through catastrophe comes change, whether you want it or not. either you choose to change or live with the changes that other people will impose on you. and they will. look at today’s date, 9/11. everything changed six years ago. writing became utterly meaningless in the face of cracked fate, brutal determination and sanctified hopelessness.
i was re-orientated and re-directed. i was horrified and struck bone scared. i was already bitter with graduate school and this was the tipping point. i was done with it. i decided after the towers fell that the world was going mad and there was no way i could write my way through it. but i could live, i could provide, and i chose that, i chose to leave the world, and start some other life that i could keep manageable and safe.
here we are six years later. i do not feel any safer, with one child and yet another on the way. but i’m writing again. and it matters. it matters for me to be in the world like this, with the world like this, because the world has continued to be this way. it wasn’t the world that had changed, it was me finding a new fear that i could not, and did not want to, understand.
and here i am now, finding myself yet anew, as if with a different set of eyes, back at it again, back to the grind, because the grind fucking matters. it was always a problem with scale, always too worried about the scale of it. instead of focusing on the work. it’s the work that does the work, whether it’s only on myself or the random hit from amsterdam. it doesn’t matter.
just get the work done, no matter the cost, the scale, or even the fear, especially in the face of fear.