Personally...

A little bit on what’s behind my work

Personal essays are a funny thing. A great deal of personal essay writing is either dramatic and confessional, like a public diary entry, making the reader feel prurient; or it is deceptively abstract and high register, a series of specifics disguised as generalities.

Personal essays can feel cheap, attention-seeking, embellished, dramatic, too particular to have an actual point. It’s impossible to know what they’re actually presenting, or concealing, or presenting in a coded way. The creative process behind them is impenetrable. Sometimes, I imagine, even to the writer.

Most of my writing is not of the “personal essay” genre. But it has taken me some years to become fully comfortable with the idea that I nonetheless have a “creative process.” I like to think of my work as somewhat by-the-book and based in good reason and logic. And I picked up the bias of thinking of artsy people mostly as not gainfully employed. “I’m gainfully employed so I must not be an artsy, or whatever, person.”

But while hopefully my work does make sense and is based in more than the things in my head, it is also irreducibly creative. A nice side effect of fully acknowledging this without embarrassment is that I can appreciate other people whose creative work I might once have considered unserious.

I’ve probably done that a lot, but one case in particular stands out to me. Years ago, I don’t remember how, I came across a YouTube video from a female creator/artist, explaining her creative process. She walked through how she put together a particularly emotional and personal project.

She cut together a bunch of clips where she talked about the idea, developed it, described how she was putting it together, crying while going over her script, etc. At the end she just filmed herself talking about how sometimes she doubted her talent or creativity, but that projects like this reminded her she really had it, and she cried again narrating all of this.

I think, at the time, I found this all a bit self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing. But I now understand what she meant. I understand that insecurity, or uncertainty. Sometimes an idea feels like a revelation, and it’s hard to tell if you’re inspired or nuts.

I also understand her emphasizing that her project moved her to tears. That isn’t, as I once saw it, a humblebrag or something; it’s more like, if this doesn’t move me, why should it move anyone else? When you’re a solo creative person working on your own, it is very easy to lose your ability to judge or edit your own work. Is it good? Is it bad? Who knows. Who decides? Who cares? Your own reaction is some sort of indicator, at least.

I am ashamed now that I saw that young woman’s behind-the-curtain video as attention-seeking, when now, with a fuller understanding of the nature of my own work, I see it as a kind of gift, a giving of oneself: putting a commitment to pouring oneself out over the desire not to be seen vulnerable.

Her final project as I recall didn’t involve her crying; the point is that, like a carefully, lovingly executed recipe, the final product is subtly shaped by the process, and a process of clinical or cynical detachment will somehow yield a less meaningful and moving piece of art, even if whatever is missing is not discernible or measurable.

It’s a little bit like how I describe a seasoning in a dish that adds some subtle je ne sais quoi: “You don’t taste it, but it tastes different without it.”

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People sometimes ask me where I get my ideas from, or how I get them, which is perhaps a distinction with a difference. The answer is I don’t really know; if I knew, it would be easy, or everyone could do it.

Often it is actually quite strange to me how a piece can come together thematically from little hints and nudges and impulses that would seem to have nothing at all to do with one another. Let me walk you through one example.

For some time, at least a couple of years, I’d had this idea to do an analysis of “Someone Like You” and “Hello” by Adele, treating those songs as incisive expressions of a long modern quasi-adulthood. That is, almost a kind of hidden sociology or social criticism in the form of deeply personalized lyrics. But I never quite felt there was enough of a reason to write it, and I felt it might be a bit too out of left field for my audience. So it sat in the back of my head for years, a mental first draft.

Several weeks ago, I was reading, of all things, an article about the war in Afghanistan and how America doesn’t care enough about veterans for whom these wars never really end. That observation and its background of memory and grief brought to mind the Adele lyric from “Someone Like You”: “I had hoped you’d see my face / And that you’d be reminded that for me, it isn’t over.”

It also happened that, at the same time, I was wanting to write, sort of, about a personal experience. And that old, shelved Adele piece, which this news article reminded me of, turned out, in a way, to be a strangely perfect way to say what I wanted to write.

So a piece which, to the reader, is no more than “Here’s what these song lyrics say about being a young person these days” actually came together out of years of holding onto a draft, a personal experience that made it newly relevant, and a line from a news article that reminded me that draft existed.

Here’s another one. Around the same time, there was a Twitter blowup sparked by someone who argued that postpartum depression doesn’t exist, or that if it does, it’s because childless women have become accustomed to too much autonomy.

This, um, intellectually stimulating discourse led conservative writer Emily Zanotti to argue, entirely in keeping with Christianity, that motherhood is in some ways analogous to the sacrifice of Christ. Motherhood, she wrote, drove home the meaning of “This is my body, given up for you.” I found this immensely moving and I actually teared up (which I rarely do and will less often admit to).

As Zanotti and I are both Catholic, I also took her to be making a reference to the Eucharist: the mother says to her infant, “Take, eat; take, drink” every bit as much as Christ says so to us.

And this dovetailed with a long-running analogy I use about the Eucharist and the sort of shadow of a miracle that hospitality is. I did that here, in one of my slice-of-life pieces about immigrant-owned restaurants:

At its most basic, this is a story about immigration. Sometimes, people will find this vaguely objectifying: Oh, you just like immigrants because they bring great food. But I don’t think it is. Of course, immigrants don’t bring their food out of the kindness of their hearts. It’s a business they find themselves able to do. But food is culture. Food is hospitality. Food is almost sacred. To break bread with people is in some respect to become one with them. Take this, all of you, and eat of it.

I don’t mean this irreverently; I mean something like, every human meal is a shadow of the Eucharist; and the Eucharist, likewise, is a kind of ultimate, where the “offer” of sacrifice and the “offer” of hospitality become intertwined and see their highest form.

But I had not made the obvious connection that “take, eat” is literally what any parent or caregiver says, or any friend or spouse offering the other a bite. That is so striking and beautiful, that my faith considers miraculous this thing which is also a human universal.

Now I go back to that YouTube creator and her visible emotion as vulnerability, as a giving of herself, and I see something Eucharistic in that, an offering of oneself. And that idea of vulnerability as an offering makes me think of the words we use for communion—“take” and “receive.” We can apply those words elsewhere, to regret, to memory, to old relationships: we can take someone without receiving them. And this series of connections was also going on in the background in that Adele piece.

“You can’t just call everything the Eucharist!”, you might be saying. But the point is not literally “a YouTube artist crying is the Eucharist.” The point isn’t any of this, exactly.

It’s that the ideas behind a discrete piece of work often somehow cohere out of a chain of seemingly unrelated influences which would be impossible to predict, plan, or reverse engineer. Creativity is like the breath animating the dust, literally grasping at, acting out a shadow of, creation.

And without all of those seemingly unrelated ideas and influences—even if they’re never expressed—I wouldn’t really be writing the same thing.