I like to think that my recent lack of content output, in our current iteration of the word “content”, is my artist’s instinct. It makes me feel better about how I spent a large chunk of my January: introspective, silent, and making a whole lot of meaning out of every little thing and then keeping it to myself until I know what to do with the feeling. But I’m not so sure it’s my artist’s instinct so much as it is a result of my retreat into my comfortable cave, a habitat that becomes all too familiar whenever I visit home for an extended period of time; this time, it was nearly a month.
In this time, I thought a lot about how some of my best writing is born out of heartbreak. A kind of determination that only exists within observation and perseverance to make something out of a very specific kind of channeled energy. I romanticize heartbreak just as I do with everything else in my life. It keeps things interesting even though masked underneath is a kind of melancholic reckoning that is more abstract and limiting. In this reckoning, I become obsessed with output and more notably, creating lucrative projects that give fodder to the kind of life I always imagined I would live when I was just a teenager dreaming up the life I have now.
I made a third of my income in the last two months of 2024. I realize that the way in which I admit where this channeled energy went to is ostentatious, perhaps a little embarrassing. It’s not something I consciously dreamed up of but simply where I landed as a result of finding a tangible purpose as an influencer in the interim as I “make it” as a writer.
But still, my life, as ever, humbles me. With one great success comes one setback. With one great compliment comes one bout of criticism. I sat next to a very big and successful Substacker at a fashion week dinner the other night and while I was talking to her, I didn’t know what to feel more: envy or immense admiration. She just writes. She posted on Instagram four times last year. I was baffled. I made a mental note to do some more manifestation rituals this weekend so I can direct whatever it was that I felt during that dinner towards achieving whatever parameters I have to declare myself having “made it” as a writer.
I have maybe ten more paid subscribers than I had last time I posted on here and that means a lot to me even though one social media partnership would pay for one person’s yearly subscription one hundredfold. I know I’m not supposed to think like this but that’s just where my mind goes. Moving on from the melancholic reckoning of my recent past that put me in a state of borderline manic productivity, I want to now romanticize something else: the paradox of not knowing what comes next.
A few weeks ago, my sister shared this poem in the group chat with myself and my mom:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
The Real Work by Wendell Berry
“I like this poem :)” she wrote. I proceeded to read it over and over and over again before sending it to someone, also a creative, whose work ethic and output is unmatched. “I’m always baffled!” he responded.
At this very specific time in my life, I want to also romanticize confusion and turbulence and doubt. Even in writing this, after a strange bout of writer’s block I haven’t quite experienced before, I call to shift the perspective on struggle from something to avoid to something inherently valuable and intrinsic to creativity.
Unfortunately, I oftentimes still feel the most comfortable in a capitalist system. I think most of us do because it gives shape to our purpose and direction, especially in the state of the world we’re living in. It’s a kind of proclamation for sure—what kind, I do not know—but one that is honest and one that recognizes that feeling lost or uncertain is not a failure but a sign that we are engaging in the real work. I want to feel baffled. Maybe not always because stress is another component I'm not recognizing in the immediate. But any resistance to clear, defined, recognizable feeling or direction in life is a good thing, I promise you.
Fashion week started yesterday and I see my peers posting their bi-annual Instagram posts joking about the upcoming month, something about the “stress Olympics”, or a very niche reference only those in the know will get, or that one scene in Sex and the City where Carrie and the girls are freezing their asses off in the name of fashion, etc. I can empathize and laugh-cry with them but I also feel, for perhaps the first time ever, that partaking in this is a choice. And I feel both hands off and satisfied in my decision to let the comfort of my mind and body take precedence over the optics of this industry. I’m attending two shows that mean a lot to me. I’m shooting three campaigns next week. Then I might go to Mexico at the end of it just for the hell of it! I’m baffled because I can do this.
What once felt like a default perfunctory course of action to keep up with the pretenses of my job is giving way to a new kind of feeling I’m not quite familiar with. Without any loud fanfare, the real work begins. May we all be baffled.
Laura
Deeply relatable. Always baffled ❤️