What is it like to be alive right now?

Around this time last year, literally, I was grappling with learning how to follow my creative impulses without getting caught up in both my own ego, and the dread of the hustle.

Guess what? I figured it out!

JUST KIDDING.

But the beginning of a year feels like a fine time to pause and look at where things are at, what got done, what needs work. I’ve got two projects that have been slowly simmering for years—one, a podcast about self-worth; the other, an anthology of stories about grandmothers. I’m a slow, slow producer for a whole bunch of reasons, which I’ve finally started to accept, but I also don’t want to let things slip out of my grip. Hence the self-assessment call.

I was frustrated that I didn’t get more concrete work done on either project when I looked at 2024. Then I sort of reviewed, month by month, what else was going on in my life and how my projects got sidelined. I saw pretty clearly and remembered viscerally, I had a lot going on last year! It’s understandable that I didn’t have a ton of space to really devote to these projects, which require a level of brain-use that I’m just not capable of sometimes. And at the same time, there was this shockingly gentle voice that popped up and said, “Life is always gonna life, you can work around it, too.” I’m reminded of my friend Elizabeth, a brilliant playwright who reminds me regularly that even 15 minutes of writing is meaningful. Release the pressure and shame!

I’ve also been working through the muck of this national political moment and whole-world political moment. After I got laid off from one of my clients (don’t worry,

Jim Hightower

didn’t finally get sick of me after 20 years), I did a bunch of volunteer work during the summer and fall, working on organizing rural communities to vote as left as their ballots would allow them to, heh. In the aftermath, I had been feeling a little sheepish about returning to my passion projects. Are these really what this moment is demanding?!

I write a letter to myself every new year using FutureMe, and this year’s reminded me that I went on a walk with my friend Kat in early January a year ago. I wrote about that conversation in part here, but one part popped back into my head a few days ago: she talked about working on certain projects not because they’ll get a million downloads, but more as an effort to document this moment in time from her/her team’s perspective. What is it like to be alive right now?

Last week, my cousin Willow took me to see “Suffs” before it closed on Broadway. It’s a fabulous musical about the suffragists of the 1913-1920 era, working to get women liberated from being forbidden from voting. (I’m phrasing it this way very much on purpose: I hate when people say women “won” the right to vote or worse, were “given” the right to vote. No.) I considered myself a Learned Feminist™, but I did not know about the very radical people and actions that were happening during that time. I’d pictured them all as the fancy ladies with the big hats, saying, “Let mother vote!” How wrong I was: Thank goodness someone told more of the stories of what it was like to be alive right then, because it helped me feel more connected to the long march of progress, and less despondent about where we find ourselves right now.

That made me think about visiting the Woody Guthrie center with Hightower last year, and how surprised I was to see this whole collection of radical work by Woody and many others that came with and after him. Again, I knew about Woody Guthrie and the power of radical folk music, but also, some of Woody’s drawings could be posted in Matt Wuerker’s political cartoon roundup today. He documented what was happening then, so we’d know we weren’t alone now.

Then I got an email from the best literary agent in the world today,

Anna Sproul-Latimer

. She pulled this quote from Jimmy Carter’s letter that’s included in the Voyager craft, invoking it as the best writing advice of all time. I started to cry.

What we document will hopefully live into the future. I used to think that was a function of ego; maybe it is, but maybe it’s also to help the future feel less alone. Maybe it’s not so silly to be working on my little projects right now, then. Heh.

How’s your January going?

xoxox
dz

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PS—Some other people I love have written posts recently that have resonated with me. Here’s a few:

Are we making art and stories or are we performing rites and rituals?

Pretty good year

Sitting with uncertainty