9. Amputate
I have been late to everything for as long as I can remember, and for one year, I have been late to nothing. It’s an odd thing, to feel gratitude that a global pandemic relieved me of one of my most persistent anxieties. For more than 365 days, I haven’t had to mentally self-flagellate every time I walk into a room 10 minutes late, sweating, half-heartedly apologizing even though I know how inconsiderate apologies become when they are given too often.
For a year I also haven’t had to hang out with people who make me feel bad about myself. That’s awesome — but also, when that thought first occurred to me, it made me wonder: why was I doing that before? When there were no more invitations, no more events, no more anything, other people felt lonely; I felt relief. I can’t apologize for that.
The changes that threw other peoples’ lives into a tailspin last year did not affect me. I read about grief, I Zoomed with friends who tested positive for COVID, I lived with the latent fear we all have been operating with. Mostly, though, I was affected in my own semi-unique ways.
I had already been working at home in my slipper-socks — the kinds with the nubby-bottoms — for eight years. For nearly all of those years, I couldn’t afford to travel to report stories, so I got really used to doing my work over the phone. When the pandemic hit, I simply reverted.
That return to old ways exposed a nerve: that one of my great pleasures in life is being able to report from the road. It took me so long to build a solid enough freelance business to be able to do just that, so when I couldn’t travel, I started asking myself a lot of questions about why it is I do what I do: What is it about my work that is so satisfying? Why do I work so much? Why is it that when part of what I do is removed am I affected negatively? But also: other questions came. Who am I trying to please? How long do I plan to live like this? To what end will I push myself?
Recently I confessed to a young freelancer that I stuck it out with freelance journalism because I naively thought it would one day lead to some incredible job offer — one that would allow me to stay in the West, one where editors would trust my creative ways of telling stories. But … that never happened. It makes me laugh to think that this was in the back of my mind for so long: an aspiration for a job that only existed in the 1990s at men’s magazines, and even then were scarcely available to women.
The pandemic made me realize that maybe when I started freelancing, some nonexistent perfect job was the “end” for me. But along the way, that faded. The process became the reason for doing it.
On the road, I find a life free of distraction. Time when I can concentrate. I focus on a story, and nothing else really matters: not in my personal life, not the news, nothing. When I go, I’m just gone, and sometimes I think I need to be gone.
My pandemic brain found a creative workaround: without the ability to travel, I started renting cabins for days on end. I get dropped off with a couple bags of food, my computer, and a back-breaking backpack full of books, and… I’m gone again. I’ve been doing this for a few months now, isolating myself for a week within four walls that are not my own, living by a new rhythm. I wake up when I’m cold, start a fire, meditate, write for awhile, eat, stoke the fire, meditate more, write more, eat more, sleep more.
I figured out that if you want to write — really write — you’ve got to cut out the noise. No. That’s not strong enough: you’ve got to sever yourself from the noise. Amputate the static.
Last year, when the pandemic forced everyone else inside, my normal got noisy. My quiet place had been infiltrated. Social media was angrier. In-person meetings became Zoom meetings; I wasn’t late anymore, but I was in more meetings, and everyone was miserable. For years I was the one who was notorious for working all the time; now everyone was. It took seeing that to make me realize what a sad way that is to live.
I haven’t figured out answers to all of my questions, but the one I’ve been trying to figure out the most lately is this one: what is life when you take work away?
Here’s one way my life becomes life. Over the last weekend, I completed a three-day baking project via Zoom with a close friend. We live states apart, but the pandemic has made us closer.
Together we assembled two perfect croquembouches. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a complicated tower of cream puffs, gleaming from a sheen of caramel. As we navigated through the process, we’d hold our bowls up to the camera and ask “how does this color look to you?” and “is this pastry cream too thick?”
When it was all finished, after we’d closed our laptops and said goodbye, I sat there for a bit and stared at the monstrosity sitting on my kitchen table. The house was empty; Joe was out climbing a mountain. And I said aloud to the thing: “why did I make this?” (Later, the stunned look on my sister-in-law’s face would answer that question for me.)
I didn’t even really want to eat the damn thing, but making it did make me realize how much I need to lose myself to complicated projects. I like to find a way through things that feel impossible.
I scorched the shit out of my fingers in the process, though. But I think anytime I write, I feel like my fingers are a little burned by the time I’m done, too. Gnawed at, muscles tense. It’s a sign to me, and no one else, that I’ve found a way to the other side and am looking for new ways to burn.