I can only write about my life

The book of repetition

In Coventry, Rachel Cusk claims that there are books of change and books of repetition, and that women’s writing “might be another name for the book of repetition.” This was delightful to read. It got to the truth of something. Although women’s writing was constituted within identity and difference in a predominantly male landscape, repetition is its sole principle. Anyone can write from this vantage point, but the writing must live in time. It must live with the seasons. 

winter solstice x birthday

I was facetiming with my dad just yesterday and he was telling me that he was interested in writing a book about the time he spent volunteering on an old world war 2 ship off the coast of Guanacaste protecting endangered sea life. He told me that he did some research on writing a book and felt a bit stuck because everything online said that he needed character growth and development and he didn’t feel like he changed all that much. I suggested not listening to what other people claimed a novel was supposed to be and to write from his genuine excitement and inspiration. He just shrugged. I thought about how many novels don’t get written because we assume they must be a book of change. 

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

The truth is, right now at least, I can only write about my life. I have tried countless times to sit down and create stories and people from my imagination and have always seemed to come up blank. Many times this has made me feel like a bad writer. Up until recently, when I realized it was costing me much to make myself so wrong. 

My writing has always been about getting deep into my life. Not because my life is particularly exceptional or interesting, but because it is the medium that is most available to me. I believe it is a deeply co-creational process. My life shapes my writing, but my writing also shapes my life back. In moments of waves of clarity, it occurs to me that almost all of what we consider our reality is the stories we tell ourselves about it. Story-telling is a uniquely human trait that is infinitely entangling us in a creative process. Even the act of claiming oneself as “not creative” is in itself a creative act. It is telling a story about who you are and what you are or are not capable of. Because we must experience reality  through the medium of the self it is rare that we can ever fully disentangle ourselves from this process. In fact, disentangling ourselves from this process would be akin to reaching nirvana, for our selfhood to completely dissolve into nothingness, into a death where there are no endings. 

Currently, I’m at the airport, high from a joint, waiting to board a flight to see my family for christmas with my partner. I am sitting on the floor near an outlet on this computer that has the battery life of a pea. It is rare that I get to write in the present tense like this. To archive an experience as it is happening. Usually I speak from the past-tense, a distant moment from the current one. I yolk memories from the past into the present to adorn them with meaning and purpose. Often I exaggerate, or embellish. I transgress the truth. I produce longing stares from a glance. I select and pick out that which I feel is important. I leave out what is not. This I have learned is perhaps an act of violence. At large the archive cannot be disentangled from the machine of colonization, and how every iteration it speaks is extractive, decontextualizing, maiming, separating, categorizing and storing away. As Saidiya Hartman articulates again and again, and so hauntingly in Venus and Two Acts, the archive takes the totality of a person's experience and interiority and relegates her to “dead girl”, or much much worse. 

I think about what complicity this holds in my own writing. When I write about something that has happened, my sorting and cutting produces a density of that memory. When I think about that moment I don’t just think about the memory itself, but also the memory of writing about the memory. They get overlaid on top of each other, or rather like a palimpsest, it is shoddily erased to make room for another story written on top of it. Sometimes, I practice this as a mode of healing or alchemizing certain experiences. Taking the most embarrassing, horrid or even traumatic of memories and speaking their existence in my own words, making them something that is okay. Extending some compassion and care retrospectively. Other times, I fear that when I write about people I am producing some character out of them, and perhaps also some character out of myself. I am erasing the purity of their essence, and in its place creating something fractured, incomplete. I can’t help but feel that every time I write about an old lover, I am pointing a finger right back to myself. It is, of course, more about me than them. 

I used to wonder if this is narcissistic, to constantly center the I in the narrative, but now I think much differently. With the writers I love who master the art of writing about their life, I see actually quite the opposite. The self is not idolized, but rather diminished. The self is not precious, it is just another site to tell a story. It is a playground, and a container. It is a performance, and a display of unbridled honesty. It is nothing and it is everything. I desire to say this is a uniquely woman impulse, to write about the self not as a problem that needs to be solved, or a transformation that needs to be undergone, but an iteration of repetitions, of comings and goings. By this of course I don’t mean that “women” are to be the sole carriers of this project, but that to live deeply inside the expansion and contraction of life, the endings that become beginnings is to write alongside that mystical essence. It is to write that book of repetition.

Happy holidays xx 

Love, Thai