Gabby Bess's Blog, page 8
January 4, 2015
January 1-4, 2015
Suspiciously, I feel as if I’ve only spoken a handful of paragraphs since the new year and I certainly haven’t written any. Across January 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th I’ve been quiet, mostly. Call it an extended New Year’s Eve hangover (metaphorically) or the effect of smoking weed for over 72 hours without reprieve (literally). I guess, at some point yesterday (January 3rd), I considered this act “hibernation” because I wrote down the word “hibernation” with a capital “H” as if that was profound. And I guess, at some point yesterday, I thought, “The value of hiding is in the length of time you are granted to gather your thoughts. The value of being found is the opportunity to share those thoughts with someone.”
I haven’t been able to write, but I need to. That’s what this is, a meager journal entry. It started with the thought that maybe I had hidden long enough. That I had gathered and now I must share — although it seems like Joan Didion would disagree:
“I find ‘speaking one’s mind’ pretty overrated, in that it usually turns out to be a way of aggrandizing the speaker at the expense of the helpless listener.”
Scrolling mindlessly through Tumblr, I came across Joan’s quote out of context and it seemed to fit perfectly into mine. She was giving me permission to stay silent, to not hold anyone else prisoner with my useless thoughts. I could see Joan cheering on my eternal hibernation: Speaking your mind is overrated.
Here’s another Joan Didion quote: When asked by the Paris Review about leaving behind personal writing in favor of political writing she simply answered: “I was bored.”
I was bored. That statement could easily be used to answer the question of why I haven’t written at all. It fits on many levels. My life, as it is, is boring and I too am bored of writing about myself. The cycle of living my life to write it often does feel “overrated” and “aggrandizing,” but it mostly leaves me with a feeling that’s someplace between “drained” and “lacking.” To entrench yourself in the banal isn’t a reprieve from anything else. I’ve devastated myself trying to convey the emotion that arises each time I remember that I’m harboring the resolve to quit smoking next to a tacit promise I gave myself not to relent to any resolutes. I’ve given up trying to share that emotion with those who don’t already feel it. It’s exhausting. It is the same feeling that I get when I look at the stack of female memoirs by my bed that all have blurbs that place their value in “revealing the condition of living as a woman.” It’s as if all women writers could be put in the blender of time and defined at a later point by their collective suffering. Less eloquently, it all seems so whatever.
But at the same time, I feel compelled to defend boredom and writing the personal. At this point, both of those things are near essential to my survival. I have no choice but to ignore the useless feeling of words. I have no choice but to push aside the fact that living is already mundane enough and writing about it is all the more banal. I write.
I searched for the context of that Joan Didion quote and I found that it was from her answers to the Proust Questionnaire.
The question: What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
The answer: I find ‘speaking one’s mind’ pretty overrated, in that it usually turns out to be a way of aggrandizing the speaker at the expense of the helpless listener.
Suddenly, in context, the quote turned hopeful. I can’t imagine Joan Didion ever having doubt in her words or what she had to say, but her answer to the questionnaire implies that even she felt as if her words were unwanted, unnecessary at times. That her compulsion to ‘speak her mind’ — to write — was her worst quality. The comfort in being able to say, Joan Didion feels this too is, strangely, overwhelming. Perhaps every woman who writes, if they could be pulled out of the stack memoirs by my bedside, would say that they felt that way too.
January 2, 2015
"Anyway, women’s writing will be the business of inwardness as long as it’s still risky for women to..."
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The Promise in Elena Ferrante (via myszko)
(via hazelcills)
file to: undoing ambition, 2015
file to: undoing ambition, 2015
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