Your Inner Magician (And Other Mid-Move Thoughts)
I’ve been stuck in the perfect pressure cooker for any writer.
Soaring high on the wings of publishing Tara McMullins’ piece to launch The Spectrum Spotlight, I Icarus’d myself into melting some of my feathers off. Or so it has seemed.
Over the past week, I’ve imagined you on vacation. Or perhaps stuck in a cubicle where the air conditioning keeps your sweaters in business. I’ve imagined you running with little feet pattering behind you. Or perhaps driving the bigger littles to Social Club or whatever the cool kids call it. And where I have tried to find our shared common thread, there is none that can neatly tie me together with a few hundred of you. In the rush to find something to say that will be delightful in your inbox or on your phone, I have ridden the writer’s rollercoaster of feeling unworthy, lost, dizzy and a little bit like a phony.
When my writing feels stuck, I grapple with the foundations of identity
This is a singular moment in time for my life. While I’ve imagined your vacations, cubicles, and families, I’ve been in the process of leaving the mountains of Colorado to return to the general vicinity of where I grew up. When my husband and I first trekked out of Dallas, we rented a home in Denver for a year to acclimate to the thinner air and colder winters. Then we bought a home about 2,000 feet even closer to the sun. A veritable paradise. No neighbors you can readily see off the balcony or back deck; hundreds of trees in every direction; and tucked at the end of the road so no cars can saunter by at all times of the day. In the summer, hummingbirds come within six inches of my face to get a drink of sugar water. And if I’m paying close attention, I can even see wobbling fawns when they’re only a few hours old.
We first moved to Pine in July 2019 (do your own COVID math there), and I was optimistic about seeing friends while also enjoying the spoils of our hermit crab cabin. But I was also five months into grieving a second-trimester miscarriage, so the real story is: I moved to the mountains, overflowing with grief, kicking at tree stumps, hoping to be fixed.
Like many other writers I know, my writing life is intricately connected to my daily comings and goings. And right now, everything is in a state of upheaval. All the rhythms I rely on to help find some grounding are hard to pin down. As I’m processing the shift away from Colorado and back to Texas, I feel like my hard drive is short-circuiting.
Our home in the mountains is a paradox to me right now, and no matter how hard I try, I don’t have an inspirational poem to imbue meaning into all that these four years has given to and taken from me. This inner drive to “poem-ize” my life has been a recurring pattern: as I approach a huge life transition, I try to frantically wrap it up into a neat bow. And only now can I see that moving has always felt like a simultaneous inner death and rebirth. It feels like once I hand over the keys to my old home, everything about who I used to be will vanish. I’m stuck in the messy middle, and I find myself in another familiar spot:
I am longing to move through the world as a scientist, collecting objective facts and writing out my next steps in a rigid action plan that can never fail me—when I have always been a little bit more of a magician, shifting behind the veil of secrets and discovering over time that opening to magic is the only way to make it through our mysterious world in one piece.
This, perhaps, is where I can draw a thread between us, and you can tell me what you think, OK?
Right now, things feel neither scientific nor magical—not in my regular life, my writing life or anywhere else. They feel downright ridiculous. I’m leaving a state whose policies on women’s healthcare I support (and have been saved by twice); it’s also a state where my health insurance policy costs $800 more per month than it did when we lived in Texas. While trying to maintain some inner stability, I can’t help but channel my inner Meg Conley, drawing connections between my political and economic and existential conundrums.
To add insult to my voter registration card, moving back to the Lone Star State also means we can probably afford to buy an electric vehicle in a few months (but couldn’t in a very purpley state like Colorado), while simultaneously I am walking into the unknowns about whether Texas will join the Counseling Compact that would allow my therapist to keep working with me out of state. I’m leaving Colorado, a place with the hands-down best, most democratic voting system that I may just write an entire newsletter on it soon; and I’m treading back into a world where voting and the goddamn power grids are all clenched in between the knuckles of men who can be gladly bought.
Bouncing between science and magic
I’m wishing for the move from Colorado to Texas to be all science and accurate predictions, just like I often wish for my writing. I expect to have proof of magic before I release my writing into the internet, the air and the hands of the unseen. I am trying to demand something of my life that can never be conjured. I am trying to know who I will become before I have even made the transition into a new home. I am demanding predictability when life (and writing) is hopelessly, eternally, inevitably only one thing: unpredictable.
So, I am meeting you today with honesty: not straight in the eyes, but looking slightly away so I can hear you better. I’m feeling as though someone out there, also in the void of science and magic, might be wondering if there is a place for them even if they can’t prove it just yet.
I have nothing to help solve the mysteries of why writers treat themselves as scientists when they are really more like magicians in street clothes. Perhaps the best laid plans and outlines for writing and life have nothing to do with science. Perhaps they have everything to do with magic and the person inside that hasn’t been born or given a voice yet.
So that’s where I’ll leave you today: walking into the next room, the next home, the next state and hoping tomorrow or the day after, you and I will have something magical to share with one another.
Chime in:
How do you relate with the unknowns of writing and sharing it with others?
When your life is in transition, how does that show up on the page? How do you tap back into your inner magician?