On feeling you have nothing left to offer.
Being artistically drained and giving who you are now a chance.
I once heard a joke on a storytelling podcast that, at some point, you reach an age where you stop hating all of your past work. That point, however, is, unfortunately, when you realize that all of your best work is already behind you.
It’s a great gag. But I can not relate. Every time I read my old stuff, I correctly think, “Man, this nigga is spittin’.” And when I think about my future stuff, it’s, “Hell yeah. That guy? One of the best to ever do it.” It’s an unabashed self-belief in my past and future. The current me is the person I tend to have the most issues with. One thing I don’t like about the guy is that he-I-me-we tends to worry about burning up great lines and scene ideas when they instead could be used for a better future project.
In the years I edited the essays of college students, I often sensed a hesitancy in them from using some of their better ideas for a particular story. While there were many factors for each case, the underlying sense I received was the worry that each of us has a finite tank of usable thoughts for our art.
I guided each student through this, but all the while, I too have been guilty of the same fear. I have worried before that if I spend the few incredible insights and stories of my life, then I shall be but a husk, forced to sit with the fact that I used my good ideas before I had the confluence of magical things that would have made them the most appreciated and me the most loved.
There is merit to the idea that some concepts need time to grow. We may attempt to get at an idea, only to realize that we have yet to find the point we wish to make with it. Then, only through friction and time can we discover what it is we had always wanted to say. But this is not the same thing as hiding away our cherished thoughts—waiting to release them only on some imagined promised day.
Author Annie Dillard says, “The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.”
“Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
As much of a fan I am of my past work, I often mourn the ashes of thoughts left unshared.
In my late teens and early 20s, I was a political speaker for candidates and causes in my hometown, Austin, TX. I was desperately trying to make sense of our consistently deteriorating political reality in the States. I wrote with passion and fire, and even if I don’t agree with everything I wrote back then, it was always honest and true to me. What gets me to this day, though, is that one of the best lines I ever wrote came from that version of me, but it is now sitting unattended in an essay draft. Only being trotted out here for the sake of this point.
When I was still in college, every news headline dug into me like a sickle into a carcass. I was a kid who believed in superheroes and thought that I alone could lift us from every curse and political evil of the world. I cared a lot, I still do. But the weight of my self-assigned role crushed me. I tried to write through the jostling mash of needles in my heart, and to that consequence, I put to words that: “The principled die young, and I’m mad at myself for not being dead yet.”
Whenever I do go back to shape that essay, that line and many others are not exactly honest thoughts to me anymore. Today, I can explore what my distance from those thoughts means. But I also wish I had published that essay when I wrote it—because I will never be able to publish that line as the scared kid who put it together. The young me who was feeling so fiercely those existential thoughts, was alive and worthy of having his ideas shared. He was the one most in need of connection. That scared kid could have used his time in the sun—reaching people in the way only the current can.
It’s easy to feel like you have only so much to offer when you, respectfully, haven’t been through much. It can feel like your tank is just these scant few things. But I do believe us to be abundant, and there’s nothing I feel more firmly about than the great potential for depth and insight in every single person.
The writer
wrote a piece called, “HOW TO WRITE BETTER STORIES IN 4 EASY STEPS.” He wrote about a paragraph of explanation for his first two points, 1) Write something every day and 2) Capture your ideas.But then for his third point, 3) Have life-changing experiences, McKeany spent the next 1600 words, 4-5 pages, describing all the major events in his life: from having a happy childhood, fathering a daughter, and then to seeing the brutal fragility of life when his own father passed away from cancer.
(The fourth point is to not use semi-colons.)
Even folks who find themselves stuck in routine will inevitably encounter new joys and losses as the world turns around them. The more life you are around and art you experience, the more you have to reflect on and process.
It’s the reason a lot of art comes out of walkable major metropolitan areas where you can’t go more than 2 minutes without seeing someone throw a pizza at a pigeon or overhear an argument where one lover kicks the other out of their apartment. The tank may empty, but it constantly fills. For better and for worse. Again, again, and again.
André Aciman once wrote about how memoirists use the conventions of literature more so than those of history. Our memories are not perfect film reels we can playback. No. Instead, to explain what we wish to say, we reconstruct memories in our minds and fit our experiences into new contexts. Each time. Every time.
In essay writing, you can talk about the same shit again and again. 10 years from now, that balloon you watched fly into a powerline in a Shady Hollow parking lot may no longer symbolize the destruction of your youth. It may instead be the moment where your obsession with latex began.
It’s not better or worse. It’s just different. So use it now. Use it again, later, experience more life, and then forget any of it ever happened at all.
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That’s all for this week. Shout out to those joining us from a QR code on a flier somewhere in the great city of Austin, Texas. Y’all real for that one. More soon. Also go read that piece I linked earlier. My brief summary contains the faintest fraction of what that piece has to offer.
More words to read!
Loved this read!!
Thank you for this one! I felt it for sure as I'm just going through feeling as though I have nothing to offer so much lately and my husband just shakes his head and tells me I'm a liar. Also, fellow Austinite, hi!