of my life has been those words. Maybe I needed all those years of saying, thinking, and writing the same sentence to give me courage. Maybe “I want to write” is my prayer of faith.