Happy Place

Hello again friends. As a librarian, especially one who works with youth, my life is flipped from most of the rest of the world and my summers are the busiest part of my work year. We have more activities and more people in the building, and I manage a pair of interns for six weeks and also people go on vacation so there’s extra work for the rest of us, and then suddenly it’s August and I realize I haven’t written here for months.

And it’s compounded by the feeling that I need to have perfectly coherent, Capital I Important thoughts to write on here. And also the continuation of the world being on fire in so many heart wrenching ways. It feels impossible to talk about anything else.

And/but/also, if I’m learning anything this year, it’s that I need to cling on to the good stuff where I can. And a few weeks ago I got a chance to go to my literal happy place.

It’s one of those phrases that I’ve heard all my life. People say it as a joke and also not as a joke. And I always had some place I would think of. The 100 year old theater building I spent a lot of time doing shows at as a kid. My friend’s cabin on a lake in northern Michigan.

But a few weeks ago I went back to my MFA program for alumni weekend for the first time in several years, and when I stepped onto campus my shoulders came all the way down and I breathed a full breath with all of my lungs.

And I thought: This is my happy place.

I get it now. I understand what people have always meant by that phrase. The way a place can live so deeply in you it can actually regulate your nervous system. I didn’t even (get to) spend that much time on campus during my years in the program because of the fucking pandemic. But it doesn’t matter. Being there still makes my whole body vibrate on a different frequency.

Everything is hard right now. Feeding myself (every day! Who came up with that system!?!) is hard. Paying my bills is hard. Dealing with the public who are objectively increasingly angry and violent in my face is hard. Watching the horrors unfold around me is hard.

Being creative is hard. Writing is hard.

Because it’s hard to see the point of anything.

And also because writing is just … hard.

For a long time I was always actively working on something. My MFA thesis and then a different novel I first-drafted and then abandoned, and then my Momfluencer book which I wrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. But it’s been over a year since that book went on sub and I don’t feel like I have anything to show for these past twelve months. I don’t have a draft of something new the way I hoped and thought and planned on having done.

I try to remind myself that what I have done, is to try a bunch of things, and that realizing that something isn’t working is better than trying to force it for months. I started a book I’ve been wanting to write for a long time… and discovered that I’m still not ready to write it. Then I started a very different book I was excited about … and discovered that the premise I’d devised was not enough to hold a whole book together.

I took that idea apart, broke it into its ingrediants and put them back together in a very different way and I’m finally working on something again that I know has legs. (I think maybe next time I’ll talk about the process of getting it there because it was a whopper.)

Anyway, I’m really excited about this one. I’ve done a full outline and I can see and feel how it all hangs together, how one thing leads to the next to the next. With each book I learn to give myself more time in the planning stage. With each book I learn something new.

But it’s still hard. And it’s hard in new ways. I wrote a whole book and it got me an agent and I revised it and sent it out in the world, and even though it wasn’t the first book I’d ever finished I still find myself feeling like, Can I do this again? Do I know how?

I still feel myself facing the blank page with a completely irrational fear. I just have to type words. I’m not performing brain surgery. No one will die. But it’s hard. It’s hard to actually do. Hard to make myself do, every day.

There’s a scene in the tv show Firefly where this crew of smugglers have transported a herd of cattle from one planet to another in their spaceship. There’s a Strange Girl (Joss Wedon loves himself a Strange Girl) who hasn’t gone near them the whole trip but on the planet, suddenly she talks to them and pets them. And when another character comments on this she says, “They weren’t cows inside. They were waiting to be, but they forgot. Now they see sky and they remember what they are.”

I am not saying we're cows. Just, like. For the record.

That’s what I feel like every time I go back to Hamline for Alumni Weekend. I see the buildings, I see the people, and I remember who I am. I remember that I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words and I can write more. I remember that I’m not alone, there are so many amazing people in this community that understand and can help and commiserate when I need a shoulder to cry on, and who celebrate with me when I share amazing news with them (news I can’t talk about here yet, but soon, hopefully).

I remember that among the many many MANY things I can’t do or change in this dumpster fire of a timeline, there are still things that I can do.¹ And I remember that fascists come after the creatives and intellectuals first because we terrify the fuck out of them.

(I’m going to keep terrifying the fuck out of them.)

It was a wonderful weekend. I stayed with a friend and met some new ones and talked deeply about craft for three days. I went to a book launch and caught up with my cohort who I’ve keep a weekly email check in chain for several years now. My friend and I led a sesson on ways to make your author readings more effective and the whole process was so fun and easy and I had a great time doing it. I got coffee with a friend and talked about the hard parts of writing and I listened and listened and talked and laughed.²

And I heard amazing readings of amazing books by amazing authors who I still can’t quite believe I know, like, in real life.

And everything feels a little less hard, on this side of that trip.

Do you have a place like that, friend? A happy place? A place where you can be completely yourself?

I hope you do.

I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

And regardless, I hope you keep terrifying the fuck out of people. And clinging to the good things.

Because the good things matter too.

1. I’ve decided to focus my time and energy fighting for the Freedom to Read. I’m getting more active in the Authors Against Book Bans group and looking for other ways to do this work as well. This is the thing I have the most skills and expertise for, and the biggest chance of actually moving the needle in any way, so I’m going to focus on this.

2. I also worried a lot about my cats, but they were such good girls for my cat sitter while I was gone.