That feeling when you haven’t eaten a home-cooked meal for days, for weeks. It’s not that you haven’t had meals, good meals. It’s not that you haven’t left the table with your belly full, perhaps even thoroughly enjoyed it. But you know these onions didn’t chop themselves. You know that in most kitchens, food is not handled in latex gloves and white aprons. Tables do not end in checks. You realize that food is not just sustenance, not just something that keeps you going, but a moment where you are reminded of who you are. You chew, you swallow, you digest, you are nourished, you transform. Eating at home is a way of becoming, as is eating as a stranger.
That feeling when you haven’t written something for yourself for days, for weeks. It’s not that you haven’t things, good things. It’s not that you haven’t completed a full day’s work, perhaps even thoroughly enjoyed it. But you can’t make an email prose, you can’t make a memo poetry. You can tell yourself you can, but that’s like calling a restaurant home cooking. It’s just not. Good literature does not end in automatic signatures. A fulfilling session of polishing sentences down is not marked by the sound effect of a jet taking off, projecting from your laptop speakers. You realize that writing is not just work, not just something that gets you from point A to point B, but a moment where you are reminded of who you are. You sit, you process, you write, you reflect, you transform.
This past week I’ve been guilty of doing that thing where you substitute your commitment to writing with tasks that involve words. I’ll just treat this cover letter as my journal entry, I tell myself. But if I actually sat down to write with freedom that day, I would have told myself that that is a terrible idea. Not everything can be a means to an end. This is a fact that is especially difficult to accept on the days when it feels like there’s not enough time, the ones where I’m tempted to toss out all the daily rituals that are supposed to remind me that there’s always time. It becomes a cycle of malnourishment, like skipping lunch, like not drinking water, like losing sleep, in order to just “survive.” I’m seeking an escape from the guilt of writing so much about how I need to carve space to write – I would like to feel less like I’m playing a broken record and more like I’m repeating a mantra. Writing like this takes up so much time in the morning, it’s hardly possible to do it everyday. But it does make a difference, when the first words I make are not a transaction. It is a true gathering of myself, a moment of being collected. Whether it makes me productive for the rest of today should be an afterthought.