Old Lady on the Internet: 2015 in Review
If I may open with some fangirling — and I may, because I promised myself I could write whatever I wanted so long as I get the damn thing done — I decided to do this because I read Alana Massey’s one and she just annihilated the internet this year and is all about taking up space like you deserve it, like it’s yours, and I got all inspired. Of course then I freaked out right away because she’s publishing real things for real money at an alarming rate, and me? Well. Let’s just get to it, shall we?
Since I’ve been writing seriously, I go at least once a year to Artscape Gibraltar Point, the best-ever retreat centre on the magical Toronto Islands. One of the first times I went, I was in my mid-twenties and I’d just started working on my second novel. In the communal kitchen one day, I met a nice, yoga-style woman in her late thirties who told me — cheerfully! — that she’d been working on her long-poem-thing for twelve years.
I don’t know what I said as I chopped my kale. Probably, “Oh!” But inside I know I judged hard. Because really? Twelve years? Also, long-poem-thing? I mean, here I was, first novel published and behind me, ready to blaze forth on the path of glory. Look, I thought I was hot shit, staying up till three in the morning, typing so fast in my freezing little room, listening to the gray lake howl.
This past July, my second novel turned ten. It still isn’t done. I am turning thirty-seven next week. This isn’t the kind of writer I’d ever meant to be. This year didn’t start all that well.
I guess it started how most of them have for the past eight — hopeful because that seems to be how my brain is built, thank Christ, and grateful for my very nice life and loves, and cognizant certainly of my boatloads of privilege, but nevertheless dragging around feelings of abject shame and dread that I am a total, utter failure. Also, I had these weird tingly legs and my tongue had swelled up. Internet diagnosis: I was really fucking stressed (about a lot of stuff) and had been for a long time.
So I rolled up my sleeves and bashed at Part One of my book for those parts of January when I wasn’t at my admin job; I rewrote the shit out of two sections, over and over, because that’s what I do. I write, man. And I was going to finish the novel this year if it killed me.
Spoiler: I didn’t. Spoiler two: I’m actually kind of glad.
According to old journals, something in me broke on February 8th. I know because I wrote a new story in there that day. Which is something I hadn’t done in years. “Not until the novel is done,” I’d say to people who asked, which seemed so sane at the time, so prudent. I’m easily overwhelmed and entirely anxious. Trying to juggle more than one thing at once was just courting chaos in my already hurricane-ish brain. “Not until it’s done.” Of course what I meant was, “Not until it’s perfect.”
The novel is inspired by the true event of my working for a woman with a disability for several years. Half of it is told from the support worker’s point of view, half from the woman being supported. So I live in fear that it will wind up a vile appropriation of my dear friend’s voice. What I want it to be, among other things, is a paean to her, an attempt at sharing with the world how our relationship changed us, and taught me to fucking listen; it’s a thing about our love, and nailing the character’s voice is supposed to serve as evidence of that.
Obviously getting it perfect became a weirdly tall order in concert with my already hefty neuroses around perfection (I’ll spare you the details till My Essays of 2016 start to drop haha). The point is: Nothing New Till The Novel Was Done.
But then February 8th. I didn’t record exactly what happened, but I bet you there was ranting and weird laughing and probably strange, snarfly tears. There might have been desperate horoscope combing, or a stompy walk through the ravine near my place. There was definitely long, deep listening on the part of my partner who has been with me this whole entire decade and never once given up on me so I keep wondering when I will wake up and find out he’s been but a lovely dream.
My guess is in February he saw my swollen tongue and flaky face and said something like, “Babe, why don’t you try something new?” And for a confluence of very boring, clichéd reasons including years of therapy and mindfulness practices and cultivating a friendly inner monologue and learning to take guilt-free days off and surrounding myself with a coterie of people who believe in me and often say so and petting my cats and naming and owning the shit out of my anxiety and not following every last negative thought-hole right on back to bed, I said YES.
The new story, “Getting Things Done,” is fan-fiction about the day when David Allen, my all-time favourite productivity guru (everyone has one, right?), starts to learn to play the flute. Venerable Toronto poet, Lynn Crosbie published it in her pop-up magazine, HOOD. (Scroll down a little to find it.) I don’t know if anybody read it, but you know what? I like it. Here is my favourite part:
They had had two glasses each of champagne, and were sitting in the outdoor hottub, bromine-scented steam swirling against the backdrop of the mountains down which they had speedily shot that morning, Kathryn so fast and so sleek. The pool area echoed with the squeal and squeak of a sort of coven of rich teenaged girls of the type they abhorred, and he had cleared his throat and told her, “It’s quite honestly the music itself. The way it sounds. It…um. Transports me. The way it’s almost nothing, and yet completely something. The way it’s emotion embodied in air. Or. Emotion turned into air. Or.” He had felt a semi-painful folding sensation in his chest as he’d tried to explain and she had smiled at him, but seemed distracted, annoyed by the teens, who issued now from the pool, a dripping, shrieking bikinied mass, the relaxation value they had carefully calibrated through online research leaking away, and she smiled, but he felt, still, ashamed.
