I feel a constant pressure to do. I’m not alone in that feeling, I know, but it sometimes feels like nobody ever acknowledges it, not really. Is it burnout? Burnout’s opposite? A desire to burn when I’m out of ideas?
But I’m not exactly out of ideas. Instead, ideas tangle in my mind like balls of string unspooling at the paws of pesky cats, rolling across the room in haphazard layers. I have research projects I want to work on, zines I’m writing, a chapbook I’m loosely compiling, a novel I’m writing, a newsletter I try to send out every Monday. There is so much to do—not only abstractly but concretely.
Yet I find myself struggling to put words on the page. And with each hour, minute, even second that I struggle, that struggle intensifies. I begin to panic because I’m running out of time.
Like I said, I’m not alone in feeling this way. James Baldwin writes about time in Giovanni’s Room with such sharpness and clarity of thought. If I may, here’s an excerpt from the passage that always comes to mind:
Giovanni placed himself before me again and began wiping the bar with a damp cloth. “The Americans are funny. You have a funny sense of time—or perhaps you have no sense of time at all, I can’t tell. Time always sounds like a parade chez vous—a triumphant parade, like armies with banners entering a town. As though, with enough time, and that would not need to be so very much for Americans, n’est-ce pas?” and he smiled, giving me a mocking look, but I said nothing. “Well then,” he continued, “as though with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place. And when I say everything,” he added, grimly, “I mean all the serious, dreadful things, like pain and death and love, in which you Americans do not believe.” (Baldwin 34)
Maybe Giovanni is right. Personally, I often feel like I need to hurry to settle and solve things, to put them in their places. But life is never so tidy, and we’re often left feeling like there’s not enough time.
Pain. Death. Love. Giovanni asserts that Americans do not believe in three of the greatest disruptors of time’s parade. I lack the talent and confidence needed to make any sort of generalized assertions; no matter, though, because I trust James Baldwin to make those assertions for me. I sense, as Baldwin did, an American craving for linearity, cause and effect, problem and solution, to rule our days. Unfortunately, we cannot stop pain, death, and love from running in the street as our parade tries to keep marching along.
It makes sense that I’m struggling to create lately. I loved being home for the holidays, visiting my family and my partner’s, but as you can imagine, we often deal with some complicated feelings about our lives from the people who love us. We also have people whose feelings are less complicated, more hostile. That brings some pain. And, as I’m sure I will write about in the future, my father is sick.
Pain. Death. Love. I’ve had all three on my mind and in my heart over the past three weeks. I can’t expect myself to achieve maximum creative output!
What I did instead of research and write this weekend was use watercolor pencils and Sharpies to doodle some jellyfish. It was silly and fun and made me feel happy. It was, more significantly, a way to step back from time’s parade and enjoy instead time’s swirling flow.
I encourage you all to look for your own ways to rebel against the parade of time this week. Do some doodling, take a long walk, wait to reply to that text you want to avoid. Not as a tip to avoid burnout or a strategy to light a creative fire—just for the sake of stepping out of line.