letter nine: the best of me

i wonder if writing to me is the opposite of feeling

Dearest friend, 

Why am I never at my best when I sit down to write to you? Recently, I’ve wondered if I only ever write when I’m unhappy, and so far, including this letter right here, I haven’t found evidence to prove that thought wrong. I have a few journal entries from high school of days I wanted to immortalize in writing somehow, but even those are tinged by melancholy of some degree, this awareness that in writing about a happy memory which at that point had only been a memory for a few hours at most, I was already acknowledging that a memory was all it was. Over. Done. Only to be remembered. 

I know that my lack of writing about happier days is testament only to the fact that when I experience happy things, I never want to exist outside of that moment. They come so rarely, these bursts of happiness, and when I do feel them, I try to consume every last drop of it I can. Even if it means not pulling my phone out to take photos, even if it means setting aside the need to hoard physical mementos to bring back home with me, even if it means that you can wipe this one memory from my brain and I’ll be none the wiser I ever experienced it. I might regret it after, but in the moment, it helps me to stay inside this thing that will so soon become mere memory. Whether a concert, or a conversation, or the way the water looks during an otherwise uneventful afternoon. It’s only now that I realize I also consider these moments to be things that are not worth writing about — not because I think they’re not important enough for me to write about them, but precisely because I think they’re too important to ever be diluted into the shape of my words. 

If something has really, truly made me happy, I would be there experiencing it. I wouldn’t be thinking of how I would write about it later, or thinking about what words there are to say right now. True happiness, I think, is felt wordlessly. There wouldn’t be a need for anything but silence. There wouldn’t be a need for anything except to feel. 

I wonder then if that means writing to me is the opposite of feeling. 

It’s not a new thought. But it’s heartbreaking in a way I didn’t expect before, realizing that I can’t write in any state that isn’t unhappy. I’ve always known writing made me happy, or as close to it as possible; I love the thrill of it, the ease of it, the exacting precision but also the loose ease of putting words down. I love that little voice in my head that only speaks when I’m writing. I love their flow, their timbre, their complete lack of hesitation. I love the headspace that writing puts me in. It’s safe and comfortable. It’s fun and freeing. I never have to doubt once I have a doc open in front of me. Doubt might come before or after, but as soon as I start writing, I’m not thinking anymore. Every single thing I’ve written, as far as my consciousness is concerned, wrote itself. 

That’s really quite the textbook definition of a coping mechanism, though. A safety behavior, even, because that really is what writing is to me. A behavior. A habit. A reflex. It isn’t sacred to me. I don’t have to be in the right mind or the right position or even the right time to write. If I have words to put down, I will. It comes when I want it to, even if what comes might be horrible to me. Writing is my oldest and closest friend. It’s my constant companion. It takes my thoughts and makes sense out of them. It keeps me company when the space around me, literal or metaphorical, feels too vast. It gives me a place to disappear into as it takes over for a bit. I’m untouchable by the outside world while writing; I don’t understand what people are saying to me, I don’t feel hunger or sleeplessness. Writing cocoons me. It comforts and reassures, because here is a place that will never fail me. Even when I hate it, even when it’s being stubborn or upset with me, even when good words leave me for a bit—writing never does. It’s always here, and here, I still eternally pray it will remain.

But for all of these things to be true, it would also mean that I write only when I need escape, companionship, protection, comfort, reassurance. That I write only when the world is too much and writing is the only thing that feels safe. It’s a filter between me and the world. It’s a filter between me and really, properly feeling. It’s probably why I don’t need it when I’m happy. That, I don’t need escape or protection from. But all other times — I write for a place to disappear to. People always ask if I project onto any of the fiction that I write and the answer is that if there is a place in my fiction for my own personal real life feelings, that place would have been subconsciously removed before I even realize it’s there. All the things I feel in any depth are things that will never be in writing. At most, they will be filtered through a character, or echoed by another. But me — I will never exist in completion, even in my nonfiction. 

I like it this way. But it’s not a very healthy relationship to have with something you love, is it? To only need it when you’re so far into the depths of something that you have to grasp at love to pull you back up, even if it means dragging it down with you in the climb upwards? I love writing. I do. Very much so. I told you. It’s my oldest, closest friend. It’s the be-all and end-all of my relationship with the world. If it had physical form, I would hold it close to my chest every night to fall asleep. I really, really love writing. I love it so much I mourn like a fool when I finish a story. I love it so much that if I only need to write and never speak again, I think I’ll be just fine if not much happier. I love it so much that I don’t know how to read a book and love it without also missing writing, because always, always, always, it’s been too long since the last time I wrote. I can’t live without writing. I can’t live without the parts of me that write. There is no me without writing. 

It’s just sobering, I guess, to realize for certain that I only write when there’s something I need distance from, because — Well, I write so much, you know? 

I write so, so much. 

I write so much that the sheer amount is something I laugh at. I can spend hours just sitting there writing, unmoving everywhere except for my hands. I’ll black out and the next thing I know, the chapter or letter or even story is done. I joke about it. It is funny. Give me one thing and I’ll write three thousand words on it, whether or not the three thousand have any importance to them. The words always write themselves. They do. I’m not even there inside myself, when I write them. I blink back into myself on the other side. Every time. 

Again — It is funny. It is ridiculous. I make fun of it, too.

