Writing Under a Wax Moon

& what i've been feeling lately..

PART ONE: WHAT I FEEL

“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. And the bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So, now, do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces — pore-less, hairless, expressionless….”

Last week, I read this quote from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 aloud to fourteen or fifteen-year-old students in a sophomore English class I am teaching.

Sometimes, I wonder if those students see my pores. That is, the metaphorical pore. That is, the part of me that feels like an imposter when I still get confused about comma placement, splice, and fragments.

Truthfully, I feel like an imposter most anywhere I go lately. At the end of March, I turned 28, and the last five years have felt like a juggling act, tossing and catching relationships, jobs, and places. Maybe this is just the 20s, and I know I am not unique in this experience. Still, I wish I could trust myself enough to move into an apartment without breaking a lease. I’ve quit another job, and now I can’t afford rent, so it’s back to Mom and Dad’s for a couple of months this summer as I prepare to move again. Am I turning into that person who just won’t let my parents be?

Lately, I am just struggling with WHO. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Who do you want to hang out with? I DON’T KNOW, AND NO ONE... My face is a wax moon, and my words are elusive and jeering.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I think there is something about this identity struggle that artists can understand in particular, specifically when it comes to employment. Certainly, every artist (in whatever form) can understand that nagging feeling, particularly when at your day job, that screams: THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANT TO BE DOING. For me, it looks like having a job for six months, getting bored, finding a new job, and the whole time justifying it by saying: I want to write while simultaneously fearing the act of actually writing. This afternoon, I logged into LinkedIn again, dread in my eyes, just staring.

I can be a person who preaches their writing like a Bible. I have friends who wear their writing like a garment. These coverings make us feel relevant, I suppose. Art can become another façade, another division… a loud scream from a roof layered with bricks of self-promotion.

After years of asserting, I am forced to ask myself:

Do I still enjoy writing?

OR

Do I just want to be interesting?

AND

If all of this is just to be interesting, what the hell am I doing?

Markedly, it is not wrong to be interested. After all, isn’t interest the commencement, the dawn, of learning? I’m not even suggesting it’s wrong to want to be interesting. We all want that, I suppose.

What I think I’m trying to say is: I spent a long time anxiously cowering over Instagram posts and changing myself to fit in with friend groups I truthfully didn’t enjoy simply because I wanted to be or feel interesting. My wax-moon face was — it might still be, in ways — poreless, hairless…

I feared writing because: What if all my artist friends didn’t find it good? What if they did not find me worthy?

It wasn’t just identity, either, that fueled me. My writing demanded justice. My thoughts inaugurated in self-pity and self-righteousness. Nothing got me (gets me?) going like a friendship that I was afraid to speak into, a cause I did nothing about in my own time, and the scorned rage of my gender-identity. A woman in sorrow. I’d spend a morning writing about a boy, then call him clamoring for love in the evening.

When I was little, sometime in elementary school, I wrote newspapers for my family. I called it The Alexander Times. Honestly, I think the biggest difference between that little girl slipping printed word documents under my siblings’ doors and the girl typing right now is how worried I am about what YOU think of me.

This past month, I’ve been reading Cristina Rivera Garza’s biography Liliana's Invincible Summer. Cristina pours through her sister, Liliana’s, writing, who was murdered out of femicide by a past boyfriend in Mexico City. Reading Liliana’s journal entries throughout the novel reminds me of how I used to write. It was exploratory. It was free.

Now, I sit down to write, and I feel every word is stuck in my throat. My pen has a weight to it — it doesn’t feel right. Now, I look inside myself, and creativity has withered. In its place stomps comparison, and it has my voice wrapped up in its tangled strings.

PART TWO: WHAT I KNOW

My students who read Fahrenheit 451 also read Virginia Woolf this year. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf writes:

“She [the woman writer] will write in rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot.”

True, Woolf seems to be referencing inequality and lack of resources available to women writers. Moreover, Woolf contrasts this “war” women writers face with the purity of logic and reasoning accompanied by proper education and opportunity. Woolf, though, got me thinking:

How much of my writing has come from anger? What do I scream about myself that I could instead give to my character?

What if I… Could I… write calmly?

This last year, I’ve been changing. In part, it might be getting older and moving back to my hometown. Here, I’ve shaken hands with ghosts that once haunted me. I’ve bowed to past hurt like a worthy adversary. In Hungary, I was often separated from others, but I was rarely alone. No, my past always accompanied me. This year, I have learned there is nothing to be found within me. It’s only darkness in here. It’s empty.

Perhaps the change is because of Nathan — who goes beyond all that I could ask for, never demands a room, and could give two shits about someone else finding him interesting.

Though, beyond all these things, I think it has more to do with surrender. 1(a): to agree to stop fighting, hiding, resisting — I yield control of the person — and, thereafter, the writer — I want to be. Create in me a clean heart, O God; And renew a right spirit within me.

Do I still enjoy writing?

Yes, but

No longer do I want to treat this art, which I once considered a glorious gift to help navigate and connect, like a burden. Masochistic. Pain-Junkie. I no longer want to sacrifice myself in order to write. Returning to childhood, I seek art as a way to extend beyond me.

I know there is nuance and I do not intend to discredit that. I want my art to touch life, and I know this sometimes involves anger, justice, selfishness, gratitude, chaos, and peace… What’s more, I know that all artists have this internal battle — the honest content and the desire (and need) for the person to pick up the book or buy the CD…

I guess what this reprises is:

I’m trying to find my writing voice, and I think, for me, that means writing in the broad daylight with the sun’s warmth radiating around me. I want to say a prayer afterward, and I want to thank the God in heaven for giving it to me. Presently, that means I need to stop willing my writing to be something that isn’t of me because I am afraid that what I have isn’t worth reading.

At least that’s what I’m thinking right now. Did this really take me a whole month to write? At least I wrote something. So, we keep on going…

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