weeds from concrete

a question and answer (about 1997 words):

do you love to do something/ are you “passionate” about it? what if I gets “taken away from you” - maybe you’re unable to do it because of (x,y,z)? how do you feel? does it feel super shitty? like the world’s 🌎 crumbling around you because the thing you’re “passionate” about is something you’re no longer able to do. what if it’s not “your life” though? what if we’re just so used to telling ourselves it is? Or better yet - we’ve made everyone around us conditioned to the idea of it defining us? like it’s the 1 thing we have to ourselves? what if you’ve secretly enjoyed not doing it? do you feel guilty? so what do you do now that you don’t have it? are you not you? lol but do you even know what “you” is?

querida,

They’re all so fucking sticky, the loves of our lives. I didn’t make this concept up; the writers who gave it to me are far more talented than I will ever be (see: Anne Enright’s “The Gathering”, this poem by Barbara Ras). Some of the stickiest, drag you under in some only known to you pain, aren’t people at all. They are what you do. Before you used the word passion, or hobby, or interest, here’s the question you started with: do you love to do something?

I know the irony in picking this and deciding I wanted to try getting on the horn again, here, in this weird little praxis experiment. It is, after all, something to do. You have given me your questions, and I have been thinking about them since.

The world of today hates, absolutely hates when you love something you do that belongs to you, sincerely and messily and in ways that don’t look good to “the world”. When your suffering doesn’t align with curated suffering and happy endings: guts, glory, pain, gain. When you don’t get to be a comeback kid. When it doesn’t work out. The world hates it so much that you start to hate yourself.

Which is certainly how it can be taken away from you. We’re young when we learn this first, and maybe we never get to try again. If we’re lucky we get to try things: we slide into second base, we make art, we learn about space travel or bugs or plaintively play our instruments. I played piano faithfully and earnestly and doggedly for ten years, wanted so desperately to keep it in my life. I loved it very much.

Then one day the notion of what now? What comes next? Who are you and where will you go? And I was not going to be a concert pianist, or a student in conservatory, and frankly, probably not even a capable faker to make petty cash. I stopped. I put the sheet music and the metronome away and I stopped playing piano. It hurt in the way the rejection of youth hurt. We’re not going to space, the Olympics, the Oscars.

Eventually maybe you get something else. You get a little older and you know you have to protect what you have. In this world even saying the word “passion” is uncool, is derided, tsk. You have something you love to do, and maybe now you’re surrounded by others doing it too, but god forbid you love it in any way that’s not in some arc towards accomplishment. Tragedy may suffice: injured, agonizing second third thirtieth best, life changes as a trade in, acceptable ways to walk away. You can tell that story. That story is not when the world takes it away from you. Sometimes more than what you love to do, you throw all of what you have into trying to protect it, to keep it from being wrenched away.

It is exhausting and lonely and impossible to explain. If you love what you do, why not keep doing it? Why not be stronger in the face of how loud everything is,? Or why not just give up, because it is never enough to love something in this world. It must be warranted and weighed and held up and deemed acceptable.

How incredible, beyond belief, it feels sometimes. does it feel super shitty? Yes. Yes yes yes.

Super shitty: like I can’t breathe, like I can’t get out of bed, like I’m the smallest piece of shit (and even more of a piece of shit because Christ the pathos of being the piece of shit at the center of the universe), like I have wasted endless amounts of time, like I made all the wrong choices, like what would I have gained had I not loved what I was doing. It feels like panic attacks in the shower. It feels like holding it together at your dumb job with a pain you can’t explain to anyone. It feels like rage when you speak it out loud and someone shrugs it off with a, bummer or blankness. It feels like if you could only make once choice, if you could cleave some part of you out, you would be free.

Is the world crumbling? Are you crumbling? The past few years it felt like I was spending so much time trying to hold onto what I loved and it sometimes physically hurt when I couldn’t do it. So there was throwing myself into other things: trying to get somewhere with my work, trying to prove I could Be Good in the world, taking another hobby and trying to make it everything. In between I would try and write and read after getting off late shifts, or surreptitiously editing things between meetings, or submitting things into the ether because that was what I thought you did. In the meantime, I tried to make Bikes Be A Thing. I tried to make it “my life” when what I loved about it was the same thing I’d been trying to protect: how to be in the world and see it and share it and tell the stories in my head. Boy and fucking howdy, that did not work out.

After months of pulling these swords I jammed in myself out of me I started riding my bike like I used to. To go places. To see the city. To listen to music and be alone and feel my body and be in the world. I fought so hard against giving this away, giving into it, letting all the things and people that are not for me take it back, and now I wonder why it took so long. It can be so easy to tell these stories about the people doing what we love. It doesn’t mean these people are Bad or Awful or Inherently Whatever. It just means that way of operating is not for me. There are people who don’t mean to take things away from you. It just happens.

