author / woman
My word of the year is Voice, and the theme I’m playing with right now is taking my writing and work seriously.
☝️🤓
There was a time in my life when I took myself very seriously as A Writer – so much so that I found it irritating when someone couldn’t infer it about me. It felt the same as them not noticing that I am a woman.
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I’m a woman in the same way that I’m a writer.
It isn’t something I do – the verb of writing. It isn’t a status I’ve achieved or title I’ve been assigned. I have not created anything which might justify such a commanding element of self.
I am a writer in the sense that it is my worldview, my perspective, my lens. It is the filter for everything, the context in which I experience.
Likewise is my relationship with womanhood; I’m immersed in it, filled with it; we change shape together over time.
The body is a container the way the page is a container; it captures, distills, displays. It’s considerate, but not comprehensive. The mess of process, of totality, is missed.
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My practice used to be rich. It was harder for me to get out of flow than it was to get into it – and being in flow is an erotic experience, with a distinct feeling of release when you’ve put the best words to the correct cadence in the right order – your writing hums. It was a surprise, but a footnote, if it hummed to someone else too.
And that’s it, I guess: I took all the fun out of it.
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Everything started in my body then.