I used to be a prolific writer. I used to spend hours of my youth fantasizing about what I’d be like, now, in the future. I was naive enough to have things to say because I held the bright, narcissistic, young thing belief that what I had to say mattered. This was before twenty-four hour news and before my mom understood twitter. It was before I stopped reading every night because watching tv in bed on an iPad seemed luxurious. It was also before everyone started hating millennials. Especially if they were millennials.
Now I start to type and words don’t come out. Well, they do. But they’re not personal essays about anything. They’re ad copy for baby food. It’s an article about white women who love to flip houses and want their own Real Housewives of Cuntiness show about it. It’s a bad tweet here or a funny text there but, I’m not saying anything. Who wants another think piece on how Gwen Stefani uses spectacle as pastiche. Not me, especially now that we have bigger fish to fry like how ‘alt-right’ really means ‘nazi’ and Abigail Breslin grew up to be a fox and nobody is even talking about it.
Least of all me. I was never Yale bound, I never had the stamina to go to school more than two hours a day even in high school -that’s how I ended up at ASU-, so I’m educated just enough to know I’m too stupid to voice my opinion. I have an internal gut monitor that tells me when things feel right (my gut told me to buy the peacoat) and when things feel wrong (my gut told me in 2014 to dump an abusive boyfriend and never look back) but try explaining “guts” or, “kishkas” if you will, to 20 million people with internet access. I once used the hashtag #yesallwomen as a joke, simply stating that if men can unbutton their pants after dinner, I should be able to unzip my skirt, and I was called a cunt. Do you think I am brave enough or have enough energy to even pretend I know what would fix the world? I don’t. All I can do is give money to Planned Parenthood and stay as educated as possible.
And part of this is laziness. Part of this is fear. The world is different now and everyone thinks you’ve got a motive operandi.
She’s writing to get likes. She’s writing because she thinks she’s got something to say. She’s writing, but I can write better.
Well. Probably. And I think these things, too. Why should I write when Lena Dunham can grab Jennifer Lawrence to dash something off for Lenny Letter. Why write when someone might say something mean to me? I live in an echochamber wrapped in bubble wrap, sealed inside an Amazon Prime box that’s really too big for the package and has no business pretending to be a normal sized box. Writing means ripping off the blue tape and at the very least pretending like what I have to say about whatever topic I didn’t research enough (nowadays you can never research enough) is worthy of a three minute read on Medium. And god for fucking bid the seo sucks or the keywords aren’t filled in. Because maybe what’s worse than asking for attention and getting the wrong kind is asking for attention and not getting any at all.
So I stopped writing for me. I wrote food blogs and local stories and some national commercials. I won an Emmy (I’m allowed to be proud, fuck off) and I kept busy doing other stuff so I didn’t have to do personal stuff and I could shrug stuff off and be like well, whatever I’ve got nothing to say, anyway. Mila Kunis said it for me and it was picked up by HuffPo.
And then I watched the revival of Gilmore Girls.
I loved Gilmore Girls as a kid. I felt a kinship with Rory. We were both close to our moms and loved to write. I didn’t watch season 5-7 of Gilmore girls, I kind of aged out, but Netflix gives everything a shiny new coat of paint so I watched with my mom and my sister and we waited… Waited ever so patiently for a plot.
It was mostly Rory flying back and forth from London (on a freelancer’s budget? How.) so quickly I thought, like westworld, the show was operating in three different timelines but even still, nothing happened. Rory had nothing to say.
I got angry. I waited ten years to watch Rory fuck up a GQ story she was writing spec? I watched her skip past the meat of a story and sleep through an interview. She went to Yale for Pete Campbell’s sake. Why is she suddenly totally blowing an interview with a fake women’s site?
“I could do better,” I said to myself. Followed by, “Oh, gross.” It felt gross to care again. It goes against all my greater instincts. Trying might lead to failing and all of this leads to anxiety anyway so I guess I might as well be anxious and at least try.
Where Gilmore Girls lost their plot, I finally found mine.
I lost my voice or, had it in storage anyway along with all my shit from the three years I lived in Seattle, but if some dude in his underwear who hasn’t showered in four days can feel entitled enough to tell me I’m a cunt for writing about a bad date I had and Donald Trump can be elected president after tweeting at 3am about a woman who made him feel like he had small hands, why the fuck can’t I voice my opinions in this wasteland? The Statue of Liberty’s poem by Emma Lazarus clearly states that she wants the tired, poor huddled masses who are yearning to break free and I mean, it’s a slightly different context but that’s me right now. If you cut me do I not take my aggression out on Nutella and/or cheese?
What I’m trying to say is, we are all fucking assholes. And also, I’m writing again.
And hey maybe next time I’ll even have something to say.
kaledo-art
andulkaphoto
yousharknotpass
kianamaiart
blakekathryn
2087
gummygunk
theartofmadeline
janainaart
