I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
I’ve always been a creative sort: as a child I learned to cook and prepared gourmet meals for my family then continued that once I had children of my own; midcareer I worked professionally as a tech blogger and editor and had a book published; I’m an abstract artist who has exhibited in juried shows.
When I was a child I wanted to be a chef or a fashion designer, not a statistician, data scientist, or software engineer.
My main creative outlet right now is writing, but I feel a little stagnant with it and not sure where to go next. I blog here every morning and have done so for over a year, following on a previous year-long blogging project that wasn’t quite long enough. I love my morning blogging but it feels a little useless and self-indulgent.
Meanwhile I have multiple Substack newsletters, which are lying fallow right now.
Where do I go next with my writing?
I have a few ideas:
- Look for or start a writing critique group to make friends who are writers and get feedback on my work
- Revisiting my main Substack newsletter and using it to communicate the ideas I’ve been writing about here on transformation at midlife
- Starting yet another book manuscript, on that topic of midlife transformation
- Or, just keep doing what I’m doing, and trust that when it’s time, a new writing activity will emerge
Surrender and peacefulness
The Tarot reading I did this morning recommends the fourth option, with the Hanged Man in the position, “what kind of writer am I becoming?” The Hanged Man shows a man peacefully hanging upside down from a tree branch, one leg crossed behind the other, with a golden halo around his head.
The Hanged Man represents a withdrawal from the noise and crowdedness of usual life, to a place of peace, solitude, and understanding.
In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Tarot interpreter Rachel Pollack writes of this card:
In readings the Hanged Man bears the message of independence. Like the Fool, which signified doing what you sensed was best, even if other people thought it foolish, the Hanged Man indicates being who you are, even if others think you have everything backwards. It symbolizes the feeling of being deeply connected to life and can mean a peace that comes after some difficult trial.
My difficult trial was the two surgeries I’ve undergone this year. My left eye vision is still blurry and distorted but at least the scar tissue is gone now.
The Hanged Man represents a surrender to reality and an acceptance of life as it is.
Nietzsche and the noise of normal life
Nietzsche and Han recommend following the vita contemplativa, turning away from the noise of normal life towards deep study and thought.
I talked to a friend last night and she asked what I had been up to lately. It was difficult to say. “Writing a lot,” I told her, “and reading, and taking it easy.” Of course I’m recovering from retinal surgery and leading a temporarily sedentary lifestyle, so there is that. But even before that I wasn’t exactly active and hurried.
“Writing about what?” she asked. I felt sheepish telling her. Philosophy, and vampires, and midlife transformation? Options trading too. How do I braid all this together into something meaningful? I will only be able to do so after a time of nothingness and disintegration.
I find myself pursuing solitude again and again, and then I criticize myself for it. I think: “you spend too much time with your own thoughts, Anne!” “You need to get out and do something.” That is Han’s Burnout Society talking.
Writer Paul Theroux says, “The writer’s profession is a life of self-indulgence… The only difficulty is its necessity for solitude. Writings is not compatible with anything — its utter self-absorption is generally destructive to family life and friendships — and yet I find it joyous.”
Am I not allowed to pursue that kind of self-indulgent and solitude-driven joy? If not, why not? I would be the only person stopping myself.