This morning I woke up feeling all of the feels one tends to experience during any revision process. Am I working hard enough? Can I do everything I’ve said I’d do? Can I do it without recognition?
As writers and thinkers across all genres, it is easy to stumble into the raw feelings of inadequacy. It is easy to feel like you are not enough — not good enough, not ready enough, not grateful enough.
What I love most about the revision process is that it forces your brain to confront this lie. You see old work, work that has been transformed, and see that you have come extremely far and have gone nowhere, in the best way, at the same time. You are no longer the you you were a decade ago, when you wrote the early draft. But the you you are now can still find that person when she looks back into her notes. There it is: that same hunger, that same gratitude, that same thirst for language that made you who you are today.
We all feel shame about some part of our practice, or about some emotion that we associate with our practice. But when we look back, how can you be anything but grateful for what your mind has done for you?
This is what I’m meditating on today. Below is a poem I wrote in 2014, when I was twenty two years old. The last line became this poem, published in Apogee Magazine. I did not care about awards then, or recognition, or about being good enough. My love of language was compulsive. I couldn’t not write. This poem never saw the light of day, and besides this post, never will. But it reminds me of a place and time where I was just grateful to have the ability to map what I was seeing about myself and the world in my notes app. And I’d like to hold onto to that place and time, despite everywhere life plans to take me from here.
“I know my name and why I’m not dead.”