To Everything There is a Season
It was pouring rain when I woke with a lurch. It’s Friday. Friday.
Monday, I started an essay about Russian psyop. Analysis is my emotional comfort zone. It’s intellectual. Objective. A break from the months of rage and despair that began around the time of the fall rains, last October 7th.
Except it wasn’t. As I traced Russia’s fact-free themes about 2022 Ukraine (evil neo-Nazi regime committing atrocities and bent on genocide) back through pre-invasion rhetoric about 2008 Georgia (evil neo-Nazi regime committing atrocities and bent on genocide) I found allegations — even language — that felt chillingly familiar.
I realized my objective, intellectual essay was anything but. Antisemitic propaganda is one of Russia’s most successful exports — the Protocols of the Elders of Zion remains relevant today — and I have a lot more research to do.
A different kind of essay, then.
In 2016, I wrote about generational feminism and Hillary Clinton. That went internationally viral, racking up tens of thousands of shares with comments in languages I couldn’t read. I experienced the intoxicating addiction that is social media relevance. Then the cool local alt paper picked it up.
I was hooked.
Surrounded by journalists and authors, I’d always said I was grateful for a lazy muse. Professional writing is painful. You have to finish things. Worse, you have to start things. Unburdened by those requirements, I wrote only when I couldn’t chase the swarming ideas out of my brain any other way. I’d clamber into my head with an industrial flashlight and they’d scurry away amid the clatter of my keyboard. Pinned into words, most of those notions evaporated once excised. Only a few persist today.
But the first hit’s free, and in 2016 I created a Medium account to permanently host a copy of “Feminists of a Certain Age.” [1] One week later, I wrote a follow-up essay designed to bridge the widening gap between Clinton and Sanders supporters.
A year passed before I shared another essay, and then six months later the muse rolled up in her VW microbus, windburned and talking a mile a minute. She has ADHD the way I did when I was twenty-two, before a world outside myself existed. Two grown children later I’m tired and self-aware, but I look forward to her visits the way your kids anticipate their doting childless aunt’s bustling arrival.
In one long day, I wrote a fairy tale about my real life. Far from my most successful piece, that essay is too long and I see the flaws now, but writing it coalesced the phantasms in my head. The haunting stopped. It still makes me cry. It’s perfect for me. [2]
The most useful essays I write distill complex issues into comprehensible insights. Years of academics, along with my ADHD brain, sharpened a knack for resolving disparate pieces into focus. Many of you joined me in the early COVID years for precisely those essays.
What I ache for, though, is a bit of the eldritch. The writing I love plays at the edges of perception. I want you to descry fields of mist and moonlight, revealing bare glimpses of… something. I can’t tell you what. It’s your something out there on the moor, not mine.
What I choose to write is neither of those things. In August 2018, at a point of significant despair, I wrote “Hope is a Task With Feathers,” [3] because I needed to hear it. It turned out, so did a lot of you. Around the same time I encountered the Hopepunk genre, and decided to spend the rest of my life encouraging people to take one more step. Only the cumulative effect of all our actions can pull us through the epochal crises we face. Mundane small steps compose those actions.
There’s just one problem. My muse isn’t a free love, bell bottom-wearing hippy girl distributing flowers and hope. She’s more of a Lilith: a moody creature with curves and claws, prone to self-indulgence and dangerous wrath. When I warned her we’ve been writing dark, cold, painful things since October 7th, and for our own mental health we need to channel some hope, she stormed out, screaming over her shoulder that this time I’m on my own.
If I really had been, that Russian interference essay would be finished.
Trying a different tactic, I wheedled. I told her that if she wants attention — and she does — she’s going to have to throw a few carrots in with the switches. She’s sulking now. How many times did I edit out the raging fury these past months as the winter rains fell? If she’d had her way, our voice would be raw from screaming.
So here I sit, with an unfinished essay about Russian disinformation, a self-imposed deadline and a recalcitrant muse, doing the least creative thing a writer can do: writing about writers writing. I’m not supposed to but muse is another word for id, and right now I’m drowning in rage and despair. It didn’t start October 7th with the winter rains, though that’s the day it took me over.
It began gathering in 2015, as I watched the Democratic establishment choose a winner before the race began, and coalesced in 2016 when the backlash elected an abysmally unqualified, would-be dictator over a competent, ethical woman who won the popular vote. It intensified in 2020 when initial COVID denial calcified, rather than yielding to blatant evidence. For a while I found hope in the coalition of fact-checkers avidly spreading truth, but few of those allies wear the masks they advocated for today, even as COVID continues to maim and kill.
In 2018 I set this task for my writing: to bring hope. I have written thousands of words extolling the necessity of beating back despair with white-knuckled optimism. I have insisted that my cohort fight for our children’s future. I have exhorted you to take one more step, and then another, on even the off-chance that a path exists.
Today, seeking for fluffy white clouds of hope, I found only my grim determination not to be a hypocrite. Good enough. I’ll stand back up, and try again next week.
Last night was the solstice. Today, the sun stands still.
Tomorrow comes the light.
[1] https://medium.com/@shasta_willson/feminists-of-a-certain-age-d69c109d0b6b
[2] https://medium.com/@shasta_willson/a-real-fairy-tale-5b15bdc68640
[3] https://medium.com/@shasta_willson/hope-is-a-task-with-feathers-46e333884879