And it sounds pretentious when I describe it like that, in retrospect. As if I’m being possessed by The Craft. As if I’m some sort of genius who switches myself on like a machine when the time comes. But no. I think those ways of thinking are for genuinely gifted writers, or at least writers who know what they’re doing, who can claim the word “writer” as an addition, an extension, to who they are instead of all that they are. I don’t think I’m gifted in any way. I hate saying that because it sounds like I’m asking for people to protest. I barely even think I’m a writer. I’m more comfortable using that word now, but I’m just — me. Quantity doesn’t even equal quality, they always say. I believe that. The quantity I write is what feels intuitive to me. I won’t write it like that if it’s not what feels right. Lately, though, what’s felt right is writing more and more, losing myself to my own words so I don’t have to exist anywhere else, for however long it takes me to write something. 

It’s only dawning on me this week. I finished a story the other day, and for the past couple of days, I’ve just been listlessly doing what feels to me like nothing. This manuscript I was supposed to be reworking ended up getting minor structural editing suggestions. It’s just — Delete this sentence. Add more info here. Sprinkle this or that earlier or later. Nowhere near enough for me to disappear into my words. Like this, I feel as if I can almost hate writing. Away from it, when it’s doing nothing for me, I can almost think, Ah, what a pain. Has writing always been so boring and useless? It isn’t interesting at all. 

I always remind myself of my credo — that it’s better to just have fun. It’s better to stop thinking once you’re writing. Just let the words run until they say they’re done. It wasn’t always like this, but I am at a point with writing now where I wouldn’t love it so much if it didn’t come so lightly, so freely. Sometimes, though — Sometimes, I don’t need writing to take me away. Sometimes, I don’t need to rely on writing in order to find fun in my life. When something is already fun, I don’t need to write about it. I’ll have nothing to say that would be close to enough. To me, writing isn’t for preservation. Writing is for dissection. Writing is for cutting things open and doing an anatomical inventory, detached and clinical but at least leaving no room to be wrong: There is my heart, where I’m supposed to feel this squeezing because I guess this must be sadness. There is my stomach, where I’m supposed to feel my gut sinking because I’m anxious. There is my mind, where I’m supposed to think and be present but instead I’m letting writing do all the thinking for me, like a separate, external brain outside of my own body. 

When I was a kid, there was a lot of talk around me about comedians who no one realized were depressed until there was outside evidence to support it. People would say things about how this or that person ended up in comedy because and/or despite the fact that they suffer from depression. I think we as a culture still like to narrativize and romanticize the hell out of that. We like our comedians now — Bo Burnham, any pre-2020 John Mulaney project, majority of dark humor viral videos on Tik Tok — to come with a sprinkling of depressed and traumatized. But people don’t necessarily go into comedy because they’re depressed, do they? They don’t choose to make people laugh because they’re simply so, so sad on the inside and just want to make the world better even when they themselves can’t seem to feel better. Wouldn’t we all choose to be better if that choice was entirely up to us? Aren’t depressed comedians depressed because they do comedy for a living? Because you dedicate your life to one thing and you learn to compartmentalize around it? Because you give something enough weight to mean this much to you and the rest will fall in a hierarchical line around it?

I love writing. I do. I keep saying that. It’s not because I doubt it. It’s because I know that no matter what, writing is all the best of me, and I want to remind myself of that much. It’s just — world-shaking, to realize I subject this thing I love, this thing I love most in the world, to the worst of me. Because I know it can take it. Because I know it will accept me. Because I know that if I need to disappear inside 150,000 words for a couple months instead of subjecting myself to the labor of taking care of myself some other way, writing will let me. 

Because I am so, so tired of living, but no matter what, despite everything, I am never tired of writing. 

Between the two, isn’t it a no-brainer which one I’ll choose? 

I said it to you before, didn’t I? I write to you because I want permission to keep writing. I want permission to never, ever give up on writing, because I want permission to live and love by proxy and make something capable of reaching another person and bringing them something because I’d rather disappear into all that labor than let whatever literature or psychology or personality typology wants to call this gaping emptiness that never, ever leaves my body. Maybe I’m no better than that narrative we project onto comedians. But what I understand a little more clearly now is that no matter how selfless it might seem to want to bring laughter to other people, I know that when I want to give, I’m really just asking for permission to write because of my own self-interests. Because unhappy or not, unhealthy or not, I want an excuse and a reason to choose writing.

I fear I’ll have nothing left without it, after all, and even the purest kind of joys are too temporary and finite for me to choose nothing.

The other day, I saw this quote from a translation of Enrique Vila-Matas’ Dublinesque: 

I don’t know myself. The list of books I have published seems to have obscured forever the person behind the books. My biography is my catalogue. But the man who was there before I decided to become a publisher is missing. I, in short, am missing.

The person who posted it had tagged it with fragments of selfhood. 

Tonight, I’m wondering how I’ll see it, when it’s all said and done. If I’ll see the self obscured by my writing as a missing fragment, or if I’ll see it as a fragment of existent selfhood nonetheless. 

I just don’t have much to give, really. At the end of the day, I only observe the world and put what I see into words. It is a kind of living to me, and so it is a kind of selfhood. Writing is, too, despite my sudden certainty somewhere deep underneath my heartbeat that when the day comes that I stop writing, that I run out of things to write about, it will be because I am finally happy. 

For now, there’s this letter. And there’s you on the other end of it. I’m sorry that this isn’t substantial or significant. I’m sorry this isn’t happier, but I feel like I’m always apologizing for that. 

(Do you see what I mean?)

I promise I’m doing okay for the most part despite the tone here. I hope you are, too, my friend. Consider this an interlude before we return to our regularly scheduled existentialism next month.  

Your huckleberry friend, 

Sha