I am, I admit, a little depressed. A few days ago, there was a break in the weather, and so I drove down to Boise for the holidays, inched through the snowdrift over Monida and rolled down into the high desert. In summer, this is the way I go when I want to lean into feelings, to contemplate regret. It’s a scrappy, flat land and every once in a while you pass a cow or a truck, but mostly its alfalfa and dry brush as far as the eye can see. Depending on the month and year—the slate of distant rain clouds, a blue shot so far that you can see the earth curve, and other times, orange smoke and the end of that same world. You come to the four corners after Dubois. Turn right for ranches; turn left for more populous towns guided by no subtle illustration of God. To go straight in winter is to find yourself on unplowed roads with no room to think, hugging the right shoulder as semis speed past and throw brown slush, and what should be a 7.5 hr drive stretches into 10 hrs.
And so I took Monida because there was ruminating to be done, but, as I said, this could not happen on account of the blinding snow during the day and the deep, early night that followed and made everything unrecognizable, including the trucker stop with the self-serve sundae station. There is a day, probably not far from now, when I won’t recognize my hometown at all.
This morning, I woke up at my parents’ house to some novel feedback and realized that I did not know how to fix my book, and that it was flawed on a very basic level, and it seemed that even rewriting it (again) might be above my pay grade. So I did some crying and did the thing that I am very good at, which is to take a small feeling and make it into a very big one, an existential one if you will, and my mom took one look at me and said, Let’s have some perspective, I thought someone had died. But by that time I had already convinced myself that two years worth of work was down the drain and that it would just be best to quit my PhD program now, and consider a line of work better suited to thin-skinned individuals, one that is not yoked to my entire identity.
So I am sitting here drinking my second tonic water, thinking perhaps this is an identity crisis or perhaps just a crisis of faith. I want so badly to be good at this, and in that way, to be loved. I am embarrassed by it. I was talking to one of my Idaho friends a few months ago about how I missed being young. 18, 19, 20—years I don’t really miss at all. This is a friend who is a smart, talented poet and biologist. I said I missed feeling like anything was possible. Like I could join the foreign service, or get married and have kids, or become a famous poet. Those early first college workshops when you were just speaking from the heart, playing with sound, unaware of pitfalls and mistakes because you didn’t quite know how a poem worked. Before all the workshops and criticism and self-doubt. Back when I still wrote poetry. My friend, the one with a good job, family, and book, looked at me and said, Oh my God, I know exactly what you mean.
I speak now like I’m old, like I didn’t reinvent myself a hundred times in the last decade. I act like there is some sort of ceiling, but there isn’t. At one time, I thought I would die happy if I could get into an MFA program. After that, it would be enough to publish in magazines. After that, a PhD. After that, after that, after that. Maybe there is a lesson here about contentment or feeling good enough, or that the feeling we are actually chasing is love or acceptance or something else I might know if I had actually read my Freud. Maybe it’s as simple as what they tell you: the joy is in the work and not the accolades. This does feel a little more complicated if, say, you want a job in academia that requires said recognition and at least one book.
I was rejected so many times this year that I learned new ways that someone can tell you no. I didn't finish my novel this year. I didn’t get a fellowship or residency or publish in any journals. But I think my fiction did change, and it’s maybe one step closer to what I actually want to write. At the beginning of this year, I made the decision to take another workshop, which I had convinced myself I would never do again, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made as a grad student. And then there were things that happened that had nothing to do with writing. I moved to Montana. I got a dog. I read some great books including The Heartsong of Charging Elk by James Welch (I’ve been on a mission to read everything he’s ever written), Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss (one of the best essay collections I’ve ever read), Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (how does he do it?), and I reread Red Water by Judith Freeman (this really seems like it should be a classic of Western lit; I don’t know why it’s not more widely read). I was crushingly lonely. I made some friends and went on a couple terrible dates that made me think that being crushingly lonely was not so bad. I am learning how to pin curl my hair.
I am, right now, thinking about new possibilities. I am thinking about work. That I will have to drive back home through the snow. There is now way around it. Each year around this time, I think up some resolutions, ways to reinvent. Historically, I have been fairly good at naming what I want and going after it. And so I ask myself: what do you want? Even in fiction, all good characters should want something. And what I want is discipline. And what I want is to read more books. And what I want is write like I am young again. What I want hasn’t changed at all.
I can relate to every bit of this, believe me. As I labor through the edits of my book, literally months behind, one day I am already planning my bespoke leather and fur tuxedo for the national book awards and the next I'm eyeballing those Now Hiring $18/hour! signs at Wendy's. You write beautifully. And I don't know if you're ever in Missoula, but someday I'd love to tell you the story Lois Welch told me of Jim's hassles over rewriting The Heartsong of Charging Elk and the accompanying existential crises....