Why Haven't I Been Writing?

Notes on being an unemployed, depressed workaholic and returning to a larval state.

Hello, I am jobless. I’ve been jobless since the start of the year. This is not my first layoff experience, and one of the great joys of aging is that I no longer freak out over life’s sharp turns as I once did. Some people call this wisdom, that my perspective is now shaped not only by the stuff I've learned in books, but by my having lived through so many tectonic shifts. I now have so much evidence that whatever comes, I'll figure a way through it, because I always have.

Does this sound convincing? Let’s go on.

I'm unemployed, so I should be writing this newsletter more. I should be building an audience, gently encouraging folks to pay me some of their money for my words, posting on a schedule, earning a living by my art, such as it is. Ever since I launched this newsletter, I've struggled to figure out what I want it to be for. Mainly, I wanted a space to drop occasional essays without spending a lot of time editing them. I've not had the space or resources to do much personal writing over the last handful of years. On the one hand, I tell myself that's probably for the best – perhaps the urge to publicly document and share many of my most intimate and vulnerable thoughts is not always a healthy choice. And yet, and yet, the urge doesn't actually go away. 

Also, jobs! I’m job seeking. Should I be writing deeply personal newsletters? My attitude has always been that anyone who would hold my writing against me as a possible employee is probably not someone with whom I would successfully collaborate anyway. Maybe this attitude is a huge luxury (nobody wants to get up and work anymore!)  or maybe it's just the reality of having spent a large chunk of my adult job-having life as a person who was eminently googleable. The biggest source of my searchability – my former work at the defunct (and mostly unmourned) xoJane – has since been erased from the internet with the sweep of a now-also-dissolved corporate entity’s invisible hand. Ephemera gonna emphem…era.

But I'm not here to rehash old times. My point is that when I say I am job seeking, what I mean is that I am very depressed. My sense of personal fulfillment has always rested heavily on the work that I do. I never really learned how to draw the same amount of satisfaction from not-work sources. I am grateful to have wonderful friends, to have loving and supportive partners, to have a full calendar of plans and events to look forward to and enjoy. But my real boost has always come from work, from working alongside other talented and inspirational people toward a common goal, and the lift I feel when we can look at what we’ve accomplished together. Some part of me knew I needed to find another way of being; being a workaholic is an easily exploitable trait, and I don’t want to run myself through the wringer for someone else’s creative projects anymore. I wanted it to change. I wanted to learn how to be different. I did not expect to be thrust into that education so dramatically, but the last eight months have been an involuntary adventure into who Lesley is when she’s not working, working, working, all the dang time.

—

One morning a few months ago, I was two hours into wakefulness – but still not moved from bed – when I realized I'd fallen into a hole of staring at my phone, watching only the most gutting clips from the very best animated series for depressed broken people, Bojack Horseman – a show I once dreamed of writing for, but which was canceled before I had a remote chance – and crying. That was when I first realized I was depressed.

My life has tended to unfold in five to seven year cycles, or at least I try to find a pattern in the ways things can abruptly change. Real or imagined, that pattern of the floor dropping out continues with me having been laid off on the last day of 2023. And in keeping with tradition, I met this collapse with a mixture of seeping sadness and deep, visceral relief. The problem with getting multiple so-called “dream jobs” in one life is that I have struggled to know when I was ready to move on – it's hard to let go of something that you love so much, even when you know on a deeper level that your relationship is coming to a natural and peaceful close.

So! I spent the first several weeks of unemployment buried in a series of intense cleaning and organizing projects. The last three years have been so busy that household maintenance has been done on a subsistence basis. So it was a gift to open closets and put things in storage totes and feel a surge of accomplishment with every tidied shelf and every moved bit of furniture. 

