Back, for lack of a better term

On earnest declarations, Kafkaesque upsets, past previews, and writing unwritten

“I remember very clearly my panic and the terms in which I accused my analyst, who had conspired in all of this: he was going to make me so happy I wouldn’t write. I also remember his response. He looked at me directly, an event in itself rare (and possibly the underlying reason I remember this exchange). His response was memorably succinct. The world, he told me, will provide you sorrow enough.” -Louise Gluck

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I oscillate between wanting to keep a consistent, short-form, daily newsletter and disappearing every few months, with only the promise of an occasional, gut-wrenching 4,000-word essay to show for. The dissonance wrought from this is threatening to run me off Substack entirely. 

I suppose I got stuck, once again, not for a lack of things to say, but for feeling like I had no good way to say them. 

That, and I felt almost normal for a second there in the winter — a potentially fatal thing for a woman online, much less someone wanting to forge a career in writing. 

I continued telling myself that I’d rather process than produce, that everyone publishing as frequently as I’d like to be is compromising in some way, and that the sacrifices required to churn out consistent content would never sit right with me. Despite building months of fodder for a daily newsletter, I let my Substack collect cobwebs and suffered silently in the doldrums. 

I started and stopped several essays during this time, writing about my relationship with my body in which I answered questions strangers have nosily tried to pry out of me, time and time again. I started an entry on the death of my grandmother, on the first time I realized that I loved my boyfriend, on my life as it compared to a series of scenes in a Noah Baumbach film. But every time I began to write, I felt I could only present a distillation of my thought’s complexities, and knowing that somehow cheapened all of my essays thereafter. 

As time went on, I grew increasingly troubled watching my stagnation, originally wrought by a desire for control, turn to a sort of laissez-faire attitude about writing. I found every reason to stop too compelling and thus, there’s no writing to show from this period at all.  

I closed myself off to the world of newsletters and let those of close friends and mutuals go unread for fear I’d find others so ardently putting into words what I deemed myself too stuck to say. I didn’t know how to wrestle with the fact that my writing somehow reduced everyone to side characters on my little journey toward self-discovery. Surely, that’s what everyone was doing, but at times it felt smarmy, everything being copy, everyone either an object of my admiration or anguish. 

Last month I posted a long-winded tweet about coming home to myself, touching on the trappings of being an e-girl, performative sexiness, and the transition away from edgelord pick-meism. It was an honest declaration of knowing that there’s something better for me out there and merely an open-ended speculation on what’s to come. More than anything, it was earnest. 

Within minutes of posting it, a mutual who I never speak to, wrote, “some of you think about yourselves way too much. nobody cares about your inner world or your self image. please just be funny.”

__

Burrowed in the comforts of tabloid clickbait, small plate restaurants, and long walks on paths to nowhere, I teased writing I’d never release, my last entry from October 2, blanketing me like a soaked towel. 

“Writers don’t move to New York City to go dark,” I told myself amid months of creative stasis.

As time passed, my writing became clunky where it once felt natural. It lacked a depth I feared I’d only ever reach by way of another cross-country move or devastating heartbreak. At the time, my essays had no real cohesion, sentences droned on, and my words sat immiscible, like oil on water. I was out of practice and angry about it. If I wasn’t going to be producing the best possible work, there was simply no point in producing at all. 

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I write to make sense of the world around me, almost purely out of selfishness. I think I have isolationist tendencies and sometimes I feel like that’s my biggest problem. I have almost no desire to beat anyone at this game, and rarely do I feel like joining them. I think it’s partially why I catch so many strays on X. I tweet what I know my followers like, but remain just outside of sects, group chats, and scenes —  a voyeur in a microworld I once worked to create.

And then, there’s the seemingly logical self-doubt — that maybe this isn’t actually for me — writing, the public personality, niche micro internet fame, revealing selfies gone viral, whatever’s happening in that wretched three-block triangle. Maybe it’s possible that the thing I went to school for isn’t the thing I’m supposed to be doing at all. 

