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Even though it’s fun to use terms like social arsonist I think that I am now occupying one of the less sexy spaces. The spaces between. It’s what happens after you occupy Wall Street after the chanting and the microphone. It’s what happens while you’re quietly working on your first novel. It’s like going home after partying all week and thinking, Who turned out the lights?
My job today is to get new and occasional voters to commit to voting regularly in their local elections. No that’s not as fun as wearing a sign or pitching a tent or screaming into a bullhorn or getting arrested or doing anything facebook-status-change-worthy but it’s what I believe is necessary for real systemic change. I’ve read recently “Behind almost every great moment in history, there are heroic people doing really boring and frustrating things for a prolonged period of time.”
I would say the same is true for novels. That behind every great novel is a writer doing really boring and frustrating things for a prolonged period of time. To me the spaces between while writing the novel, whether it be the spaces between feedback or the spaces between a submission response, or the spaces between sitting before the page, can be desperate like being a teenager in foster care wishing keep me keep me keep me. It’s the novel afraid it will slip between your fingers, off of your hard drive, beside the others in the wastebasket on your desktop, tucked somewhere between law school and your afterschool tutoring volunteer gig. First the tugging at your brain and heart, then the shame then the daunting weight of guilt that turns the whole thing into an afterthought. That is the dull screeching around your heart when you are living in the spaces between. Come with me and brave them.
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Melissa Chadburn | Occupy the Spaces Between | The Nervous Breakdown
I’ve been thinking about this all morning. About how I am living right now in the spaces between—between a year and especially a fall full of changes, between next moves on the chessboard that is my love life, between the anger and the excitement and the tears.
I’m trying to get to a point where I am OK with that, where I am OK with knowing that this is temporary downtime that I desperately need, that things are unresolved but they will be eventually and in the meantime there is important work to be done.
And some of it is just important work for myself. It’s writing things on this blog to sort out what’s going on in my head, it’s returning to the book proposal that maybe this will be the year for, it’s finally finishing the Angela Davis reader that I’ve renewed four times from the library.
Some of it is just sitting still long enough to know what the feelings actually are.
