Writing for Us (Thank You)

The 50th Devotions

When I was 12, my mom read my journal. It was every adolescent’s worst nightmare. I was going through a phase of hatred — towards both myself and the world around me — despite my problems being relatively minuscule. I used bad language, complained a lot and rarely reflected. I don’t blame myself. I think every young person has to purge themselves of angst one way or another, but I do feel shame when I read them back. When I was out one day, she opened my journal (a composition notebook covered in silver, teal, and zebra print duct tape) to a blank page and wrote a letter for me to find when I got back from school. I don’t remember this much at all, but it must have struck me enough to tear it out and tuck it in an envelope in my memory box for 22-year-old me to find years later. She wasn’t mad. Instead of yelling at me or writing about how disappointed she was, she highlighted the potential she saw in me (that I lacked to see for myself at the time) and encouraged me to use language to “bring about peace and harmony”. “Do not let bad language and behavior of others influence you,” she wrote, “In the end, good always wins over evil”. I forgave her pretty quickly, but it took me ten years to really understand what she meant.

This week I received my certificate of completion for my Bachelor of Arts degree in Comparative Literature. It’s all I’ve studied for four years, and I suppose that means I know a thing or two about words, how they’ve divided people and brought them together. Studying literature and language at a university level tends to encourage the notion that complexity and “prestige” are what lead to a true understanding of the human soul. However, at the end of it all, through all the Barthes and the James and the Voltaire, I have learned that the modern human soul — unclouded by academia — craves simplicity. It wasn’t until I read Wendy Cope’s “The Orange”, via an Instagram page in my second year of university, that I recognized the power of language. Literature and poetry are often labelled as more “complicated” ways of describing something simple, but the reality is that it is probably the simplest way you can describe an internal microcosm of feeling that, itself, is incredibly complicated. Everything we do is only an attempt to make sense of it. How we communicate and engage with these attempts — through art, through writing, through our daily conversations — is key to our survival. We’ll never reach perfection, and until telepathy is scientifically possible, we can’t truly understand each other. But the point is to try. That’s where the love lies.

by Jackson Joyce

Mattilda Bernstein said in her talk “Writing On Your Own Terms”:

When we write on our own terms, and by this I mean when we reject the gatekeepers who tell us we must diminish our work in order for it to matter, we may be kept out of the centers of power and attention, this is for sure. And yet, if writing is what keeps us alive—and I mean this literally—if writing is what allows us to dream, to engage with the world, to say everything that it feels like we cannot say, everything that makes us feel like we might die if we say it, and yet we say it, so we can go on living—if this is what writing means, then we need to write on our own terms, don’t we?

She continued:

Nothing is universal, not even the period at the end of this sentence. Okay, maybe trauma is universal, but not what trauma, who is traumatized, or how it feels to each of us, certainly not in language. Isn’t this why we write? Sure, we all must breathe to stay alive, but we all breathe differently. What language can we conjure to shift the breath? Sure, we all experience rain, sun, water, earth. But as soon as we write about them, they change too. Try it. See if we can all agree about any of this. Eileen Myles writes, “As soon as I hit the keyboard I’m lying,” and we all know the truth in this.

Many people consider me to be a lifelong reader, writer, and all-around literary person. This is not entirely true. Yes, I basically came out of the womb with a pen in one hand and a book in the other, but as soon as I identified my audience, I put both items down. I stopped reading and writing creatively around the time I started middle school, instead chasing the latest literary trends (even if I didn’t particularly enjoy them) and echoing other voices instead of finding my own. And despite making the active decision to pursue a literature degree, that cycle didn’t end until the pandemic. It was only in isolation that I was pushed to look inward. I began writing toward myself, and discovered a sense of familiarity: I had been doing so all along.

(At 8, writing about my “ASOME” trip to the American Girl Store in New York City. At 11, complained about getting my “end of the sentence”. At 13, hyper-analyzing every interaction I had with my crush. At 17, lonely and dreaming about a life in London. At 20, in quarantine, searching for little moments of joy as if they’re pearls at the bottom of a polluted lake. At 21, stringing together a necklace with them.)

Most of my work as an aspiring writer was fiction or poetry, and I chased an invisible standard that always left me discouraged. I wrote a short story at 16, got an A on it, submitted it to my school’s creative writing contest and lost. Truthfully, I haven’t written fiction since. Because I’m young and largely inexperienced, I never thought my life was worth writing about or talking about at all. Shortly after my 17th birthday, I wrote: “I just have so much in my head and nobody is willing to listen. I hope my future yields multiple people like that. Maybe.” COVID-19 hit three years later, and everything spilt out of me one day in my best friend’s basement. Not only did she listen, but everything spilt out of her too. Since then, it seems we’ve all been walking around leaking feelings. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think so at all.

Mattilda Bernstein said further:

Everyone is a writer, we would say, and this wouldn’t just be aspirational. Because, all of us, as soon as we went outside, we would approach one another to exchange sentences and build a structure that could hold us.

What if, in the document that included all our work-in-progress, which kept growing and growing, what if every now and then we would pull out one sentence, any sentence, to see if it could breathe. To see if we could breathe together. What if a writing process was by definition a process of mutual coexistence in the world? What if all writing involved an exchange? I mean it does. We all know this. But what if we acknowledged it all the time? That document with all our words would keep growing and growing, and so would we.

I do not have the answers. I am probably far less experienced in life than most of my readers. This newsletter started as a way for me to practice reflection, to pick up the puzzle pieces pouring out of my brain and try to put them together. Along the way, particularly in the supplemental readings and also in your lovely comments, I have come to learn that this experience is universal. We are all trying to find our way, putting together the pieces of our lives in hopes that The Point of it all will be revealed eventually. And maybe it never will, but there is solidarity in the journey: in the waiting and the fear, in the little moments of sunlight and good naps and birthday cake, in how we share these moments with others. I have never stopped writing for myself, but now I also write for us.

Everyone has something that gives them their routine doses of light, and I’m incredibly lucky to have found mine. Thank you for sharing it with me. I hope it has brought you some light too.

A Note

Devotions will be on hiatus until September. This project has been deeply rewarding but also a great challenge. I need some time to catch my breath. Upon its return, Devotions will transition into a fortnightly newsletter, to give me some space to experiment with writing in other forms. There will be other things to supplement the usual essays, the beginning blossoms of which are still floating around in my head. Maybe a podcast? Social media involvement? Interviews? We’ll see. I’m already looking forward to it. Thank you thank you thank you.

In the meantime, you can read the full Devotions archive here, and access the Spotify playlist here.

I love you. See you soon.

<3

Tara