4

It’s mid-August. I’m staying in London in the flat my wife owns. I can’t say living here yet, really, because legally I don’t and can’t. I am here as a visitor. I’ve returned to the U.S. four times in the last ten weeks, which has left me feeling scrambled up, shifty, unmoored. There’s no air conditioning in the flat because it’s London and air conditioning is rarely present here — something I’ve come to enjoy for the most part, everyone sweating and stinking in shops, pubs, and restaurants. I’m sitting on the floor of the living room, leaning against our brown velvet couch, a couch I long dreamed of having. Sunlight shines through the square atrium at the center of the living room. I live in a flat in London with no air conditioning but an atrium and a brown velvet couch and I am always sure my life will begin tomorrow. I realized this yesterday as I was deciding what to do with my day. My wife is visiting LA after playing a festival in Seattle before we meet in Michigan for my childhood best friend’s wedding. She travels often as a musician, which means I’m frequently alone with the dogs. I’ve been alone for stretches in Detroit, LA, and soon to be London. For the most part, this doesn’t trouble me. I enjoy being alone, puttering around the house, rearranging the bookshelf, reading, cooking, taking the dogs for walks, watching movies, and scrolling on my phone. I am trying to understand who I am when I’m alone, what changes, and why. I noticed my aversion to doing certain things over the last few days alone. There are lots of things my brain feels “safe” doing alone, but most of these things happen inside the house. There are a few exceptions, like grocery shopping, going to the tailor, rock climbing, meeting friends at a bar, and the aforementioned dog walks. But I feel a kind of friction when I have to leave the house. It’s cozy in the shaft of light the atrium forms, on my scratchy wool rug, leaning against the curved edge of the couch. There’s plenty to do. It’s so easy NOT to leave. I tell myself I’ll play soccer when my wife returns. We’ll go to the bar around the corner to read together. Which is true, but catching myself thinking this, I suddenly realized, do I only live my life when she’s around? Am I going to act like this when the stretch she’s gone isn’t just a few days but a few weeks? Am I always thinking my life will start when [X]?

A more generous part of me tells myself that solitude is a necessary pre-qualifier to create. It’s true, of course, many people have said this. Unfortunately, I’m not creating much either. A few sparse journal entries, but not much else. I’m scrolling on my phone more than I’d like to admit, even though I’ve deleted Instagram, where previously I could kill a few hours a day. I want to be free of reels, of content, of wondering whether I should post a hot picture of myself for attention, and then doing it and feeling a lurch of shame. In three days, I’ll leave the job I’ve had for the last eight years. When I tell people this, they ask, what will you do? And I say, I’m going to write. But my secret fear is that I won’t write at all. That I’ll waste time the same way I waste time now. A quote I read today in Cheryl Strayed’s interview of the writer Chloe Caldwell made me feel sick. Caldwell recalls a piece of advice her late father always gave his guitar students: “You get good at what you do. If you practice guitar, you get really good at guitar. If you don’t practice, you get really good at not practicing.” Caldwell continues, “I love this phrase because you can apply it to every single thing in life, in ways both literal and abstract. If you write, you get good at writing If you look at Instagram, you get good at looking at Instagram. If you walk, you get good at walking. If you swim, you get good at swimming. If you write, you get good at writing. If you don’t write, you get really good at not writing. If you look at Instagram, you get REALLY good at looking at Instagram.” I started thinking, what am I really good at right now? Online shopping for vintage flip flops. Checking Facebook Marketplace. Reading Substack notes. I’ve trained myself to do everything but write consistently, and yet I’m expecting that everything will change in three days when I leave my job that I’ve hardly been doing for the last three weeks and I’ll suddenly sit down, inspired to write for hours at a time. For the last eight years, I’ve told myself I’ll get serious about writing when I leave my job. I felt like I couldn’t really write the things I wanted to write while working at the relatively conservative company I work for, or maybe didn’t want to risk the careful separation of personal and professional I had forged where my coworkers knew relatively little about who I was outside of the hours I spent on Teams video calls with them. I told this to my wife the other day, and she said, Why not? Would they have fired you? I realized I had never thought about it. I assumed they would fire me, or maybe they wouldn’t and I would just feel a little weird at work knowing people could potentially know personal things about me and my preferences and my hang ups and my neuroses vis-à-vis any work I put into the world. Again, the fear of witnessing. It’s not so much about being witnessed but being judged. So I put it off for eight years, except for a few stints of inspiration during periods of great sorrow or joy. I watched a video interview of Miranda July where she said at some point when she was young, she realized, You’re asleep at the wheel. Maybe everyone has some version of this, the realization that only you are responsible for forging the life that you want, for making yourself into the person you want to be. The Annie Dillard “how you spend your days is how you spend your life.”

So what? Who cares? No one asked but I think I’m long overdue to get started. I’ll sit and write for no one, for now. I’ll pay attention to what I do, knowing it’s what I’ll get good at. I’ll go play soccer and maybe even have a drink alone at the bar around the corner. I’ll eavesdrop on the overground and write down what I hear. I’ll track the path my thoughts take and try to understand better how my mind works. I’ll underline passages in my book and look up the words I don’t understand in the clunky dictionary on the bookshelf, the same one I grew up studying for the spelling bee from. Maybe I’ll even practice piano. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Life is today, here on the rug, the dogs sleeping behind me. It goes on.