September 28, 2022

The last two personal essays I've completed, and the one I'm working on now, have reminded me that one of my greatest challenges as a writer is emotional resistance.  Over the winter and spring, I tackled two pivotal years from college, centering the essay on the creative stuff I wrote during those years.  It wound up being a rewarding journey of self-discovery, since I had repressed a lot from that time, but the pain of those years prompted me to take frequent breaks, up to a few weeks on a couple of occasions, so that the resulting essay took me five months to feel satisfied with (though in fairness to me, it's long: 8,400 words).  I moved from that to a shorter essay about memories from my early childhood.  This was a more straightforward project, and one that enabled me reclaim a richer, more mixed picture of that time in my life than I'd previously had.  As such, it was a joy to write, and took me just a few weeks to complete.  Now I'm tackling my time in, and relationship to academia.  I've articulated some core ideas that I think will make this essay a rewarding piece, but the subject is one that I feel a lot of ambivalence about because it spans three decades of personal struggle -- a great deal to digest and express succinctly -- and features multiple failures (two divorces and an abandoned career).  I'll emerge on the other side having finally embraced who I am, but after so much denial, it's hardly a heroic outcome.  The essay will require more than a little emotional nakedness to come out well, and I find myself resenting that, and myself for my hesitancy and my failures over those decades, necessary though they ultimately were.  Part of me would love to abandon it already, but it's an integral part of a larger project, an essay collection that will be my "memoir in shards."  With my work schedule and other commitments, I'll be really surprised if I finish it before the new year.