I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
Today the Friday Flash is the Friday Freewrite1, as I use an idea from my favorite (anti-)productivity newsletter The Imperfectionist by Oliver Burkeman to get something out of my head and published here.
In The freewriting way of life, Burkeman writes:
[Freewriting] is a form of what I’m going to call (perhaps regrettably) unclenching – a psychological “move” that involves relaxing in the midst of anxiety and uncertainty. Surrendering control, but thereby unleashing a vastly greater capacity for action, creativity and aliveness.
This makes me think of a novel I just finished, Lily King’s Writers & Lovers, the sequel/prequel to another novel I read recently, Heart the Lover. The second one was on my Kindle because my daughter and I share an account, and she suggested I might like it. I did — a passage in it even struck me so that I wrote a blog post about Greek tragedy inspired by one of the character’s comments.
In Writers & Lovers, the main character Casey suffers from anxiety. She uses clenching (and to go with it, unclenching) when she has panic attacks. When an abusive coworker starts working nights, like she does, she starts having the attacks regularly at her job as a waitress:
I start getting my customers confused, my orders mixed up. I have to take long breaks on the fire escape. My whole body feels like it’s a big iron bell that someone has struck, and it won’t stop ringing. It’s like not being able to catch my breath, except that I can’t catch any part of me. Muriel tells me to take long, slow breaths and scan my body from head to toe when this happens, but I end up gasping for air. Out on the fire escape I do some clenching. It’s the only thing that helps. I clench my fists or press my knees together or squeeze my stomach muscles all at once. Sometimes I start with my face and work down my whole body, tightening each muscle one by one for as long as I can stand it, then letting go and moving on to the next. It’s enough to get me back into the dining room.
I love Burkeman’s idea of freewriting as unclenching the mind, in a similar way that Casey unclenches her body.
I’m feeling more drawn to fiction lately. Why? Because it offers more subtle and complex insight. Because it provides an escape from Twitter and Reddit and Substack. Because it, in a way, supports unclenching: letting go of self-centered rumination.
Anu Atluru, one of my favorite online writers, went quiet on social media for two months. In her list of things she realized during this sabbatical, she writes, “I feel more free.” She unclenched. She also realized during this time that fiction had something important to offer her:
Fiction hits harder. I immersed myself in more of what I’d consider true art. More imagination, timeless principles, and character study.
I’m a fast reader, a speed reader. In fifth grade I took a reading speed test. My teachers were amazed at how fast I could read. But my penchant for reading fiction fast has hurt me. I miss the beautiful imagery, the charged dialogue, the interesting and sometimes educational exposition. I don’t get to unclench as much with reading fiction if I sprint through it. It becomes another fast-dopamine activity.
Ray and I listened to two audiobooks on our road trip: Blake Crouch’s Recursion and Alice Feeney’s Rock Paper Scissors. You can’t rush through an audiobook. Sometimes I listen to then when I can’t sleep. They put me to sleep by unclenching my brain. When I’m listening to an audiobook I stop thinking about my investments or my lack of a real career plan or my flabby belly. When I get back to the book, I have to recall where I was and go back to it. It’s an exercise in presence and memory, to pay attention to the book (when I’m awake) and remember what happened.
My elder daughter is a slow reader and a generally slow processor. She is also a fiction writer (in addition to working full time as a software engineer). She engages deeply with short stories and novels. She absorbs and savors all the details of the writing and the meaning. I want to channel her style of reading the next time I read fiction. I have Lily King’s collection of short stories Five Tuesdays in Winter checked out from the library on my Kindle. I’m going to do slow reading practice with the stories.
Maybe I want to write fiction. I’ve thought of that before. I even worked on turning my memoir draft into a screenplay.
If I write fiction I want to do it slowly, with presence.
I wonder if writing fiction could be another way to unclench?
- Maybe I’ll add that as a new Friday category! ↩︎