I need so much more space in my creative practice or I am literally going to die

It is okay when I don’t write; sometimes my body is taking part in a process under ground. It is okay that it isn’t always spilling forth, that my time isn’t used the most efficiently or productively. Sometimes the chapters of underground process take longer than we’d like. Sometimes we scream at our “symptoms” I LOVINGLY ACCEPT YOU NOW PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO THE FUCK AWAY. There’s so much I could be writing that I’m not writing. The part of me in charge of making rent and paying bills has come to regard this my most sacred work as “the way I make money” and so therefore, I stand nervously hovering over my own process.

The thing is that I want to bring the disparate pieces together. The thing is I am quietly working on something in the background. Will it reach fruition? Will it reach fruition without a decisive act of will? The thing is I am addicted to pleasure, I am addicted to safe, trust worthy, real love… his hands melting everything frozen inside me, bringing me somewhere unimaginable and beyond words. I could write about that. I could write an entire book about pleasure. I knew already that pain breaks you open, changes you fundamentally, changes your relationship to space and time, to intensity and even the concept of scale. But pleasure? Who knew pleasure could change me like this. Who knew pleasure could open me, turn me inside out, take me to the edge of myself, and bring me back somehow more of myself.

How to write about pleasure in the context of so much pain? How to selfishly carve out the space to throw myself on the ground in absolute worship of pleasure? How to risk it all to tell the truth about how absurdly lucky I am? How to let it be good, but in an extra way, just like the pain always has to be so fucking extra? I need so much more space in my creative practice or I am literally going to die. I need the secret relationship, the secret world, the place of creation I came to in devotion in every chapter of my life. I’m so lucky to be a full time writer but goddamn the eyes of capital staring over my shoulder telling me to “get to work.” I can’t approach my writing like a “job” without killing my writing. The writing is something else.

There is so much suffering that suffering is the default. Absolute horror is the most common experience on earth. Torture, atrocity, unthinkable suffering is the norm. This is the context we find ourselves in. We move ever closer to ever more horror for ever more of us. We fracture and splinter and dissociate to cope with and deny the magnitude of the horror. We give up what is most sacred and precious about ourselves in exchange for respite called “not knowing.” We go jogging or for a bike ride and the sky is filled with smoke. We carry a little box of horrors in our pocket that report to us stories about the horrors but only if we specially subscribe to them. Otherwise the box of horrors can be a box that calls you ugly or a box that tells you you’re a god. It depends on the subscription chosen for you by the algorithm — a prediction of the best way to monetize your attention based on your greatest insecurities and preoccupations as tallied by what you look at and search for on your screen. Whether we subscribe to the horrors they continue and continue to approach.

I can’t imagine being more unloved than being treated like a sex object in your family while you are a child. Incest is degrading and humiliating. Incest is a permanent state of outsiderness — barred from the supposedly most normal and fundamental human experience: familial love and belonging, home. Incest is not the absence of family but the family as threat, the family as violation. I am learning, as an adult, everything I did not learn as a child. I am learning how to be loved, how to be respected, how to be precious, how to be safe. My process is unfolding exactly on time. I trust every movement. I trust even the “symptoms.” I trust myself.