Let Her Write

Today, I turn twenty-three. For the past month, at least, I have been attempting to construct a plan of extravagance for the day, the weekend, perhaps even the week after. Something bold that tells strangers, Look at me! I am celebrating something in my life! Perhaps I would wear a dress and perhaps I would dance a little.

As a child and a teenager, I celebrated everything and nothing with equal passion. Never have I spent Valentine's Day with a partner I could call my own, but I melted the chocolate and I cut the strawberries. I bought flowers for everyone I love. This Valentine's Day, I spent it alone attempting to hold the pieces of my heart together. Even that I could not bear to make romantic. To welcome in the new year, I sat on the same sofa, eating the same meal, on my own. Christmas felt like an illness I had to patiently and painfully endure until the ringing in my ears had finally settled.

All of the moments I gladly built, despite my circumstances, were being brushed into my past like specks of dust. I refused to not celebrate my birthday - to once more absent-heartedly utter the words, It is just another day. Though, despite attempting to make the day somewhat special, I remain on the same sofa, eating the same meal.

For most of my years I have been the poet. Turning nothing into something charming. Meaningless interactions into stories. How I could write a library for my fictional infatuations and lives. In that moment, toes upon the rocks and a descending horizon ahead, I was the poem.

- Katerina Petrou, The Poet or The Poem (2024)

I question how many of my recent experiences have been built upon a lonely dissatisfaction with the way my story has been written. It urges me to write something better - something interesting, something quite less upsetting. There was a moment in my life when I know I was happy. It was a time when I would wake up each morning with an enthusiastic eagerness to begin another day. Vividly, I recall sitting amongst my family and feeling so utterly content that a blissful sigh would escape my mouth. As if all the years prior, the ones coloured in darkness and despair, were slowly being released from my body - making way for this new way to live.

It did not take long for the darkness to engulf me once again. Since those days of sunshine and barbecue smoke and the whistle of kick-off from the television, it is a darkness I have not rid of. Truthfully, I do not believe it will ever leave me - I have made my peace with this. Happiness is not sustainable. It is fleeting in a way that sadness can pass through a generally happy person's day. To be happy is no longer my goal. For, if I would spend my days attempting to grasp at something so evanescent, I could only deflate. So, what else is there to living other than happiness?

I have been a writer all my life. Mere days ago, I uncovered the large pink notebook I would take with me on school trips to write songs about the trees brushing past the window or the boy I loved. Though, my words never felt so urgent as they do now. I could breathe so easily when I was happy, now my writing is a ventilator. If I cannot write stories of my life that are interesting and fun and poignant, what was all of this for? How can I possibly live each of my seconds, my years, without making all of them worth it in some way?

God makes a covenant that “I will not measure you out any more distress than you need to write your books. Do you want any less than that?”

- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (2006)

I must admit, I lack the energy of a twenty-three-year-old. My soul is rather fragile and I do all I can to protect and nurture whatever is left of it. Finding myself in the city surrounded by loud cars and drunken strangers, I think to myself, this will be a good story. No, I am not enjoying myself. Yes, I would rather be somewhere quieter, somewhere familiar, somewhere else. Though, how could that prove I have lived a life filled with something other than a hollow sadness?

I thought that, to be a writer, I had to be a collector of experiences. And I thought every experience worth having, every person worth meeting, only existed after dark.

- Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love (2018)

I do not believe any of us are truly innocent from the desire to fill our lives with tailored experiences. The wedding may be beautiful, it may fill you with an overwhelming happiness that forces your first months of marriage to be strained - to feel empty in comparison. We work for the promotion, we get the dog, we have the baby. We tick milestones off the list of life to prove that we did something worthwhile with it - something to tell others about. I question how much of these experiences make us feel alive.

I may feel tired. At times, I may struggle to put the ink in my pen. Though, if writing these stories is what keeps the air in my lungs for another year, I say, Let her write.