How To Do Everything Except Get Out Of Your Own Way
A Character Study Getting Back On Track
This is satire and to be read with a sense of humor. None of these characters are real, rather just figments of my imagination based on people I know, people I used to know and probably a few different versions of myself, both past and present. That said, I haven’t written anything long form in over six weeks. Blissfully existing in the instant gratification that is Substack notes and starting rumors on Rich People Shit. I’ll let you decide who my muse was for this one.
She wasn’t sad, she wasn’t happy, she wasn’t bored. Everyone she knew had been here before, when putting one foot in front of the other in New York City turns into a very expensive hamster wheel. The days start slipping through your fingers, the same chaos, same faces, same nights. Who was that person who made time to stop and smell all of the perfumes at the Dries store in Soho? It was nobody’s job to inspire her, but if she ever wanted to write something beyond 300 characters again, the only option was to get out of her comfort zone. There was no team to let down, no done is better than perfect, no deadline to adhere to so she could pay her rent. The price was much worse. She was giving up something that brought her joy.
Three kinds of dumplings in Flushing, a morning spent on the second floor of the Strand with Egon Schiele and Arthur Elgort, a t-shirt from a music festival she had never heard of from Metropolis. Her funk was unraveling. She still couldn’t put pen to paper.
One random Tuesday, between a breakfast meeting and an afternoon of calls, she found herself locking eyes with Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. “What could I write about that would get me invited to one of your salons,” she asked out loud, envisioning herself telling F. Scott Fitzgerald about all of the real-life Tom Buchanans she’d met over the years. A voice smoky and deliberate filled the weekday emptiness of the gallery. “Maybe finish something first.”
Every time she sat down to write, something dire demanded her attention.
Her super stopped by to fix the sink. “How amazing would this apartment look if I put red carpet throughout the entire thing.” “I love it,” he said. She spent the afternoon tape measure in hand, just in case.
A friend of a friend she’d met once her junior year of high school popped into her head. “She always had the best hair, I wonder what she’s up to.” A Google search later she was on a wedding registry from 2021, a mint green La Marzocco marked as purchased. Not her style, but good for them.
The graveyard of coffee accessories acquired over many Black Fridays caught the corner of her eye. This apartment was becoming a talent show of her shortcomings. If she wasn’t going to write, she could at least attempt a crème brûlée cold brew.
Inspiration struck. A fabulous but tragically divorced widow spending her summer Airbnb-ing the Dries Van Noten home in the Belgian countryside. Three sentences on the page. Two hours on The RealReal, every Dries listing, cheapest to most expensive. Research.
Pretty Woman was on Netflix. Vivian Ward. Strawberry seeds in her teeth. A hero’s journey.
Famesick sat on her nightstand. Of course Lena Dunham had writer’s block, all of the greats do. It felt disrespectful to even think about publishing something without getting through at least the first hundred pages.
A woman barely old enough to have been through her Saturn return spoke calmly into the camera about how she had come to Paris for a Grimaude Mini Kelly and if this wasn’t her time to be offered one then that was her cross to bear. Exactly. You can’t rush fate.
Everything is a sign if you’re paying attention.
On Wednesday afternoons she arrived at her therapist’s office on West 13th Street and was greeted by a black Escalade with a driver out front reading the New York Times. Despite the building being filled with thirty other offices, she had convinced herself it was waiting for whoever was before her, someone brilliant, complicated and fabulous, who had to exit out of an alternate entrance for privacy reasons.
“This is teaching me something, you know,” she said, hands in her lap, ballet flats flat on the floor.
“Tell me,” her therapist said.
“If I want to write something again, I just have to do it. Only the version of who I am right now can get it done, not my inner child, not my highest self. There’s no one to blame, no one to grow into.”
Her therapist leaned forward. “And who would you be letting down if you never wrote a single word again?”
“Not even an email?!”
“I’m serious. Who?”
She sighed, exhaling kind of exhaustion that came from way more than writer’s block.
“All three of us.”
There was a birthday dinner that night she couldn’t get out of. “Be impeccable with your word, be impeccable with your word, be impeccable with your word,” she repeated to herself as she fought the urge to text that she wasn’t coming.
“I had no idea the reservation was for six,” a friend of the birthday girl exclaimed, shimmying into the semicircle booth. “You don’t write your little things anymore? What happened? Is work just INSANE?!”
There it was. Proof of concept. Star quality. Who even are you without haters? She flagged down a server who had no plans to stop at their table. “You know what, I’ll take a margarita.”
Later that night she arrived back at her apartment tipsy enough to put a magnifying glass to all of her problems, but neither drunk nor sober enough to fix them. She took the most recent three-pack of Muji notebooks she’d bought and put them in the drawer in her kitchen that was probably intended for pots and pans. “I should probably get some new ones,” she thought, staring into the cupboard. She didn’t even know the difference between broil and bake, but at this point it seemed more likely she’d be whipping up Thanksgiving dinner for a family of twelve before she ever got back in touch with her potential.
Saturday morning rolled around. “What’s today’s excuse,” a voice she could only assume was the ghost of Gertrude Stein asked. She got out of bed and made herself a hard boiled egg and ate it. Her confidence may have been crashing but her blood sugar wouldn’t. “What are you doing today?” her barista asked, passing off her usual black coffee with a dash of almond milk. “I think I’m going to try and do some writing, we’ll see.”
She came home, opened her laptop, just like she had done one million times before. And wrote.
Love love love this! That writers block was worth it ♥️
Ok all these outfits are so good