Also in February, I joined Twitter. You may say, “Holy shit, that is not a big deal,” and you are entitled to your opinion. For me? It felt like crawling out of a cave of musty woollen shawls, like I was sniffing other air, blinking my mascaraless eyes in the harried blue light. Old lady on the internet. Unfinished novel in my bike basket, curled and stained with tea.
I discovered women on there ten years my junior writing with such aplomb and courage about passions I had held for years — pop music, reality TV, judicious but seething misandry — and even getting paid. I felt chuffed for them. I felt thrilled. I felt honestly so confused.
Then, one night in March, I was at my friend Ashley’s birthday party while Canadian Internet was blowing up about Odin’s. The next morning I sat in our living room talking and crying and chugging coffee, and my partner — at this point my full-on Kris Jenner — was like, “You have to write about this, babe.”
So I did. This is the first piece on the subject of disability I have put out for the world to see in ten years of thinking and writing about it every day. It got shared all over the place. Ashley’s mom read it. Ashley herself read it. Odin’s aunt read it. To be true, I nearly pulled the plug at the last second when my partner was about to hit send on the HuffPo uploader; yes, he had to hit it because my stomach had turned into a twisting mass of worms with teeth. Nevertheless, it happened. And you know what? I didn’t die. This was kind of surprising to me.
Publishing this one little thing reminded me why I like to do this shit in the first place. I like when people read it! I want to communicate. Sheila Heti says something in this great interview that has rolled around in my head all year: “I’ve had a desire to be in the world.” I had known that of myself once, too. And now, because of these parties and my momager boyfriend, I remembered.
In April my wildly generous best friend connected me to a friend of hers who is currently pole-vaulting to fame’s sparkly summit on the merits of her hilarious and very smart words. This woman met me for coffee, mentored me in the ways of websites, reminded me I could write on anything I had feelings about — including writing a novel for ten years — and encouraged me to go ahead and pitch. It meant a lot.
So now I’m in the New Yorker on the reg! Just kidding! Maybe one day! But whatever, I did lots more work, all year long:
I have wanted forever to write something on Bachelor Nation, and then I fucking did and I talked about white fragility while I was at it.
I renamed my long-defunct blog on writing Little Bravery, and did some pieces there on Nickelback and how I used to let my desk at school get so messy that it would be full of rotten fruit come time to clean it out that seemed to resonate with quite a few folks.
To fangirl once more: in late October the illustrious Rachel Syme retweeted this first installment of my attempt to document three good things I read each week, and said I looked nice in my black turtleneck selfie, which made my ears glow a bit. Ideal because I had arrived that very day on the island for yet another week-long retreat I’d informally dubbed “Novel’s Last Chance.” I needed that glow.
I finished a third draft of a new essay out there, worked on more stories, and wouldn’t you know, a new incarnation of the novel emerged too — not from fresh writing, but from extensive, ruthless cutting and heavy employment of alter-egos. Is it done? Hell no. Will it be done in 2016? Idk. Do I give a fuck? Sure. But not a fuck so intense that I’ll give myself tingle-legs and won’t take a break to share something imperfect and wordy on food or Tay or trying to interrogate my own whiteness, you know?
I’m a bit late to this party, old lady on the internet, but I’m just going to own my shit. I wrote some good things this year. Even if the risks I took may seem small to some, they felt huge to me, and I am fucking proud of myself. I am proud of myself for these ten years I’ve put into the novel, too. I am proud of myself for being a totally unsavvy hippie ranging through the woods, and I am proud of myself for the extent to which I’ve actually considered my personal brand this year. I am proud of myself for letting my gray hair grow out and I will be proud of myself if I dye it again. I am proud of myself for examining the fallout of patriarchy with increasingly x-ray eyes, and I am proud of myself for tweaking my thought patterns, because I am worth it. I am proud of myself for practicing really huge self-acceptance this year, and self-forgiveness for not being “further along.” It feels amazing.
If you liked or shared or commented upon or glanced at anything I wrote this year, I want to say a very sincere thanks. To know that a few of you have read and reflected on this stuff I put out, and that it meant a tiny something in your day, has convinced me that being in the world is what I truly want, even if it’s scary, even if I sometimes fail. I want to use my outsized interest in sentences and ideas toward some kind of connection and I want to do it regularly.
I don’t know what, precisely, is going to happen in 2016, but I do know I will keep writing. Back in January, thrashing away all alone, I really wasn’t sure.
Finally, in closing, yoga-lady of the twelve year long-poem-thing, I salute you and I’m sorry! I totally get it, girl.
If you’re an editor and would like to chat, I am at julia.s.tausch@gmail.com and on Twitter too, and I would be so grateful and ready.
