Every month, I get one paycheck for my creative work through Patreon. I write 6 or 7 days a week, usually about 500-2,000 words per day. This has been my habit for over a decade. I have written several books, none of which I found worth pitching to agents or publishers, merely the practice of […]
Category: Personal reflections
Birthday Post 6
It feels incredibly selfish of me to break the silence on my birthday. It just seems like a neutral time to talk about myself, I guess. There’s so much that deserves attention. I am overwhelmed by how much there is to write. Specific essays form lengthy outlines across dozens of documents that I don’t have […]
Identity Beyond Memoir
It’s already June, and I feel like I’m still recovering from March. Countless more important things are going on than my personal family drama, so instead of writing about it, I want to write about what it’s been like to go beyond it and establish a personal identity. It has not been easy, and I’ve […]
Art Worth Making
“Don’t use your memoir to air old grievances and to settle old scores; get rid of that anger somewhere else. The memoirs that we do remember from the 1990s are the ones that were written with love and forgiveness…although the childhoods they describe were painful, the writers are as hard on their younger selves as […]
Living with Existential Depression
People have been asking how I’m doing, and I answer that it’s all the same as it was months ago. I’m still fighting the monster of depression, I’m still trying to find meds that work for me, I’m still struggling to find my way back to my art. There’s not much to report when it […]
Winter Freeze
“When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of the imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal […]
The Devastation of Lost Faith
“I lay in a bed of resistance Chained to either side I really wish I could, reset, rewind Someone has clawed out my eyes I don’t know what they told you But this place is not what you think Living inside a hole, they put me underground Where they could never find me unless they […]
Only Human
“Enjoy the pain, it’s yours for a while, girl Don’t run away, your fear, you’re getting older We are relying on you and your emotion And as you go, promise of being bright – Where did you go, my dear, don’t slip away now It’s going slow, unclear, but you’re alive now Don’t be alone […]
Dear Anxiety
“Trapped in a cold white room I want to know, who’ll be there when you snuff the wick? I won’t reflect the same as you I want the proof you’ll promise to let ’em down quick. I never want to see clear at all There’s nothing that could be there now Pull out your teeth […]
When God Spoke to Me
“Descartes invoked God – in this case, a literal deus ex machina – to save himself…When people run up against something inexplicable, transcendent, and, most of all, ineffable, they often call it ‘God,’ as if that were some sort of explanation.” –Barbara Ehrenreich “If you withhold information from your children because you would rather them […]