I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home

by Jami Attenberg

I have been told I am difficult. I am difficult in the sense that I am not easy, but fuck easy.

all of the credit was given to the show’s creators, their creativity, their genius. They had come up with the ideas. They had ownership. The rest of us were there to make their vision come to life. We served their ideas. Eventually I thought: What about my ideas? When do I own them? And once I realized that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I could not stay where I was any longer.

Grief can be forever. We are taught to seek closure in this country, we are encouraged to move on quickly. We are judged, possibly, for not getting over things fast enough. But grief can be for your whole life.

I try to live in hope when I think of America. Things are terrible everywhere, all the time, I know, but let me have my hope anyway. It does not alter how I walk through the world and what I know to be true. Yet I take comfort in the burning embers. There are still embers! With enough life left to burn.

I just wanted to be in a better place than I was when I wasn’t writing. If I just looked at everything a little differently, if I fully accepted the artist within me, if I leaned into my eccentricities, if I saw all the colors in their most vivid fashion, if I embraced the kaleidoscope at last, I could be there.

A great lesson: When someone tells you not to bother dreaming, they’re not on your side.

I have always felt like I was two wrong turns away from complete destruction. We all are, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think we’re not.

How grateful women are sometimes when men simply back the hell off.

In fact, we receive so much from other writers when they show us how it’s done. When they position a character’s heart directly on the page for us, when they’re inventive in form or structure, or emotionally true in a way that feels radical in its familiarity. Or when their sentences are so crisp as to be nearly audible, like a piece of paper torn in two—all of this shows us how to do it ourselves, how it’s possible, but also it emboldens us, releases us from our fears about our own work. An encouragement by example. We learn from them, but also, they tell us we can. Without even knowing it. Enter here. Start here. Begin now. This is why it’s always important to be reading. This is why we must always chew on the words of others. It’s nutrition. Eat your dinner.

Even as the patriarchy has been practically translucent to me my entire life, I have still managed to internalize parts of it.

I had never figured out where I could live besides New York. What place could occupy me as much? But what about a city of sad men playing trumpets? What about that? Where you are both sad and alive at the same time because this is music, after all, this is a city of music. Where people drink and dance when people die.

The better questions to ask: What kind of stories should I be telling? What would I be willing to do to make it all work? What do I love about writing? What are the voices that need to be elevated from my world and from outside of my world? What secrets of mine would I be willing to tell? What do I know already? What do I need to learn? Is that a ghost in the shadows or just another person slipping into the night?

I had lost some friends in my life, or sometimes they had lost me. The thing about bad friends is you never realize when you’re being one until it’s too late.

You can’t stop the monster, the city of New York, the hungry giant, looking for land and sky and space. If there was a way to destroy something and then build on top of the rubble, New York City would do it.

Living day by day had always seemed a valid way to operate. I had started to see how my life could look different. Quieter, and calmer. I wanted things to be easier and sunnier. And I did not want to grow old in New York. I had been young there, and that was enough.

Who knows what my life would have been like if I’d had any confidence in my appearance as a youth. Instead, I reveled in my brain, and all the places it could take me.

When I travel too much, I get stuck. Sitting in an airplane, in the back of a taxi, packing and unpacking, dragging the luggage, checking the phone over and over, sinking deep into myself. Arriving at my destination but never seeing anything. I used up all my adrenaline on getting there.

I thought about the way women are told we’re crazy when we are just trying to claim our space in the world. The way we’re treated, have been treated, for eternity; how when a woman cries foul men invent ways to shut her up immediately.

There are times we just send out messages into the world and hope they are received with the intention they were sent, but we can’t always count on the attitude or the generosity of the recipient.

This is the thing a writer does, we claim everything around us: the wind, the earth, the collapse of a wave in the ocean, the sting of salt on a wound. We claim it and redefine it and turn it into something new.