I’ve been meaning to tell you where I’ve been. Yes, my apartment on Congress, yes walks in Brooklyn Bridge Park, and neighborhood coffee haunts. Yes, sometimes in Manhattan visiting friends, yes eating croissants, sometimes feeling guilty afterward, and sometimes fully enjoying it. I’ve been listening to my TikTok feed tell me about ADHD –and how certain types of music and dopamine hacks can help while trying to not let myself self-diagnose.
I’ve been taking pictures and videos. I’ve been reading a memoir by poet John Giorno an artist steeped in the 60’s NYC art scene and lover to Pop artists Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, etc. Giorno gets intimate! Probably more sex than I’ve read about before… sometimes uncomfortable and other times I’m more open-minded.
Life is moving and all I am trying to do is focus on the task at hand slowly and as consciously as I can. There are many times this fails. Especially, when I am on my phone checking texts while sending emails– this is the worst for all parties involved. I try not to do that and keep my phone away yet with the speed of everything and the ways in which we communicate such boundaries are hard to do consistently. I just try to remember that if I am texting and simultaneously thinking about the email the text and the email come out worse– sometimes this doesn’t matter like missing punctuation or the wrong word, and sometimes it’s a tone thing and that is a reminder – a quick pinch on the finger– that it is never worth it to do multiple tasks at once.
Conversations can wait. They are better if they are waited on and thought through when everything is coming through technical wires and not in person.
I have found that communication is important and that the best we can do is breathe and feel our feet on the floor when we are approaching an uncomfortable conversation.
I learned that most things change and since I am trying to be an active participant in appeasing the present moment, I invariably change too.
My newsletter is what I’m considering, “dead.” It is more churning under the ground into the soil I guess. I don’t know the exact process of what happens to a plant turning into soil I would have to google that and for now, it’s not the point. Moreso, how do we know when something’s run its course?
It wasn’t hard to move on from a newsletter of about ~100 readers. People leave jobs with multiple six figures, or careers of what many deem “successful,” actors that completely change their type of roles and take the risk of perhaps never having a role again.
The part where I ran into resistance was thinking it somehow had a further life than I expected. Instead of forcing it forward consulting it myself and saying– Are we done here? Did you say what you needed to say?
I think we did, replies the newsletter, and you changed, replies the newsletter, and now you can think of me as a firework over the East River unexpectedly on a rainy night in October.
To honor what we make sometimes is difficult. Sometimes I look at something I made and I am immediately put off by its eccentrics. Like birthing a mess – similar to the soup I made the other day. I had green split peas so I set out to make green split pea soup, and instead of golden potatoes, I had purple sweet potatoes from the farmer’s market. I was taking food pictures and humming to Paramore while cooking this soup with the vibrant greens of peas, and bright orange carrots, and the best part was the deep mystic purple potato. The soup– my friends–was delicious, but I have to tell you the color was horrid. It was brown and the consistency… I will withhold from more, yet I couldn’t throw it out because if I closed my eyes I recognized how delicious and nutritious it was! But yes aesthetically everything that went in contributed to a disturbing end.
That’s how I feel about what I make sometimes.
One friend asked me, well you have to think it’s good to put it out there right? And I paused mid-sip of coffee because I realized that there was something I had to admit. No… I am often totally and utterly uncomfortable in several parts of the writing, or other forms of art “process” I’m encountering. Somewhere in this conflicted body, I sensed that the only way to get better was to do. And that through action clarity would follow, and that through putting the work out consistent action would come easier.
Parts of this were absolutely true, and other parts were not as they seemed. I will say that once I released this urgency to “put writing out on some consistent basis” my body relaxed and I had less anxiety.
In that realization, I thought maybe it was all one large experiment and I am not meant to write consistently for an audience. I can’t say if that is true or not, and I can’t say anything definitively because everything constantly seems to change.
I read Alice in Wonderland over the winter, and it bothered me how outrageous the dialogue was–nothing was as it seemed outside the fact that everything was obscene.
The story reminded me to expect the unexpected. Expect things most of the time to not go your way, yet that “way” that you are so sure of usually finds itself to a better way! Which is exciting right? To stay open to the possibility that you will still be happy, and okay if your way is usurped by the world’s way. And then one must eventually accept this, or spend all their precious energy on trying to have it be a certain way, and then after exhaustion sets in one realizes they must give in.
Oh, giving in! I hate giving in sometimes, yet there is no better way to keep my own peace than letting it be. There is nothing you can change about most situations, yet I think most of us know this and need reminders. Follow where you are being pushed. If there is resistance– ask why.
Last year during my newsletter there were times when I was forcing myself in a seat to write at my desk when really I just wanted to take my notebook and pen outside and walk around Brooklyn or Manhattan. It is one of my favorite things to do. But who cares if it is our favorite thing to do right? I mean how productive is walking around a neighborhood with a pen and notebook?? So of course I resisted this urge a lot and it would cause anxiety because anxiety is often pent-up energy being thoroughly ignored.
When I went back to edit poems from last year my favorite pieces of writing were from walking around and experiencing the city. Funny! Art isn’t productive! Or … it’s not productive in the way our usual society’s machine deems productivity.
When people ask what I do on a weekend I usually say that I walked around. I guess I’ve given in–letting things unfold on their own.
Two weekends ago, I stumbled upon a brownstone selling vintage clothes on the sidewalk. Two elderly ladies, twins, were selling their rare collection of clothing collected over 50 years. They are interesting and I rushed to grab cash and bought some sweaters. They hustled me of course because they have lived many years and are wise and are just these two badass twins in matching velvet hats with feathers in them. I told them I would help move their clothes out the following weekend if they’d give me some of the remaining items for free. They refused my help as they “had a guy,” but told me if I posted an ad for them I would get a sweater. So I did.
It’s just things like that. Unexpected things. Leaving moments in my life up to the wind.
Thanks Colleen-both for your column and for your reflections on doing and not doing, your way and the world's way. wise words. and i'm pretty sure there's a writing way that is getting ready to manifest for you. ann brummitt
Julia Child threw away many Vats of soup. We plant seeds that don't grow. Taking time to inhale the city is productive! Thank you for sharing your art and please don't give up. Love you so much.