Bring what you have

I forget how much changes in autumn. I’m not very good at remembering things like that: remembering what’s come before, even if it’s happened many many times. My strange life indoors keeps time’s tethers very loose, but then perhaps it’s like that for all of us and the past feels like a dream more often than we care to admit it. I sometimes envy people who have somehow managed to maintain a strong sense of the past, their memory and their reference points, but then perhaps they are kidding themselves. I think everything is far looser, more slippery than we acknowledge. Here, now, the brown sycamore keys are spinning their way down to the doormat again, the afternoons are dark, my feet cold. Sometimes, I catch myself standing still, sure it was all different a moment ago, and then have to shake my head and remember it doesn’t matter. It is my 20th autumn in this house but it may as well be my first. The only question worth anything is ‘what is actually true now?’

My days are a back-and-forth between making things and not making things. I write and I don’t write. I make pictures and I avoid making pictures. I remain very good at making excuses. I also remain very good at doing things against the odds, and despite a year of renewed pain, illness and restriction, I have written nearly two books, made dozens of poems, filled journals and sketchbooks. It is hard to believe that someone who avoids doing things as often as I do can accumulate so much work, but then that is the rub: that it is far easier to do things than we think it is. It turns out there really is all the time in the world, if we decide to use it in small amounts over and over. It makes me wonder what I could achieve if I seized even more of it, in smaller and smaller increments. I am, forever, in a process of finding that out.

The thing I resist, more than anything, is bringing what’s true to the page. I know, more clearly and surely than I know my own name, that this - this truth telling - is my work and I resist it all the same. I keep wanting, instead, to shape things in advance. I have a bright idea or a dream of something and I want to will it in being exactly as it is, impressive and flawless. I am realising more and more how easy it is to hide behind art. Despite what everyone says, it’s actually far easier to be an artist of good things rather than bad - good in the sense that your creations are made deliberately a little prettier than is really true, manipulated to be a little closer to the story you’d LIKE to tell, or only shared if they feel like they won’t break your cover. It is far harder to create and share ugly, true things and to be the person you actually are.

It’s this that still holds me back so often. I don’t want to take my truth to the page. I don’t want to take my pain or my frustration or lack of skill; I don’t want to take my confusing disability, my envy, my vulnerability, my same-old same-old to the page. I don’t want any of it to show up there where someone might see my whole, true self. It’s easier, safer, to hold back and wait and hope that something about me or my life might change in the interim. That maybe, while I’m staring at my phone or watching endless episodes of whatever, that I will turn into someone who can deliver what I wish I could.

I forget lots of things. I forget that autumn brings with it a special kind of morning light that you’re sure you could scrape off the crystalline windows like honey. I forget that finding a dead leaf as big as your hand can make you feel as old as time. And I forget that, in the end, I will always find the strength and the resolve to scoop up what I have and take it to the page anyway, because I know for sure now that it’s really the only way, in the end, to do anything.

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