Everything Is Going to Be Okay · 12:15am Jan 11th, 2021

The page stretches out before me. White, endless, empty. A cursor blinks, over and over, restless and waiting and unsatisfied. I want to write. I have to write. I can’t write. I wait for words to come and they don’t. It’s been a long time since they last stopped coming. I hoped they wouldn’t leave again. I hoped I’d keep them rolling, keep the gears turning, keep the words spilling forth like letting off a pressure valve, write like I was writing before.

But I can’t. There’s nothing there, white blankness sprawling so far out of the page that it fills my mind too. I have ideas, vague ones, titles and words and concepts, and then the cursor blinks and they all seem useless and wrong and not right, they’re never the right ones anymore, when did they stop?

I pause. Take a deep breath. Exhale. The cursor blinks. I type out the words, and the keys slam home, echoing, a sound that used to be reassuring and now seems empty and hollow.

And then the words sit there, indelible, stark contrast to the emptiness.

Everything is going to be okay.

***

There is a strange truth to words.

Written ones, I mean. A weight, one that doesn’t seem to cross into what we say or think. They have a kind of power that other forms of communication don’t. Contracts must be written, laws are scribed, carved onto stone tablets so that none may doubt their veracity. Symbols etched onto ancient pyramids, and further back onto the walls of caves, some of the only remnants of those civilisations that still remain. Permanence.

Truth.

It’s that permanence that makes them mean more, I think, or at least feel as though they do. Words that are spoken fade away, and then they’re gone, rattling around in our memories but otherwise ephemeral. They don’t last, and so they are cheap. Forgotten. Untrue.

Not that they’re actually untrue, of course, but they have no strength, no power, no permanence, and so whether or not they’re right seems less important somehow. We often use idioms like ‘making a mark’ because we have this importance we place on permanence, as though the mere fact that it’s some physical thing (or virtual, in the case of my recent endeavours) gives it more credibility, more meaning. That’s not to say that it should, of course, only that it does. And perception is really all we have: if we feel that something is more important, then it is. And so we ascribe this importance to written things because they’re physical, because they’re enduring, and in doing so we make the idea real.

***

I am stuck. Lost in place. Trapped. Trapped by my own making, maybe, my own failures and flaws. A year of being trapped, a year of nothing and emptiness and arguments I’m a part of but don’t really participate in. Hollow.

Left behind.

And in the hollowness I reach for a sheet of paper. It’s blank, a fresh slate. A fresh start. Yawning white, shining out. A pen in my hand I don’t remember picking up. Chicken scratch handwriting – I never understood how people could write neatly. I certainly can’t. I can read it, though, and that’s really the only thing that’s important. I don’t believe what I’m writing, but I write it anyway, because it’s the only thing I can think of to do. And even in their rough scrawl, the words stand out against the page.

Everything is going to be okay.

***

I think that’s part of why I write so slowly. I always have done, and almost certainly always will. Even those blissful moments when the words take hold and spread their wings and drag you along with them, daring you to keep up, and you type as quick as you can and it’s still not fast enough, even though those moments do happen they’re far too sporadic. Unreliable. You can’t wait for words like that, can’t wait for ‘inspiration’ to find you in that way. Do that, and – whilst you’ll love those moments when they do arrive – you’ll never get anything done. Enjoyable, of course, but no means to actually write things, and certainly not often.

And so instead most writing takes place in the moments where the words take effort. Laborious. ‘A labour of love’, and it is labour, but we do it anyway. I write because my mind itches if I don’t. I write because it allows me to talk about things I otherwise can’t, feelings I don’t have other ways to express. And because, despite all the hard work, despite the terrifying blank page, I love it.

But it’s still hard. And it’s hard because the words have meaning. Because they’re true, material, and so I have to make sure they’re the right ones. Because they mean so much more than a spoken conversation, where the words melt away into time and memory and only the concept lasts. Too much permanence, too much weight, and there’s no room to get the writing wrong.

***

My mother is in the hospital. I don’t know it yet, but she won’t be coming out. I’m sick, and have been for a long time. Months. So ill I can barely get out of bed, that even going to visit her is difficult, almost impossible, and when we arrive at the hospital I have to run to a bathroom and retch over the toilet. She’s not really herself, either – the drugs make sure of that. She smiles and recognises us but it’s with the glazed look of someone who isn’t really seeing. If she’d had the chance, I don’t think she would have remembered those moments afterwards.

And then back home, and we try not to talk about it even though it’s all we can think about. We try not to think about how every time we visit the hospital the doctor’s voice is lower, his face more drawn, the numbers he gives us getting smaller and smaller. We try not to think about how Christmas is coming up and we were supposed to be spending it with her. The house is pregnant with expectation, tension, unstoppable inevitability, and we try to pretend it’s not there anyway.

I find a piece of paper. My hand trembles as I write, as if my handwriting wasn’t bad enough already.

Everything is going to be okay.

***

It seems silly, perhaps, to talk about pony fanfiction of all things this way, but I think trivialising it like that is equally unfair. It’s still writing, after all, and I still want it to be good, as good as anything else I write. I still want it to have meaning and merit, and use it as a means to improve my work, and it’s safe to say that regardless of the content I have a bigger audience here than anywhere else I’ve written things. And so, yes, the weight of the words feels just as important here as anywhere else. They matter just as much. I still have to get them right. I still can’t afford to get them wrong.

