The words will lead the way

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Pine Plains. The whole series is here.

So, this has been a tough year. The succession of tragedies in and around my life in 2024 had an oddly cohesive effect, in hindsight—they brought people together, they focused the mind, they simplified the job: Live, feel, repair (or at least think about thinking about repairing).

This period is turning out to be harder. The initial shock of the deaths is gone, the fires are out. But the emotional biome is still devastated, and the opportunistic agents are setting in—the floods, the plague, the erosion. My boyfriend is so deep in the inundation of a creative project that I’m lucky to see him for minutes a day; I find myself inexplicably adrift from old friends; a close loved one and I aren’t speaking. I’m lucky to have some hourly freelance work to try to stay afloat while I finish my novel, but it’s taking enough brain space that the novel has slowed to a crawl, thus undermining the arrangement. The cats, the dogs, the laundry, the cooking, the dishes, the piloting the car through a strait of street-cleaning restrictions—anyone who runs household logistics knows how it can wear. Two weeks ago I caught the worst cold of my life, and so the somewhat singular bright spot in all of this—a perfect training season—is compromised just in time for my first big event of the year, a half-Ironman this weekend in the Finger Lakes. (There’s thunder in the forecast, to boot.) And that’s all just the stuff I have direct contact with. I’ve been a student of the news for a long time: We’re in a new epoch of dread.

I’ve received and enjoy the gift of resilience, depleted though it has sometimes recently felt. The things at issue in this newsletter—writing, meditation, movement, social connection, creative purpose—they’re all adaptations, all artifacts of hardship. I’ve known much, much less hardship than most people on the planet, and when you factor in the brutal history of the species I’m floating on a champagne bubble somewhere far above the coupe glass, which is full of blood, shit, and bacteria. But pain is pain, and it’s the nature of life and death that most of us can find occasion to say, at some point, that we live in what we’d once have taken for a nightmare—or at least a stress dream. (Just one example: Until I see my LDL drop, I can’t eat more than two squares of chocolate a day.)

In the early days of Covid, right after my ex-boyfriend exited the country and broke up with me over the phone, my therapist at the time asked me to remember that I was not the same as my feelings. I’d never heard that idea worded in quite that way before, and it confounded me. I was exactly my feelings; they swamped every horizon.

But in the way things do, the sentiment stuck somewhere, and unseen, it matured. I have noticed, in some especially challenging moments this summer, that the emotions that are most painful can live in me for a few days, at most, before something sweeps them aside. It’s often less time than that. A world warped by fear and loathing over the first cup of coffee can be soft and sweet again by sunset. The sweetness is not realer than the fear, or vice versa. The feelings are stories, and stories in humans are reality, which is why they’re powerful and important, and why it is so necessary to tell our own, and for them to be the best. I hope you’ll see how this connects: We create because otherwise we’re created into something not our own, the place of a stranger. Whatever you’ve heard, the future is not an accident and we are not its captives. The words will lead the way.

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