In the closing stages of my divorce in 2017, and preparing my condo for sale, I called a junk removal company to collect and take away the perfectly good furniture that filled my home, along with a lot of other stuff I still don't want to think about having lost in the fog of my life burning to the ground. I have two particular memories of that day. One, of looking out my front windows at the two open-topped box trucks sloppily heaped with my possessions, a landfill of memories I did not want to keep but could not erase. Two, of sitting on the floor against the wall in what used to be my dining room, under the lighting fixture it once took me three months to settle on, dissociating, while the junk guys bustled in and out with their great rolling bins full of my things. I wound up on that floor initially so I could sit on my hands and prevent myself from overturning the bins and  screaming at them to stop – I hired them for this, I reminded myself – and I wound up on that floor in the broader metaphorical sense because I could not cope with applying discernment to what to keep and what to toss any longer, so I tossed it all. I didn’t know where I was going next, and I didn’t want to have to carry a lot. 

A few years later, I realized I had new furniture and new stuff and had largely just reconstructed the loss. Another reference point for the tectonic shifts of the future: if I lose everything, I will eventually just replace it. 

So in the beginning of this year, when I really wanted to destroy everything, instead of starting another fire, I tried discernment and storage bins and vacuum bags. I recently asked a friend why I am so good at burning things down and starting over, but so bad at making moderate and thoughtful changes over time, and he put it down to a general hatred of transitions, and a preference for being forcibly propelled into something new by self-sabotage. That feels accurate. That's probably why I often stay too long. If there's a bandage to remove, I will rip it off with no patience to recognize my own pain. Or, maybe I deserve that pain for failing to be able to find a perfectly stable life that extends unchanging off into the distant horizon that means death. 

When I finished the cleaning and organizing, I sat for a month, waiting for something to happen. 

When I finished sitting and waiting, I felt a little relief. 

Another month passed, and I started to panic. The panic grew as the weeks went on. Why wasn’t I writing? Did the pandemic break my brain? My ability to focus? Did I have long COVID, brain fog, or was I just crushed by the repercussions of realizing how horrible a lot of people truly are? Is it early onset dementia? Is it a brain tumor? I'm not going to list my anxieties further, but they continue in this vein. 

Worst of all: Had I forgotten how to write? I've spent most of the last several years writing jokes for a comedy series. It wasn’t writing-writing. It was hard – much harder than it looks – and it was fun, and it was exhausting in good ways and bad ways. But it wasn’t writing like I’m doing right now. It wasn’t writing with my heart rate a little elevated, and my hands a little trembly, and a lump of fear in my throat. It wasn’t writing and thinking “I’ll never let anyone read this” or “I’m wasting my time” or “how much can I trust my own memory?” or “who actually cares what I have to say?” It wasn’t writing with the knowledge that the writing makes me vulnerable and soft to a world that likes to hurt vulnerable and soft things, while simultaneously refusing to be cowed or stopped by that threat.

So maybe this is a letter about writing, and how even when writing is beautiful and life-altering, the process behind it is ugly, bloody, shocks of gore. In my last job I had the opportunity to see up close how an independent television show was made; it was instructive, arguably the most educational job of my life, because I got to do so many different things for it. It also taught me what we really mean when we talk about seeing how the sausage is made – an idiom that means to get a look into the behind-the-scenes action that generates the final result, whether that result is a film or a series or a book or a piece of visual art, or whether that result is financial profit, or the acquisition of power, or the eradication of legal rights. 

Seeing how the sausage is made is fun! It’s exciting and it makes you feel special, like a special person who gets a special view! It’s a secret peek into the world’s hidden machinations, being invited to go into the cockpit before a flight, it’s pulling back a corner of the wizard’s curtain to marvel at the mysteries within. But what happens when you get to see too much? What happens when you only wanted to see how the sausage was made in the factory, but you didn’t necessarily want to see how they slaughter the animal first? Maybe you realize then that you didn’t want to be that involved.

This letter, then, is maybe about slaughtering the animal. Nothing lasts forever; everything dies.

