A little over a year ago I started writing a memoire detailing how my husband and I met.
The book isn’t finished yet, I am still building that sandcastle one grain at a time, but I can now tell you with confidence where 98 percent of my writers block comes from: thinking my story is not worth telling.
Sometimes the best part of my day is sitting in the grass with my husband.
And that terrifies me.
What the heck am I supposed to write about if the most action I saw today was an afternoon walk?
As an avid videographer, I have tried to make a vlog before:
a couple of times and a couple of channels actually :/
And I failed to stay consistent for the same reason listed above.
Sure when I have exciting things happening I am more than excited to create something but, when my life is not a constant whirlwind of adventure what am I supposed to make?
Who am I to ask for peoples’ time, especially with so much content out there? What story could I possibly have to tell?
I would try to remedy the second question by going out in search of interesting people, places, or things to do and that did take me on some pretty exciting adventures. But the underlying problem still remained.
I did not feel interesting enough on my own or worthwhile enough to show up as myself.
Back in Los Angeles, I remember taking an acting class with a crazy old bat of a woman. She looked like the divinations teacher in Harry Potter with her coke bottle glasses and an unruly mane that curled in on itself in wild blond loops. She had each member of the class step onto a blank stage and do some activity that you normally and frequently do alone (we all giggled when she said nothing sexual). At the time I had just discovered Instagram and was toying with the idea of building a selfie empire. So I stepped onto the stage and, using my shoe and a chair as a makeshift tripod, I began to have a photo shoot with myself (yes you can laugh, I won’t find out… probably).
After about 3 minutes of people chuckling in the audience my teacher stopped me and in the most frank reading I have ever received said, “there is some part of you that wants to be seen but isn’t. Go home and come back next week with another activity you do alone, but one that isn’t about performing.”
Different art form, but I still had the same problem. An inner critic that said, unless I’m living one of those truly out of the ordinary lives that we see in movies and television I have nothing inherently valuable about my experience to share.
This week, as images of the horrors of war spill onto our social media feeds I want to make clear what happens when we follow that voice to the dark end of its logic.
My narrative problem unravelled when I was reading a book on writing called Writing Down the Bones. The passage went as follows.
“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers humans must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.”
I scratched out the bit about writers and put humans because I believe it is not just limited to people pursuing wordcraft.
You see if we cannot believe in the wonder of our seemingly mundane and “everyday” experience then we reduce life to statistics and figures.
The opposite of a bullet is a story. And there are enough factories producing bullets around the world. I wanted to make something different.
I wrote this poem this week in the wake of these thoughts. Whether you are recording your unique vantage point of the world through a pen, a camera lens, a recipe book, typed letters, music, dance, paint (or literally any other blessed act of creation), I hope you’ll join me in making something different out of these times.
And now, a poem no one asked for but me:
So I got up and decided to write my story
To combat destruction by documenting life’s rampant creation
Just because they say no one will care in 100 years doesn’t mean we have to stop caring now, or have to start acting like the tiny details of our lives aren’t worth remembering. There is a polaroid army marching against my despair. Each 5x6 frame a reservoir of my joy, and every time I see it my cup runneth over.
My husband has a mole hidden on the back of his head and I sometimes touch it when he asks me to rub his back. He hates when I do that but I do it anyway because my body is like a night without stars and his skin is map of the constellations.
And maybe in 1000 years no one will care. Or think about him or me,
Or the way he smiles at the sun—not a thought in his head beyond the gratitude to just exist,
but right now
He is my world
And I have to believe that matters.
I have to believe that when a bomb goes off in the Middle East those are not just numbers or when someone hears the words, “it’s cancer” they are not just a mathematical statistic or medical inevitability.
They are heartbeats, and laughter, smiles and fingerprints
So I write.
I write like I’ll never run out of ink
and my husband takes pictures like his camera has the same magic built in
and together
we treat our stories—and our lives—like they matter
because they do.
Love Notes to Little Things:
This excerpt of a book called Figuring by Maria Popova. I feel like it touches on my exact feelings in this post and why documenting your life matters. My best friend wrote to me this week saying: my soul is tired of living through unprecedented times. And I had this thought, what a blessing to be alive during a time when the tools to document our lives are so unbelievably accessible. We will be the people that future generations look to when navigating their own unprecedented waters, and so on and so on and so on until the last star burns out and even then, the human miracle will have all been worth it.
Casa Attar, the studio my husband and I built (with our BARE HANDS) is now on tiktok. I am sharing some of the wild behind the scenes, the process, and a lot of before and afters from the crazy thing we did last summer. If you are into interior design, or just beautiful spaces in general, check this thing out!
Slacklining might be my new personality. Thank you to my friend Jordyn for introducing me. If you have read some of my other posts you may know she is my friend with all the exciting things to do. And now I have one more!
That alien looking thing is an egg sac for an alien looking creature called a praying mantis. We found it in our garden and rescued it before it got weed-wacked to bits. They are solitary creatures, but I hope some of them stay in the garden for me to admire when they’ve hatched.
Great Reads:
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
If the excerpt above didn’t convince you, I don’t know what will. If you are a writer of any kind, this book was gifted and highly recommended to me, and I am here to do the same.
Stay tender and stay true lovebugs,
Dakota