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Being a journalist of today and a writer whose work people will care about tomorrow feels entirely antithetical to me. I don’t want to fall in line at a media company, but I also don’t want to be scraping by on piecemeal pitches, hoping someone will take a chance on me for the thankless promise of a modicum of clout or literary it girl-ness. I often wonder if any of this can be done earnestly and secretly hope a new job in marketing will square away my hang-ups. I feel simultaneously naive and somehow above everything, all at once — the ultimate chasm keeping me at odds with writing and myself. 

I’ve spent the better part of this year wondering if the way I’ve self-identified in the past ten years, and the way people know me, is merely a freak thing, a chimeric dream just waiting to be unspooled. Sometimes I feel as if I’m operating outside of myself, an illusory woman in a world that orbits according to nothing. 

I wonder how much longer I can punish others for insecurities I see in myself.

I also know that no one needs another newsletter fighting to stay afloat in their inbox, but still, a large part of me longs to be the person whose work touches a lot of people. That feels somewhat self-important, but it’s likely the least selfish thing about me. The discourse was merely an avenue to getting me here. It was never really about the sourhoe persona either. I suppose what I’d really like, is just to make people feel a little less alone.  

All of this is a lot to take on when, practically speaking, the time spent writing to dollars accrued is undeniably bleak. The sort of rigamarole of promoting diary entries cosplaying as personal essays also feels embarrassingly self-aggrandizing and unnatural.

And yet, here I am again, despite all of it. 

I hate to linger on the self-referential, but that’s sort of my whole brand. Tweets are purely archival, meaningless, and trite. Instagram is for friends and making it look like you have them. And Substack, despite my chronic avoidance of it, is for writing. 

And I suppose that after all of this, I’d just like to get back to that.

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Here is the beginning of an entry I wrote about moving last August:

I arrived in New York ten months ago on a one-way ticket, towing half of my weight in cargo and wearing a Daddy’s Little Meatball t-shirt. 

A guy I’d been talking to at the time told me he’d pick me up from the airport.

“I genuinely love picking people up from the airport lol” 

We never really discussed the logistics of it, though and as the date approached and he didn’t bring it up, I assumed he’d forgotten, or simply rescinded the offer. I can’t say I wasn’t a bit resentful as my new roommate gripped my old college suitcase, stair by stair, but I managed to, like always, romanticize an overpriced taxi ride and a night to myself. Plus, an unexpected pendulum had swung — I’d not so secretly been rooting for a different man who would later come to be my current boyfriend. 

October 2023:

“Are you official?”

“Well…not yet but it’s going in that direction.”

“So yes.”

“Well, I don’t want to jinx it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Come on Erica.”

“Well —”

I feel hit with the desire to be hurtful.

“you didn’t pick me up from the airport.”

That Thursday evening in August, I arrived to minimal possessions I’d shipped in the weeks prior — a deconstructed bedframe, a carton of Hestias, the French Mary Janes I bought with half of an NPR paycheck, three flavors of quadratini, and a lack of understanding that starting over meant relentless discomfort and the promise of nothing in the context of my then-unemployment. 

I’ve always embroiled my life in the memory of years past though, even for times I knew were unequivocally bad. I can't decide if this makes me a romantic or just deficient at living in the moment. I think about 11-year-old Francie, the protagonist in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” and how she said that pouring a fresh cup of coffee down the drain made her feel better than just drinking it. I remember reading that as a teenage girl and instantly understanding. It’s the high produced by inventing something so blatantly false — the quiet kind of lying to oneself. I feel like this often. I haven’t been to enough places, seen enough, built up enough memories to create a bank of fullness. I wonder when I’ll grow tired of finding beauty in smallness. 

“Okay, I’m going to run, but these are your keys.”

I look down, beaming. 

“The front door sometimes sticks.”

“Also the toilet flusher needs to be fixed but it still works.”

“I can’t believe I live here,” I think to myself.

“It can get really hot in here, so turn on the fan.”

My arms feel like jello.

“And make sure you hear the click when you turn the key.”

“I got it.”

I’m not retaining anything.

She smiles.

“You’ll figure it out.”

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