A beginning

The start of a new day. Canyonlands National Park. May 2022.

I've always been a writer. I'm not unique because of that; it's just a fact. Like many writers, I've often (always, if I'm being honest) had an ego about it. In high school I would humblebrag that I wrote essays in just one draft, and my grades generally fared well despite that fact. First time's the charm, mates! I think I thought I always said it right the first time, with occasional edits as I wrote to clean up the mess. I think I was also scared of being the one to find major flaws. If a teacher decided my essay was imperfect, they had every right to critique, whereas if I looked too hard, I might rip the whole thing up. I wanted to be perfect on the first attempt, because if I needed a second or third draft, maybe I wasn't actually good at this thing that I, and so many people around me, said I could do really well.

But it's much easier to write for an external purpose than it is to write for myself. There are myriad reasons for this, not least being the need to get good grades so that I would presumably make better money as a result, or in more recent times, to make any money at all. I think of the book Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott, in which she sympathizes at length with the writer who does everything in their power to do anything but write. And then, often (but not always) due to an impending deadline, they sit down and they put a word on the page, and then a sentence, and then the spell is broken and the moment becomes the writing. It's far easier to evade myself when I'm the only one keeping score. 

But I do know that I love to write; I need to write. And right now a lot of what I write (when I finally get to writing it) sits untouched, uncared for, maybe never to see my eyes again, let alone anyone else's. Not all of that writing is good; a lot of it is decidedly not good, or at least needs a lot of work. But some of it is worth sharing, and I'd like to teach myself to love the writing process again, to create for creativity’s sake rather than fearing failure. 

So. I'm going to start sharing what I write, and maybe other creative endeavors too. You may be asking, Lucy, why are you posting this on the internet now? The New York Times just asked if we passed peak newsletter times. Yes, I might have missed the bandwagon. I don't care. Someone, somewhere, said something smart about "better late than never" and I'm going to roll with that advice. There probably won't be a consistent schedule, at least for now. There almost certainly won't be a consistent topic or style, to start out and maybe not ever. This is a container for whatever I want to put in it, and I'd like to not box myself in too tightly. It also won't be perfect. Some of what will live here might be the product of heavy editing and curation; other things, well, they might be fresh out of the oven, so to speak. I want to gauge how this is going before I set expectations. (The location may also change; I’m starting on this website because it has other relevant works, but I may switch to Ghost or Substack or something else, so stay tuned.)

This is a green light to start something new. This is a reminder to take good advice and run with it. This is a confession of words tucked away in hard drives and long-closed notebooks. This is a revelation that writing is a noun and a verb. This is a home for the idea that nags in the night, that wiggles around a brain while on a walk, that slithers out of the subconscious during a shower. This is a blessing for doing the work.