In some cases, striving for the ‘right’ words can be a strength. It allows me to be a harsher critic to myself than I would otherwise be comfortable with, and through that, improve. A focus on trying to write things that are at least decent has hopefully shone through in the things I’ve published here, at least a little bit. And I think if you want to get better at something creative you have to take it seriously, no matter the context, and if nothing else I can at least look back at the very first things I wrote on this site, years ago now, and see how far I’ve come. Those stories are permanent, after all, and I leave them up partly so I can always see how much I’ve improved when I doubt myself and partly because I don’t think removing them would accomplish anything. They were still written, the words still exist. They would still be real (metaphorically speaking, not just because people would be able to find them on fimfetch).

But of course, it’s a double-edged sword. I write slowly, meticulously. While I do comb through my stories a couple of times before publishing to catch typos and clean up awkward sentences, I generally dislike editing and try to get things right the first time. The words have weight to them and it makes me feel like there’s only so much that can be changed. Once the pieces are placed, it feels wrong to remove big chunks, to completely replace or alter large sections. Perhaps it’s me being too inflexible, but I feel like there’s only so much time you can spend changing a story before you were better off rewriting the whole thing entirely from scratch – or better yet, something else.

And instead that pressure to get things right the first time can be almost paralytic.

***

A year misplaced, displaced. Hard enough the first time, almost unbearable the second. I feel like every time it happens I drop further back from where I’m supposed to be, where I should be. But maybe not where I deserve to be. The first year of university is a perfect place to make friends. Everyone’s in the same boat, after all, and so it’s easy. Starting over again in second year makes it far more difficult. Friendships are established, the status quo set. Not impossible, of course, but while I do make friends again they never feel as real as the first year. And those I lose touch with as well.

I think this is really when I start to drift. The car has been losing traction for a while now, but I’ve only just noticed that it’s no longer turning, no matter how hard I twist the wheel. I know this only in retrospect, though. At the time I am just lonely, and miserable, recovered from illness but not well, a hole left in my heart from lost family.

A ball of stress, walking anxiety, and I go home to housemates I have no connection with and shut the world out of my room and one of my only comforts is the page. And even then, sometimes it’s all too much and everything blocks out the words and I find myself staring emptily at the blankness again. But at least I have something for when that happens. A mantra, at this point, something to fall back on, something to stain the page when it otherwise refuses to be marked.

I type them, and they feel warm, and maybe I’m starting to believe them a little even when the world continues to argue to the contrary.

Everything is going to be okay.

***

It goes without saying that the paralysis is bad. The not-writing is bad. But I can honestly say I would never give those things up, because they’re only a side-effect of the words being real. Because I only feel that way because I feel like the things I’m writing matter, even if only to myself, and I would never choose to change that.

Because that’s the best part of writing. That’s why I’m still writing, that’s the fun part. We talk about writing for ourselves, and that’s true, we have to do that, but we also write for others. We have to do that as well, we publish our stories and send them out into the world, fearing backlash, fearing criticism, but we do it anyway because deep down we all want our voice to be heard. It doesn’t have to be heard by many, as long as those that do hear it understand it. As long as it reaches them. At its most distilled, writing is a means of transferring feeling, of evoking it in the reader. A feeling, a thought, an emotion, an idea. A time and a place. And writing can only do that because the words are real, and permanent.

Because they’re true.

Writers need the words to be true, just as I do. We need them to be real or the illusion would shatter, crafted worlds collapsing under their own weight, characters revealed to be no more than cardboard cutouts on a stage. And yes, the words being real makes us vulnerable, the thoughts and feelings within them often close to home or coming from places that are. Any feelings evoked in a reader have to come from the writer first. If I write a sad story, I have to feel sad while writing it. If I write a horror story, I have to be scared first. If I write a romance, I have to love the characters as well.

So we need to accept the good with the bad. We need the hard times, the not-writing times, the times when it all feels hopeless or impossible. Because we also need the great times, the times when the words seize you, when you write in a whirlwind of emotion and feeling and it feels so easy, as if you’ve written it before, as if instead of creating you’re simply unearthing what’s already there, because in many ways that’s exactly what you are doing. And you can’t have one without the other. You can’t have truth without weight.

Giving that up would be giving up everything.

***

I am truly drifting, now. Out of time. The car is lost to me and I know it, I feel it, feel it in that I can feel nothing. No traction. It skids and slides and drifts and there is nothing I can do except brace for an impact, but the impact never comes. I wait and wait and still I have no choice but to drift with it, and still there is no crash. No rock bottom to land in.

In some ways I wish there was. A crash would hurt, would break me, perhaps, but at least then there’d be a chance to survive. At least then I could leave the wreck and stagger onwards under the power of my own two feet, even crawl if I had to. But I don’t crash. Still sliding, still drifting. Endless. Purgatory.

Before, I had the words to follow. They were something, at least. Something to cling to and measure progress, something real that I could turn to and pretend as though I still had traction, as though I was still moving forwards instead of just endlessly spinning out of control. And then the days grew dark with winter and I lost the thread of writing and I can’t find it again. Spinning. Hollow. Empty.

An empty page, a hundred empty pages, a hundred stories begun and never finished, never even past the first sentence. The cursor blinks, and we are where we came in. I don’t know what to do. There’s only one thing I can think of to do. I need to find the words again, I need to find the truth and vulnerability again, and maybe I know where to start. The one place I’ve always started when I need to find words, when I need to stain the page.

You know what I write. And I type them and then I make sure not to stop, and the words pour out like a waterfall, like a hole in a bursting dam, and it’s perfect, and exactly what I need and want and although it makes me raw to write about these things and it hurts, that’s okay. The hurt is okay. Cleansing. And so I don’t stop and I keep writing and I swear not to ever stop again. But even if I do, I know how to find my way out.

I type and the keyboard rings out and I can’t help but smile at the almost forgotten clack.

Everything is going to be okay.

There is a strange truth to words.

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