works in progress
For the past year and some change I have been working on a book. This sentence feels not only audacious to admit out loud but also pressurizing, because if I tell enough people outside of my writing group that I am working on a book, they will one day maybe start to expect a final version of that promise. This is what scares me the most, the delivery of the proof.
The root of this insecurity is probably more so stemming from the fact that writing, which used to be a core part of who I was as a human being moving through the world at any age, had for a long time become something I used to do. When I started to make my way up the entertainment ladder in LA and saw the hoops that were required to make it as a TV writer, I’m embarrassed to admit sometimes that I gave that dream up, or at least shifted it to the side of my pile of goals. Writing pilots had started to feel like work, and I wasn’t sure I was any good at it anymore. Daily, my boss got calls from writers and showrunners during the WGA strike telling her that they couldn’t pay their mortgage. I was terrified. I sought shelter.
In the shifting of what I wanted to do with my career, I returned to prose out of a desire to feel creative and started writing longform again, a type of writing practice that felt tied distinctly to my childhood, when one of the main ways I stayed entertained was filling up my black and white composition notebooks that were supposed to be used as school supplies for the next year with stories of fairies and trolls and my first “novel”, a ten page story about a girl trapped in a museum. I think I had just read The Mixed of Files of Mr. Basil E. Frankweiler and was feeling deeply inspired.
In therapy recently, I’ve been talking a lot about my fear of failure and how those exact fears prevent me from being the best version of myself. I often feel like I’m bad at my job, I’m a bad friend, I’m bad at staying healthy. These thoughts flit through my mind so frequently that over the years I’ve had to gain tools to silence them. I fold them up with my mind and stick them in drawers, my logical brain reminding my emotional brain that there is no truth to them, they are only thoughts. But still, they come up, when I am groggy on a Sunday morning with no plans, or when I make a mistake at work that feels catastrophic, but instead is so minute I won’t be able to recall it in a week’s time
Mostly, this fear of failure has hit me every time I open my work in progress google doc, where book sits, taunting me. Somedays, like today, I am drawn to sit and write, and I'm reminded how good it feels to be lost in this story I am thinking of. And then other days, every word feels like a hammer to my skull and I can’t help but judge the typos and misspellings, and wonder if it will ever turn into something worth sharing.
I’m sure this fear of failure has been enlarged lately because of my own questions of where my life is going and if I want to keep it locked on the track I’m on, or swerve outside of the guardrails completely. There is something so romantic about being a starving artist in New York or London, and I often wonder if making the leap would save me or change things in my mind for the better. I sit most days watching other people’s lives unfold on social media in front of me, curious if I were to plop into their shoes for a day, if those voices telling me I’m not good enough would quiet forever, or if they would still be just as loud.
The other day, I was watching a video essay by a writer I follow here named Ava Williams whose dedication to her art and creativity is a consistent inspiration for me to not throw in the towel, but to try and try again. At the end of her video, a line struck me so deeply that I started to tear up.
“The mundanity of my life is what is interesting to me; that is where my life is happening.”
In watching this video of Ava’s, which catalogues a pretty normal weekend in her life, this sentiment hit me like a ton of bricks. The mundane moments in my life are also the ones that I want to share and write about. Even the subject of my book sometimes feels so close to me and my experiences that I wonder how else anyone will relate to it or empathize with the characters I write about. Watching her words and creative process unfold inspired me to return here to write about some of the things I’ve been thinking about and as I opened this page I saw countless drafts from the past year and a half since I’ve last written here of ideas I’d half thought about then abandoned because I decided they weren’t quite up to the level of perfection I have deemed I need to be operating at.
So in a way, sharing this is my first attack at fighting back at my own self-sabotage. Yesterday, I drove to a summer camp in the hills of Ojai and picked oranges with Sam and Taylor that would in turn make their journey to food banks later that day. It was an overcast and misty day, which I’ve come to appreciate as a form of much needed respite in the brutal heat that a summer in California can bring. The only sound aside from our chatter and the occasional farm worker in the distance was the wind whistling in the leaves. The orange groves we were harvesting from stood next to a giant high ropes course that brought me back to my summers at camp, ziplining through the limber pine trees at camp allen, sweat dripping down the back of my harness. I loved the idea of that version of me fearless on the ropes course, looking down at this new, older version of me, someone who craves these silent mornings more than my younger self would ever be able to fathom.
Afterwards, we walked around cloudy main street and ate soft serve from shiny, metal goblets while people watching. The couple at the table next to us was talking about buying property in Malibu, every aspect of his wilderness chic outfit at least one hundred dollars a piece. A sign was welcoming members of the Ojai Playwright’s Conference, and I remembered my classes in college talking about various writers’ retreats we could apply to post-grad. This one was always heralded, and now the town was a common day trip retreat for me. The small reminder of Texas and writing in the heat leading me here made me smile. On the drive home, a wayward spotify queue turned into a Broadway sing-a-long and the sentiment of I Can Do Better Than That from The Last Five Years ricocheted inside my mind as Betsy Wolfe’s voice echoed off padded walls of the tiny cabin of my beat-up Subaru.
For once, I was wondering if I still agreed with her character. For so long, I’ve been yearning to be better and bigger and achieve new heights. But in that moment, I was content to share a sweaty day with close friends.
My car still smells like oranges.
Babby recommends:
-Blondshell - I recently got to see her album release show at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and it reminded me of all my favorite bands I used to see at Cheer-Ups and Barracuda in Austin. Her lyrics remind me of a younger, yearn-ier version of me, but it’s fun to unearth that version of myself every so often. This song in particular, she said she wrote for the teenage version of herself <3
-Ava Williams’ “Anti-Vlog” that I mentioned above, and was the main reason I was inspired to start posting here again and to be less afraid of sharing my inner thoughts. The video essay starts at (27:54). If you’re feeling stuck creatively, it might resonate with you.
yummmmmm