Being a writer is lonely

Dear friends,

I planned to write this newsletter weeks ago but I got stuck. Well, to be more specific, I got a new job. A proper academic job with an actual salary (a first for me) and a lot of responsibility. A job I almost didn’t apply for because I worried I would never have time to write again.

But the job wasn’t really the problem. The problem was that I kept sitting down in front of my computer, making words into sentences that just felt—I don’t know—like they were trying way too hard.

I finally figured it out in the shower this past weekend: the problem was that I was trying to be a writer.

When I started this newsletter, I was practically swimming in optimism. So many people signed up—friends, acquaintances, total strangers! It was a true experiment in a more social, less lonely way of writing a book. I would squash the notion of the author as solitary intellectual hero. I would use the excuse of book writing to make real, meaningful connections with people. I would craft my way through this pandemic, sentence by sentence.

And it worked. People replied to my letter. They shared books and articles and podcasts on loneliness. They wrote about their struggles with pandemic isolation—and I wrote back with my own. I filled my notes with links and quotes and questions.

Then a few weeks passed and I tried to write a second letter. I tried. I quit. I tried again. I wanted my subscribers to feel that they had signed up for something worthwhile.

Then I got this new job. And I watched as the virus transmission rose, first in the US—in all the states where my family and friends live—and now here in BC. I’d been feeling smug about British Columbia—about our willingness to wear masks, our excellent public health officials. Suddenly nothing felt guaranteed. Nothing was under control. I had three new classes to plan. I had to learn how to teach online. I had to keep up with the news. I had to organize a group of friends to help register people to vote. I had to send out a second newsletter and all I had was a title: “Writing is lonely.”

But writing isn’t lonely. Writing enables a kind of meaningful, productive solitude, something that has always felt essential to my sanity. The lonely part is trying to Be a Writer, trying to convince yourself and everyone else that you are Someone with Important Things to Say.

The thing about trying to impress people is that it makes it impossible to actually connect with them. In all my newsletter drafts, the voice I was using was the voice of a capital-W Writer, a thoughtful person with time to step away from the world, see it from some reasonable distance, and make sense of it on the page. This is a perfectly useful voice, but it is not at all who I am right now. It’s not at all how I feel.

Instead I feel panicked: about the election, about the state-sanctioned killing of Black people, about connecting with students online, about my fluency in Zoom, about my computer that is truly on the verge of giving it all up, about all the friends I’ve stopped spending time with because there is so much else to do. And I know that just beyond this panic is a grief I mostly try to avoid: My family is on the other side of a closed international border. I missed my dad’s wedding. I missed the birth of my niece. I missed tomato season in Virginia.

But here is this letter in a bottle, sent from the island of my living room, floating out to everyone I admire, while the dog snores on floor.

(Mark looks up from his laptop and says, “Inspector Snorington is working hard on the case.” And it’s true. The Inspector is working over time.)

I have an app on my phone that lets me see my niece’s baby monitor. Before I go to bed, I check in on her. Wrapped tight in her swaddle, she looks like seal pup, absently flipping her tail while she sleeps. We are facing separate oceans tonight, but still she feels close.

These days I can get so lost in the facts: three classes, ninety students, seven days until the start of the semester, 2896 miles between me and the seal pup, twenty-nine electoral votes in the state of Florida. But when I attend to how things feel, I’m okay.

If I stop worrying about what my students need to learn and focus instead on how I want them to feel—about reading, about writing, about learning online—possibilities open. It would be nice for them to understand the difference between scene and summary. But it would be even better for them to know that writing can be a refuge, a place to begin the slow work of untangling experience and ideas, to cordon off some territory between oneself and the world.

I want to teach them about the difference between writing and being a writer. I want to teach myself the same thing. Substack keeps sending me emails advising me how to make this newsletter successful. Their version of success is subscribers and clicks and engagement. It’s such a seductive thought: I should make a newsletter that people really like. But I keep re-learning what I already know: having a lot of subscribers won’t make this newsletter better. It won’t make this project any closer to what I want it to be.

To fight the existential loneliness of life in a fire season, an election year, a pandemic, I’ve instituted a new bedtime ritual. “What reminded you of the beauty of the universe today?” I ask Mark. He tells me about how it felt to make a video of the clouds crossing the sky. I tell him about watching my six-year-old friend Jacob focus every cell in his body on making it to the end of the playground zipline.

Here is my recent favorite loneliness content (submitted by my friend Sarah, who makes beautiful comics about, among other things, grief): The Constellation Prize podcast from The Believer. I’ve only listened to the first two episodes but holy wow do I love them. (Here’s the description: “Feeling down about the human condition? Consider the spiritual dilemmas of a school crossing guard, a documentary filmmaker, an artist who likes belts, and more. Constellation Prize, a podcast from The Believer magazine, talks to subjects about their daily existential problems—how art, God, and loneliness fit in their lives.”)

And here’s a thing I wrote that just came out today: an essay on caring for my aging dog, the subjective nature of pain, and what it means to want something: “Trying to Conceive Feels a Little Bit Less Awful than Not Trying” at Catapult.

If something reminded you of the beauty of the universe today, I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks for being here.

Yours,

Mandy