How to go on

It’s Monday. First of May. It’s foggy outside (in Toronto) but not in that lovely misty way that feels like a spa—no, this is a cold, cold fog that is more like a damp basement.  Everyone seems to have the typical Monday face on, that tells everyone else to stay away or murder will happen. At 7:30 am, I went to my favourite AA meeting, mentally exhausted after a night of half-sleep-half-think when I tried to come up with a topic for my first installment of my residency. This is the second installment. The first one was s*it. I wrote about having writer’s block. Up until recently, I’ve never suffered (blergh) from one, writer’s block, but I didn't give into it—I used the advice I heard from one cheerful writer friend of mine who said to “just write through it” and so I did and ended up with a bunch of paragraphs about nothing. Then I had a sad nap.

But this morning, even though it was early and foggy and gross, I felt the exact opposite—I felt awake, bright and at peace and my writer’s block gave way to hope. Back in September, I tattooed that word ("hope") on my forearm after a very difficult time. Every year I get a word tattooed around my birthday that inspires me and I’ve got “lucky” and “perseverance” (this particular one is directly related to getting novels submitted and rejected) so far, and a few other ones. I need those words but more than that, I need little ugly-yet-beautiful mornings like today to go on.

I know this is a cliché but we all have difficult times and need moments that we could use to keep us afloat, especially when no encouragement seems to come forth. I don’t think writers have the monopoly on mental-health anguish but on regular basis we have to access parts of ourselves that come from the darkest places—when I write about sadness, I have to feel it, when I write about death I grieve. When I write about joy that I can’t conjure, I am frustrated, full of doubt that I’m not conveying the scope of that emotion. When I write about not being able to write... I can't even tell who I am any more. But I don’t stop writing. I write through despair and as of yesterday I write through writer’s block. In all the years of various upsets, the only constant has been writing—I wrote even when my sadness weighted every ounce of me so heavily I felt like a corpse.

The radio said this morning that May is “Mental health month”—it’s an cute coincidence that I often cover mental health. I find the month-of thing a bit ridiculous but, hey, I got inspired by the announcement to talk about how to not give in. Not give into time wasted writing s*itty things, the damp-basement weather, the monstrosity of Mondays… I don’t really have any wisdom—I could look up quotes and stick them in here but you can look them up yourself—other than whatever it is that you’re going through, you can write through it (if writing is your thing). Or you can play music through it. Or paint through it. Or do yoga through it. Or run through it. The blocks will happen but they’re only there so that you can jump over them. Have hope.

P.S. I took a break while writing my first installment, to read “Herman Melville, Volume 1” by Victor Lodato in The New Yorker, March 27. It’s about a runaway girl, a boy and a very strange woman who got mauled by a bear. You should read it. It is beautiful and wacky and it ends with “fuck with you.”

(Over the course of this month, I will feature authors talking about art that they do outside of writing. To start us off, here's an image of me jumping over invisible blocks.)