After the Work
It felt good to be dizzy with purpose...
Does it matter if this is a book or not?
Reading “Something Bright, Then Holes.” She says she’s writing a book of blue, that she got lost in the green, the canals, the pain-body. We are always going somewhere, whether we notice or not.
Rejections don’t hurt. It’s the silence that does, the hollow where attention should be. The forgetfulness. The way the world shrugs. So of course you create for yourself, because who else could it be for. And how easy it is to not sit with myself.
No one tells you what artists do in the interim, how they fold time to survive the waiting. It’s a lie that the sentences come clean, but once you’re inside them, the voice starts moving — ready, grateful, saying yes and yes and yes.
It’s always hard, this act of showing up. There are too many books to read, too many to write. The thing I want to be a collection refuses to be one. I went to school to learn how to listen, to enter the deprivation chamber of my own voice, to call it by name. It took years to trust. Now I’m here, and I never step into the same river twice.
A time ago, I left the job that steadied me — the deadlines, the rhythm, the love of being needed. I didn’t expect the silence that followed. Maybe that’s how I know it was real. For awhile, I did what I loved. I was lucky to have it so young. I built something that held when most else fell.
“If she focuses her time on writing, she will make significant work for years to come.”
That’s what my mentor wrote in my final letter. They knew what others have since learned: I’m bright-eyed, determined, and I scare fast. Sometimes, I’ll even quit before the race begins.
I know now that success is consistency times doubt. You work until the doubt dissolves. You do it again tomorrow. You let go of the myth. You accept done, then good, then perfect. The first draft is the only real miracle — it unearths the well. Everything else swims up from the deep.
Outside, a delivery truck idles. Someone else’s order fulfilled. This world processes when I’m not in it. I gave the nine-to-five a fair shot. Sold a startup. Ticked the boxes. What’s left — do it again? The playbook’s the same. But, I’m not made for same. Maybe I’m made for different.
It felt good to be dizzy with purpose, to end a day knowing the weight of it. The startup spell makes everything urgent. Revenue or ruin. But that tea’s gone cold.
Fiction feels wrong to me — I don’t like pretending. The stories turn real anyway. Everything’s someone’s truth. By holding the truth, I’ve distorted it, my love sings in a song he wrote. We all seek something. I am trying awfully hard not to be someone who seeks, finds, and runs away.
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