—

So it happened that it’s now late summer, and I was sitting on my sofa on a grey Sunday afternoon, looking at my LinkedIn profile and imagining all the ways in which I could or should rewrite it to get this job or that job. Every job description I read feels vague and opaque. I am overwhelmed by the idea of repackaging myself and my experience to seduce an employer in hopes of being hired to perform content and audience strategy for the social media accounts of some brand whose sole purpose is to generate profit for people who are already rich. I know what I am good at, but who do I want to do it for now?

The doorbell rang. When I opened the door, I was greeted by the pleasant woman who delivers prescriptions for my local pharmacy – appropriately enough, she was handing me a refill on my anxiety meds when she exclaimed with enthusiasm, “I didn’t know you were a famous writer!” 

Before I could collect myself to respond, she went on, “I was reading something online a few weeks ago that talked about you! And I thought, oh, I know that name – I deliver to her! Anyway, that’s very impressive. Have a great day!” Bewildered, I mumbled a thank you. And then she was gone.

Questions bubbled to the surface of my mind. What was she reading? Where? When was the last time I’d written something even remotely well-read? Who remembers me at this point? 

This reminded me of something else. Years ago, I was visiting my father in Florida. One night, I noticed a strange oval papery bit on the wall near the ceiling of the bedroom in which I was sleeping. On further investigation, there were half a dozen of these tiny papery bits on the walls of this rarely-used room; they were very small, less than a centimeter long, but they all looked roughly alike. I picked a couple of examples that I could reach and threw them away; they just looked like clumps of greyish linty fibers. 

Then, another evening, I happened to look at one of these little mysteries on the wall as I walked past, when I saw a tiny black thread emerge from the top end, stretch a tiny distance upward, and then drag its tiny linty case up a miniscule scootch closer to the ceiling. Of course, I was horrified, and I mean really horrified in a horror-movie way. For a moment, I thought I was losing my mind, that I was hallucinating. When I calmed myself down enough to google, I realized, with a different but still significant horror, that these things were alive.

They’re the larvae of something called case-bearing clothes moths, and they’re found all over the world. The little papery bit is the “case” the larva builds around itself like a larva-sized sleeping bag. They feed on the detritus of human homes: hair, carpets, upholstery, wool, even cobwebs. The case is not made by the larva, like a spider spins a web; the larva builds the case from the same household remnants it consumes to survive. It eats a bit of wool, it also takes a bit of wool for its cozy home. It eats some hair, it takes some hair to carry with it. After a few months, it spins a cocoon and eventually emerges as a small silvery moth which flitters annoyingly around the house for awhile. Outside, they often live in birds’ nests, where they feast on feathers, and make featherbeds for their cases.

Each of us carries with us the remnants of everything we’ve done, everywhere we’ve been, every relationship, past and current. Each of us wraps ourselves in these memories because they provide us with self-knowledge. I know I will eventually find a job that I love; I know I will rediscover my energy and enthusiasm for my own expertise, but hopefully with a new balance that also leaves room for me to be a person outside of working. I know all of this because I can look back on prior experiences where everything worked out for the best, in the end, even when the future looked blank and impossible from my current vantage point. 

When I say nothing lasts forever and everything dies, I mean that as an expression of optimism. Nothing lasts forever, which means even the most challenging seasons will eventually change. Everything dies, which means I will not feel this way forever, because I won’t feel any one way forever. And through all of it, I am wrapped in a sleeping bag composed of the substance of all of my experiences. I am larva transforming into chrysalis metamorphosing into moth – or butterfly, if that feels more poetic to you – but I’m never done, I just wind up back at the beginning again, a tiny new creature building my life afresh, drawing comfort and safety from the pieces left around from the last time I went through this process.

That, somehow, doesn’t seem so scary, or so depressing. It seems like a life well explored, and time well spent.

Why haven’t I been writing? Turns out I am writing. It just isn’t the kind of writing that happens with a keyboard or a pen. I’m always writing. And for today, I’m just happening to put it down in this newsletter for you to read.