patience: the end of escape velocity
[Originally posted on 10/27/2021 at birdbyrocket.com]
After writing about energy last week, I started thinking about the downsides of having a lot of it. My energy helps me to do things, but it also makes me worry, sends me cyclically through repetitive thoughts, and gives satisfaction a short half-life.
The energy piece is a sort of exhortation to a bunch of invisible people who lack energy. Who am I even talking to? It’s pretty funny. Maybe it’s common for young energetic writers to realize they are building invisible people to argue with. I have plenty of ideas for what needs to be different, but I don’t focus as much on what I actually need. (And as a side note: why is it so hard for a person in her late 20s to feel how young she is?! I resent this.)
So what do I need? If I had to pick one thing, it would be patience. Patience allows me to see the end of Escape Velocity.
Escape Velocity is an energetic project. I write things when I get interested or curious, try to pull thoughts together, and then… post my results. All of the ideas here are starting points. The central thing I’ve learned about writing an essay is that I haven’t written one yet.
Posting these words on the site is a kind of realization activity. I posted this, someone could read it, therefore I exist. Maybe the real “escape” is in not needing to collect these pieces under the banner of “Escape Velocity” anymore? To write, and allow the work to develop over a long time, until it truly coheres?
To give myself a little credit… sometimes (when you’re a young writer who is trying to make her work exist) you feel the need to bolster your sense of being “a writer.” Escape Velocity—and really, this site as a whole—does that for me. If anyone asked me about my writing, I could direct them here.
I think this is related to why writers turn to Twitter, especially those without MFAs or academic jobs. Though many proclaim their pride at being unaffiliated with institutions, Twitter effectively becomes their “institution,” the external place that supports their writer-identity. Twitter provides a lot of little markers that confirm a writer-identity (such as a bio, where you can type “writer”). It’s easy to categorize yourself, or who you want to become, using writer-Twitter’s parameters. I think this serves a similar purpose that an MFA serves during the time when a writer has no books to prove their writer-status, or that a university position serves while a writer is working on a long project.
I’m pretty suspicious of “writer-identities” in general, perhaps because I remember a time when I really, really wanted one. I see how little the development of a visible writer-identity has to do with a writing practice. It tends to become a scarcity mindset, which leads to fear, which can morph into ugly entitlement and bitterness. Not to mention that Twitter itself, which has institutional priorities in conflict with the values of writers and art, is probably not a good place to invest any trust.
There are complicated things that I want to write about, and I want to be more conscious of using my energy toward those topics—even if the eventual essay is far away. Writing Escape Velocity sometimes encourages me to write about things that are less complex, because the work will be “done” faster, and I can get that boost of energetic validation from making it public. In writing Escape Velocity, I wanted to resist the gravitational pull of things. Now I need to resist the pull of the easy validation I get from the project.
Fiction seems to function differently. I love writing fiction exactly because of what I can’t understand: the weird images, the concepts and dynamics I keep returning to, the subliminal things I don’t notice at all. If a story was written impatiently, this becomes part of the quality of the story somehow, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Impatience while trying to write critically about the world just leads to sloppy writing.
And frustration. I always feel like I’m right on the edge of my own comprehension, like I’m running up against a mental wall. I can’t forcibly bust my way through that wall. Eventually the wall will move further out (as it has many times before). It’s inevitable, but it’s not fast. I have to take my time.
I’ve learned all this while doing Escape Velocity, so I’m glad I tried it. Fear of shame is a force against trying things. I could feel embarrassed about posting this stuff. I could decide that all of the pieces are barely-digested, surface-level rambling that should not be public. I could delete them all, but I won’t. Instead, I can use them by expanding the ideas into essays someday.
If I was a reader of this, I might conclude that I shouldn’t ever post pieces of exploratory critical writing on the internet. Not true! I can easily imagine a writer with the opposite problem: who doesn’t let their work go, who feels too worried or ashamed to release it, who could use a little more energy. (I could also become that writer, and need to rebalance again in the future.) I’m the only one who can stop writing Escape Velocity, and I can only stop because I’ve discovered a new path to follow while writing it.
The intention of Escape Velocity was to practice short form critical writing about things that interested me, with the greater goal of learning to write good essays. Now I feel ready to tackle the project of essay-writing by taking a new path altogether—however long it takes.
So, really, Escape Velocity has done exactly what I hoped it would do.