I don’t remember the day I realized it no longer had to matter if people defined me as something: I could just walk away and do what I wanted. Yes, I felt guilty: I felt like I’d wasted time, I felt like I should’ve tried harder, or kept doing X, Y, Z. Turns out? It’s still not the one thing. It’s a thing. I define it. And secretly, or not so secretly, I am so glad I am not doing it, slowly warped and hollow.

Really what I’m talking about is words. Winter was awful. I let myself be open about giving up or in because I had to quit, because it crumbled me, because it felt super shitty. Most of the time I kept what I did, what I loved, in whatever way that meant, to do to myself. I didn’t want to talk about it with people I was friendly with or worked with, I am terrible at telling people when I make something in the world, and I have a lot of weird shame and fear about the people I do love looking at something I make and then deciding who I am. Hoarding a sincere, ardent love of something? That way lies blindness, a self dissolving, darkness. I am so deeply proud and in awe of how you shine a light on what you do, and the agonies and ascents of it all. This, too, is what you do.

So when I spent so long in therapy and on the phone to people I trusted literally weeping about how shitty writing felt, I didn’t know what I was. If I wanted to quit, what did that make me? If nobody gave a shit if I quit, who was I the whole time? If I wasn’t loyal to a fucking fault, what quality was good about me? And if it wasn’t abundantly clear to the wide world, who in reality just should be left out of this equation, crystal clear that I happily and successfully loved what I did, what did it matter if I did it? Things Happened, fractures, stumbles. A reading at a queer bar ended poorly, and I felt bad for not being better. I started pages and then gave up, I felt bitter, I stopped reading, I hated talked about it. I dramatically quit this newsletter, and it felt shitty, and it felt like such a relief.

But here we are. The world took, and it certainly didn’t give me what I thought I wanted, and honestly? What a part of me may always want, which is acclaim, and validation, and money (hahahaha). Except I’m writing this to you now.

Before I quit this and before I wanted to never look at anything I did ever again, I (likely full of liquid courage) asked this reading series in Chicago if I could read there. I sent the email because when I was younger and trying to do more live literature things, I so admired this series and ardently pedaled my ass up to Andersonville on my fixie all summer. They said yes, and May showed up and it was time to do it. I did the things I used to do: I found something and I wrote into and out of it and I read it aloud and crossed things out and read it aloud again and got very nervous and asked my friend what I should wear and then I got up and I did it, not too many beers deep, and some people who are great came and listened and some people I didn’t know said nice things and they invited me back one day and now? Now I’m doing something again.

It feels different, this doing. You have to walk away sometimes. You actually have to get your teeth knocked in a few times, however that metaphor applies to you: chasing rejection, losing money, people being shitty or just clueless, even as you just stumble off the ropes again and again and again. You just lay down and hurt.

You drink some water and you cry and you can do other things. Time will pass. That thing you like to do? Maybe it looks different. You’re different and you are still you. Maybe you do it alone, maybe you do it without the world, maybe you teach it, or share it, or tell stories about it, or it changes venues. You can choose, if you’d like.

For better or worse, things stick. There is never enough and there is so much time. Give it time. It will hurt again, it will feel bad again, and then, one day: it will feel different. This is one of the greatest joys. That what you love changes, and you change, and then you can decide what it is that you want to do, what you will do. Whatever it is, I look forward to seeing it.

te amo mucho,

carmen

notes:

_{confidential to you: thank you for easily giving this to me. confidential to yk: hey, look at this. confidential to julia: you were right about that song, and i saved that email, and the other day riding back from the lake i really really heard the end clearly. confidential to j peace: thank you for listening to it. confidential to osa: thank you for listening to it and the photos.}

_{here is a link to that great reading series Tuesday Funk. some other things I have enjoyed recently in Chicago include Poetry on the Green, Psychotic Break, Miss Spoken, and the thingy at the Archives.}

_{some things I listened to while brooding on this: “All In Good Time” by Iron and Wine w/Fiona Apple, “Roll With The Changes” by REO Speedwagon, and “Stressed Out” by A Tribe Called Quest.}

_{stick around? don’t? i truly know i may not be for you, and am definitely not for everyone. share with someone? you truly truly can always send advice questions. here is the anonymous form. if you fuck with soup when its 95 degrees, i’ll answer those questions, but also i got a lot of cold salad opinions. drink water, fuck zionism, and palestinian liberation or nothing.}

_godspeed.

It pushes the weed from beneath concrete
But hey what can you say babe?
We all got to eat

And make explicit home
Wherever our teeth, red flesh from bone
It's surprising us survivors and the eyes hungry tigers
It’s that will to live that won't leave me alone
Feels like carrying 69 stones