See?
Labor: domestic, unseen, and creative.
I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write... and you know it's a funny thing about housecleaning... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectabilty) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she "should" be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
It’s 11:00 AM and I can feel each and every one of the bones in my legs. This is a regular occurrence. Wake up and immediately burn out. I’ve been up since 6:00, 6:45-ish, and the day has already dissipated before me. I will never complain about having my own house to live in, but I will always comment on what it is like to be a woman in it. At all times, there is a FALLING ROCKS sign above my head, like that thing that Sims have above theirs, except there are no rocks. There are just tasks. Dishes to wash, laundry to fold. My man is beautiful and smart and kind and does all that he can, but we regularly bicker because, as he puts it, he can’t see what’s wrong. What’s wrong with the green sludge blooming in the sink drain, with the full hamper in the corner of our room, with the ants on our counter and the bread crumbs on which they feed. Now, before you say it, know that I’ve already thought it, and that my therapist has already said it. A part of me is still as I was at 12 years old. A blue haired, ax-swinging feminist. (Uninhibited internet access, what else is there to say.) This is why I am a WGSS minor and have a Substack. No keystroke is smoother than that which spells out therapy speak. Weaponized incompetence. Gender roles. Domestic labor. Or, as my mother jokingly corrected me: unseen labor. My man is beautiful and smart and kind, and he does all he can. Meaning: all that he can see.
I will tell you right now: if you don’t want to drive yourself insane, and would like to not end up totally alone, you better learn that visibility is subjective. And you better learn it quick. Explaining what you want is a lot harder than just going off about male incompetence. (Which is very real, don’t get me wrong, but calling something by a name does not necessarily make it that, just as naming an issue does not resolve it.) But it’s also a lot easier than sliding down the nail-spiked rabbit hole of, Am I asking for too much? Because you’re not asking for too much. You’re just not asking for it.
But I digress. I started with this type of labor because I thought it’d be a good way of getting into the other — a type of labor I’ve dubbed secondary, only because the first is so all-consuming. This second type of labor is creative labor. Or, more specifically, the labor of writing. And here’s my issue: I’ve been writing a book for…three years? Four years? And now I want to start over completely. But there’s another issue: I started writing a short story in December, and am very close to finishing it, but it feels like something I could step inside of and live in forever. But there’s also this other issue: writing doesn’t feel like it used to. Circling back to my 12 year old self, I used to write automatically. Some would even say compulsively. It was a near spiritual experience: I’d start writing after dinner, and stay up until 2:00, maybe 3:00 AM. That was also around the time that my dad, if he was on middle shift, would get home from work. Sometimes, he would peek his head in the door, smile at me, and ask, Working? It is not unique for a woman, particularly an eldest daughter, to say that when even her father can see the value of what she is doing, can see that it brings her joy, it is undoubtedly her life force. It’s not unique, but it needs to be said.
I know that writing is my what — my life force, my forever knot. But I still don’t know my how.
What it all boils down to is this: I want to write, but I refuse to give myself time. I already pulled the fast track, kid genius stunt. I self-published a book that, at 14, was marvelous, but at 22, going on 23, is an absolute catastrophe. I learned my lesson, and now, I refuse to rush. I cannot work under stress, at least not creatively. I cannot use what little time I have, what little time I am willing to give myself, to the max. If I only have an hour, I will spend that hour writing one paragraph. This is probably why I almost off myself every semester. All writing is art. And art takes time that I either don’t have, or won’t give myself.
And why won’t I give myself time? Well, because.
Because everything else comes first. Here again is that first type of labor, the FALLING ROCKS kind. I am sitting on the sofa in my living room as I write this. Below me, there is a load of wet wash waiting to be moved to the dryer, which means there is also a load of dry wash in the dryer waiting to be folded. Out of view, there is a literal dishwasher sitting in the hallway. It’s there because we’re painting our office. Which, by the way, is a total mess. There’s tape on the walls, paint rollers on the floor. Light switch covers and their tiny, stupid screws stacked on top of all the junk we covered up with drop cloths, because we were too lazy to move it out. And what we were compelled to move is, of course, scattered down the hall and around our bedroom.
It feels like we just moved again. So, to translate, it feels like I am seeing a lot of the wrong things.
Also, a commercial for diapers just played on the TV. To hear the sound of a baby crying, right now, in this context, is like hearing a siren for a nuclear blast. My hair is standing on end. I am envisioning the death of the world — which, as far as I can see, is my world. A world covered in dirt, dust, and dampness. A world like my house.