06.
To write about my anxiety is to write about my anxiety about not writing.
If I stop writing for too long, will I forget how to do it? Are these aches in my forearms and elbows pent-up diction, feeling-sentiments unreleased, tying me up in such knots that soon I won’t be able to lift anything?
That first year after quitting my astrology business, I produced less writing than any year since adolescence, not even enough hasty scribbles to fill a quarter of a spiral notebook. In this boundless expanse of unproductivity, I confronted the possibility my best work was behind me. My wish to be a writer had already been achieved. I had touched readers across the globe, many reaching out to tell me my writing had given perspective and hope, changed their lives for the better, a regular reality-check voice of encouragement, every Sunday like clockwork.
Writers yearn for just this type of communion with their audience. Otherwise, we’d just quietly savor our own wit and wisdom, never bothering to externalize. Damn this inner discontent that seeks its reprieve through engagement with others. Will I ever outgrow it? To not write at all is to not invest in anyone else’s expectations.
Now in the second post-horoscopes year, I attempt to bare my soul (to “bleed on the page” as the wisewoman advised), but I’m not sure these are words worth the effort to produce. It’s one thing to delight readers with words addressed to them directly, regarding the changing circumstances of their lives. It’s entirely another to expect them to muddle through confessions from my life.
I want to be seen as a person, not a horoscope-writing machine. An artist more than a professional. A tender vulnerable human struggling with aches and pains, compulsions and self-tortures, rather than a well-constructed persona who always presents just the angle to appear almost enlightened. Would anybody care about this plain old person?
It was hard enough to cram my artsy-aspiring words into clear enough phrases so readers might turn left instead of right during the week ahead. Complaints about my language gushed forth. I got it, thanks: You don’t like how my words weave and dodge and twist into patterns that tire the eyes, run on, celebrate rhythms and angles that lack the certain pithy punch modern people come for. These words reflect my inner world, though. When you reject them because they give no easy way in, you reject me as a person to connect with. On better days, my confidence builds me into accepting “I’m not for everyone,” but travel down that road too far, and you’re a narcissistic loner sure it’s everyone else’s problem no one understands you, never ever yours.
What do I do with this writer who made so many people happy for so long by giving them what they wanted, then changed the terms of the deal? To discover who I am, I began the lonely process of letting everyone down. Don’t await my return to prognostication.
Still, I keep words flowing, increasingly aware I feel conflicted about wanting and not wanting to put myself out there, whether in writing or social exchange. Why bother translating all this mental noise? Simply to share it with others? I guess the answer to that last one is yes. Human connection is too precious not to bother.
the in-between*
© 2020 Barry Perlman