Lately I’ve been thinking about the ways I want writing to be a panacea, a cure-all, a tonic I can take that will enable me to perfectly understand my life and what’s keeping me from living it.
I’ve been trying to work out my relationship to the internet, and to social media specifically, for years. My compulsions come and go in largely unwelcome bursts; right now I’m feeling a major lack of agency in my life when it comes to the ways I relate to the internet and to screens in general—I click, I scroll, I sit. I start to feel that if I can begin to articulate this dynamic and the ways I’ve been abandoning my creativity and my agency, I might be able to figure out what my deal is.
At the same time, I’m remembering something that came up in therapy a few years back (bear with me here). I was just starting to accept that I might want to begin medical transition, and I was telling my therapist about a research project I wanted to embark upon, one that would focus on effeminate transmasculine subjectivity.
My therapist smiled and then she said, remarkably gently, “That sounds great. But you know, you don’t actually have to write an annotated bibliography in order to be trans, right? You can just…be trans.”
One reason among many as to why writing is powerful is that it’s a form of actualizing thought, so it has the potential for transformation. But transformation takes time and concrete, material effort—except for when it doesn’t (you can just…be trans).
I think about the ways I want writing to feel like an exorcism. When I approach writing something long-form, I feel overwhelmed, suddenly deeply unsure of how to structure an argument or even a flow of ideas. Do I even have ideas, or just instincts? Is there a difference? I want to write and I want to read and I want to write essays and read essays and develop my own theory and I simultaneously feel so, so unprepared and bereft of any real discipline or know-how, despite having pretty significant graduate-level training in all of this.
Even so, even so—I feel better now for having written. I’ve been blocking my access to social media on my laptop, which is where I tend to lose entire weeks to that vacuum, and while writing can never really be a panacea, maybe it’s something more worthwhile. Something I cannot quite name, at least not yet.