My Year Of Power Moves

This was the year I started reframing every low-stakes thing I used to feel bad about as a power move. Personal sloppiness was a power move, unfettered enthusiasm was a power move, an Instagram full of dog photos was a power move, silence was a power move.

This was also the year I promised myself I would write less or nothing about writing and not-writing, which wasn’t a power move so much as an “ugh shut up, Rachael” move.

If I really wanted to honor the spirit of this year, I wouldn’t be writing here at all. But in truth I’ve typed and deleted like three versions of this post already, and it is so dark outside and I am so full of so much sugar and my defenses against my own Lisa Simpson tendencies have grown so feeble. Anyway, what’s more of a power move than one made consciously out of weakness?

I published four pieces this year. I wrote about Bridge to Terabithia and Tuck Everlasting for The Oyster Review (RIP), about grief and fear and Reader’s Digest for Pacific Standard, about fox hunting and family history for Longreads, and about Beverly “Guitar” Watkins for The Oxford American’s Georgia music issue.

This is the least I’ve ever published since, I guess, my freshman year of college when I started writing for the school paper. And I feel the least regret I’ve ever felt, looking back on a year of world-facing writing.

I don’t mean I did my best writing this year. I published less this year, but I wrote more, and I wrote bad. This was the year I became obsessed with shitty first drafts. Maybe if I’d finished reading Bird By Bird when I started it in 2008 and not this summer I could’ve saved myself some time and grief re: perfection, but oh well. Power move.

I needed to become obsessed with shitty first drafts this year because I am writing a book, or trying to, and this was the year I finally became exhausted with carrying it all around in my head. So now it lives in a Scrivener file, and a Dropbox folder, and also still in my head. Maybe one day it will exist somewhere else. (Perhaps in keeping with the theme I should say here that it’s a nonfiction collection about childhood and mortality, and I’m agentless and publisherless. POWER MOVE?!)

In 2016, I hope to write even more, even worse, and have even less to show for it. Until then: more dog photos.