mic check

time is an illusion, ya know?

Ahem. Hmph. Hmm.

Is this thing on?

Oh…hi. It’s been a minute since I shared the teaser of this little venture. I’m terribly sorry for my disappearance, but you see, I’ve been on a hero’s journey. I tried to refuse the call, but they wouldn’t let me.

…and if I were in full fighting form, I would carry this theme all the way through this post, with a clever narrative, and pithy asides about Joseph Campbell and making one’s own mythology, and some sort of real emotional kicker at the end. But…I’m not. In fighting form, I mean. I’m very much still wandering out of a cave of burnout and health struggles, blinking at the sky, wondering what the hell happened to the last year of my life. Words that once flowed to me so easily now appear hazy in the mist, hovering just beyond my grasp so that when I reach out for them through tendrils of brain fog, I find nothing but the ghost of a thought dissipating into the air. It is frustrating as fuck.

But hey. Best intentions, right?

I set this Substack up in the final hours of a pandemic-era fanfic that had come to consume my life, hoping that this would be a way to force myself to keep writing while I took a break from all that, and, just as importantly, to keep sharing my writing — something I have historically struggled to do. I am a raging perfectionist with a very mean inner critic, but I am also deeply susceptible to the power of deadlines. So I told myself that if I made a public commitment to doing this thing, then I would have the requisite pressure needed for my dopamine-starved brain to do the damn thing.

I knew I was burnt out, but I thought I understood burnout. I’ve been burnt out before. It’s an occupational hazard of living in a body that has every sense ratcheted up to one hundred all the time. I convinced myself that if I constructed just the right walls for my labyrinth of obligation and productivity, I could wend my way through this maze and follow a golden thread to the other end of recovery.

Reader, I was wrong.

But on the plus side, I did feel super guilty about the Substack every single day. So at least there’s that. (It’s romantic! I was thinking of you!)

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I should probably at this point confess that this sort of maneuver is not atypical for me. I have always had a fairly combative relationship with my own mind. Simply put, my brain and I duke it out a lot. I have a history of pushing myself unprepared into uncomfortable and/or ridiculous situations just to prove that, you know, I can. For example, I once got into an argument with myself over whether or not I was capable of hiking the West Highland Way, a 96-mile hike through Scotland stretching from Milngavie to Fort William.

The argument went something like this:

Me: Who are you kidding? You are twenty-seven years old, you’ve no money and no prospects, and — incidentally — you haven’t gone on a proper hike since you were a Girl Scout. You’re going to walk a hundred miles? On your own? You?

Also me: I am Youthful and Determined and my feet have never betrayed me! And also I really don’t want to go to this work event that is conveniently scheduled for the week of my potential hike. I can do this!

Me: …why, though?

Also me: Whimsy! Delight! And because it occurred to me that someone out there might think that I can’t do it, and I have to prove them wrong!

Me: No one thinks that, because no one spends any time thinking about whether or not you can hike, because you don’t hike. That’s not a thing that you do.

Also me: But I might!

Me: You don’t even own a pair of hiking boots.

Also me: I can fix that!

To understand what happened next, dear reader, I need you to please imagine a scrawny noodle of a woman walking into her local REI with the sort of sunken eyes that scream, “I’m haunted by the consequences of my own choices,” desperately hailing the first salesperson she can find — let’s call him Frank — fixing Frank with a gaze befitting the intensity of her intentions, and saying in the fearful but determined voice of one about to spend a lot of money on hiking gear: “Fuck me up, Frank.”

Okay, that didn’t happen, but it’s what was in my heart.

What did happen was that I spilled said heart out to dear Frank, confessed my absolute inadequacy for the task at hand, explained that I had already booked everything, there was no backing out now, and could he please, please, oh god, please fix this situation with a little ritual exchange of money for goods?

Frank obliged, and about an hour or so later, I was the proud and anxious owner of a new pair of hiking boots, a backpack, the Most Expensive Pair of Socks I’ve Ever Owned, a miscellany of other accouterments I can no longer recall, and a set of walking poles that Frank insisted I simply must have. (I trusted Frank with my life. He could’ve sold me anything, probably. What’s that, Frank? Every savvy hiker carries their own mini blender for mid-hike smoothies? Sure! I’ll take two!)

I walked out of that REI significantly poorer but rich with a sense of indomitable destiny — I can do this! I have the shoes! — and then, a few months later, I walked across Scotland, accompanied by only my wits, my REI haul, a mild knee injury, and a persistent internal chorus of oh god, oh god, what have I done?

But I digress.

The point is…the point is…I’m pretty sure there was a point. No, I know there was, I can feel it in there, poking around all pointy-like. See, this is what I mean, with the fog and the words and the Suffering™. Let’s just pretend that I said something insightful about…I don’t know…hiking and the critical act of putting one foot in front of the other — blah, blah, something, something — and move on. Let’s move on.

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I took a break here to make a cup of tea, do a little deep breathing, and retreat to the place I always go when the words start to frustrate me: my journals. I’ve never been much of a diarist, but I do keep a fairly intense collection of everything I’ve ever thought, written, or saved: Passages from books that moved me, screenshots of texts with friends, snippets of prose that floated into my brain on my morning commute, that sort of thing. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, and the result is simultaneously sprawling, unwieldy, insane…and obsessively organized. I won’t go into the details of that system (because I’m a little embarrassed about it), but let’s just say I decided to see what a dozen previous versions of Chloë might have had to say about writing, burnout, or — for the hell of it — hiking.

What I found feels like a sly wink from the past, as though I was always meant to find this, to neatly tie up this admittedly rather rambling introductory Substack post. It was a text message that I’d written out in my notes app, which is why it ended up here. I don’t know who it was sent to as I oh-so-helpfully didn’t make note of that. It was just filed as “Text message to friend worried she’d peaked creatively.” (I know, I know. Obsessive.)

Here’s what it said:

Hmm. I am not so sure about the word “peaked.” Seems like a sneaky way of being hard on yourself. But if we want to look at the creative life through the lens of that metaphor, and one’s creative output is a mountain to climb, always reaching higher and higher — then an eventual descent is inevitable. Mountains don’t go up forever. But the good news: Mountains come in ranges. Take care of your feet, bandage up those blisters, drink lots of water, be gentle and rest when needed, and after a long, slow and steady plod, you will feel the earth start to incline again…and up we go to the next summit.

Thanks, past Chloë. I knew there was a metaphor in there somewhere.

Okay, this has gotten a bit long, so I will end with a quick confession before I sign off for the night: I don’t know what I’m doing. At all. I don’t know what to call this newsletter, I still don’t really know how Substack works. I don’t even know what I’m going to eat for dinner tonight, and it’s almost 10pm. But as this remarkably shitty year comes to a close, I feel in my bones the tug to write again, and that in itself is unspeakably exciting to me. I don’t know exactly what this project is going to look like, what I’m even trying to accomplish here…but I do know that the only thing I can do — that any of us can do, really — is just another iteration of what I’ve been doing for a year and a half through this long, slow and steady plod: I’m going to try.

So…up we go?

it’s a metaphor, damn it.

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