I stayed home from work today because I was up all night arguing with myself about what I am doing and plan to do.
When I am losing my grip, I prefer to watch old movies and television shows I’ve seen a hundred times; there is comfort in them, and they involve no real anticipation, just the expectation of familiar characters who do only the same predictable things. Today I picked the last season of Six Feet Under, which I saw as it aired in 2005, and watched the season finale having not yet been a month in NYC.
I just finished the episode called “The Rainbow of Her Reasons,” which is the one in which Claire gets a job in an office, and clearly thinks of it as a foreign country. This I can relate to, particularly so at the moment. Another thing that happens in this episode is that her aunt, who a long time before had seized her by the shoulders and told her she was An Artist, attacks Claire for no real reason, questioning her commitment to being An Artist, and suggesting she might not have ever been one in the first place.
If you watched the show you know that Claire, particularly in the later seasons, can sometimes be difficult to like, mostly because she’s going through the same things everyone does in their early twenties: falling in love with Great Big Ideas and then nattering on pretentiously about them, dating a parade of No Good, Very Bad men, smoking a LOT of pot. On top of that, she goes to art school, and art school… well, I didn’t go to one, so I’ll leave it there.
Well here I am in my early thirties finally finally finally thinking about these same issues, wanting to hug Claire and say that I get it, which I should have worked through years ago. I don’t know if I am A Writer; what I know is that I don’t understand people who can live without words and books and narratives. I can empathize with them. I can support their human rights without question. But writing is so much a part of me that I am not sure what it would be to live without.
Last night I called my best friend in the universe (also called Claire, but I digress) in the midst of a panic attack and told her that if this MFA stuff doesn’t work out, in fact, writ large (pun intended), if the writing stuff doesn’t work out, I really don’t know whether or not the rest of my life is worth going through, to me. I mean, there are a variety of reasons why I would trudge through the rest of my days regardless, because life is not all about what’s in my head and how I’m processing it. And I said to her, this is why I have not gone after it, because it feels like to try being A Writer would be to try and settle the question of whether my entire existence was Worth It, and so I just put it off, did other things, hoped for the best.
You know what Claire said? She said: that sounds like a pretty bad strategy to me, Soul. If you know what you want to do, if you know what you are, what is the point of avoiding it any longer?
I don’t have an answer for her question.
