There’s something about sitting down to a blank page that still, even after twenty years of certainty that one of my greatest desires in life is to be a writer, scares the living daylights out of me.
I wrote that sentence and then immediately got up to make a matcha latte and put three potatoes in the oven. Before writing that sentence, I started a load of laundry, took a walk, and changed my outfit. Even after writing this Substack for over a year, I still make feeble attempts to avoid it. There’s a quotation in a book on writing that I read when I was about ten (I wasn’t joking in the previous paragraph), attributed to Gene Fowler but to many others as well: “Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.”
No matter how many times I’ve written before, there’s always a horrifying moment of vertigo staring at the space where my words will be: some sort of deep, intuitive nausea, tempting me into a sort of Zeno’s paradox where I never start because I have never started because I have never started.
Thankfully, though, the artistic world has provided for this eventuality in the form of beautiful stationery. I’ve always been obsessed with notebooks—I probably have fifty in my possession. I rarely finish a notebook. There are a precious few journals I’ve finished, of course, and some class notebooks where I ran out of pages before the end of the semester. But usually, my notebooks are unfinished.
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