Healing Theory (Entry #1)

Finding my "why" as a writer amidst comparison culture

Nov 27, 2024

“Diary of a Wet Cloud Series,” 2015, from The Gloomy Girl Variety Show: A Memoir

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I have been having a hard time. After getting burned out by the nonprofit and consulting world, I went back to school. While I may be a high achiever despite my limitations—my chronic illness, my Fibromyalgia, my depression—it is still excruciatingly difficult. I’ve always been an artist and thinker; I consider these key fixtures of my identity. But after my MFA in Creative Writing, I was faced with the capitalism of the real world. I no longer had an institution to support my craft: the project of understanding myself and my place in the world. Yes, I used writing as a form of therapy. But that does not mean it was without rigorous intellectual thought. Despite being baked in the whiteness and conservatism that is Oxford, OH, my MFA was a wonderful time in my life. Having dealt with depression during my undergrad, I came out with some beautiful friendships that I still treasure nearly 10 years later…friendships I could count on one hand. I missed my opportunity to connect with other queer Black and African women because I was holed up in my room, dirty dishes everywhere. All I’ve been looking for my whole life is connection and belonging with others whose experiences mirrored my own. I found some of that in my MFA; my cohort and I shared a passion for writing to the point where we were all willing to make $15,000 a year to dedicate ourselves to a writing life. It was a sacred time, a time in which I barely used social media. I was either in my bed with my laptop open to Google Docs, or with that same laptop in a coffee shop or library.

In the evenings after workshops, I’d be at the local dive bar with my friends, drinking my $5 gin and soda while talking about writing. My whole life revolved around writing. I spent time with myself on the page for two years. It was a lovely time, before the pressures of the publishing world, before trying to sustain my writing practice while working a full-time job to pay the bills. Fast forward to post-grad school and I got a job at a nonprofit mentorship program as a manager (they promoted me to Director after a year). Although it brought me closer to forming the community and I met others whose experiences mirrored my own, we were short-staffed to a dire extent. I was burnt out to a crisp, developing high blood pressure, watching my blood sugar shoot up. I sobbed in the bath tub trying to soak away the pain from my vibrating muscles. I binge ate addictive food. I developed an eating disorder. I blew money on impulse buys to feel better. Later, I got unceremoniously fired in one of those infamous pandemic era “restructures.” It started with a cryptic corporate email on a Friday morning, followed by a calendar invite 30 minutes later, ending with me crying to the CEO while my teammates looked for answers. I had given my all and then some only to be dismissed.

The burnout followed me to my next job until I could no longer push myself. I quit, taking on adjuncting and unstable consulting gigs while my partner recovered from a bone marrow transplant. Almost a year after quitting my job, I started a PhD program in Creative Writing, hoping to rekindle the solitude of the writing life again. But I am now 30 years old and my life is very different now. I live with my partner, I have a dog, I’m on social media way too much after becoming accustomed to the virtual retreat while splayed out on the couch for my “5-9 after my 9-5,” and my book is being published soon. I have way more distractions and many more pressures.

Publishing has been a mind-fuck. Part of that is what my therapist jokingly calls “pulling a Freda,” focusing on all of the existential questions on the future instead of remaining in the present. There’s so much talk of making the lead-up to my publication count—getting press, publishing essays in high-profile magazines, being on this podcast or that list or getting that starred review or hitting this many Goodreads and Amazon reviews—it’s too much. Stress has led to Fibromyalgia flare-ups, which has only allowed me to do the bare minimum in all aspects of my life. I feel like if I don’t get a certain amount of visibility, I’ll never sell enough books. That isn’t just about vanity or the measures of success many writers hold themselves to, or jealousy of other famous writers; this is the material conditions of having to make money to maintain the space to write.

Instead of enjoying my return to a writing life through my PhD, I’ve been worried about what happens after. Partly, it’s my immigrant drive to achieve. But also I’m contemplating what I want for my life post-burnout and—since the election—the real-life dangers of writing critically about being a Black woman in America during the rise of fascism. Plainly, it sucks. I had the opportunity to meet

temi lasade

, a brilliant researcher on Black women’s digital intimacies, and we talked about wishing we could just be a yoga teacher on an island somewhere. I’d love to not have a drive to write honestly about my experience of being a Black woman in America. But I’ve been drawn to art and writing about this since I was at least 17 in college, trying to make sense of myself and my experiences as a young adult away from my family for the first time. So, sometimes begrudgingly, I continue. The project now is learning how to sustain myself financially in order to make space for my sadness, because it needs to go somewhere.

All of this is a long-winded way of providing context for how I’m showing up on the page today. I had a restorative morning talking about writing with other like-minded Black femmes in

Zeba Blay

’s Pop Culture is Personal class. I can’t recommend it enough. Everyone I’ve encountered through this are beautiful souls. We talked a lot about the book, Black Women Writers At Work, and our experiences being Black women writers during the attention economy.

As I’ve continued to look for an escape through reading, my research rabbit hole led me to explorations around autotheory, specifically in the work of

Lauren Khan (née Fournier)

, Teresa Carmody, Arianne Zwartjes, and ree botts. Particularly, “Sick Women, Sad Girls and Selfie Theory,” and reelaviolette botts-ward’s “Transmedial Autotheories / Healing at Home: On Self-Making and Black Girl Interiors.” Through these works, I started thinking about autotheory as a documentation of a life as the writer processes living it. I started thinking about how a body of work is a body, the archive is a living, breathing, narrative of a life. When I’m dead and gone, all that’s left will be my words. And hopefully, the words will be there for another uncertain Black girl to find. Through the bodies of work of other Black women writers, I reach out to hold the archive’s hand and now I can feel the wrinkles on Audre Lorde’s palm. I can experience our shared intimacy. Traveling through histories, through language we exist together and she holds me close.

I don’t think I’ll ever lose that desire for closeness. And the only way I have been able to make space in my life for this particular kind of life-affirming intimacy is by creating stillness. My brain has been anything but still. My nervous system is all kinds of dysregulated. And I’ve been letting the pressures of perfectionism from this experience of publishing a first book and the anxiety of plotting how I can financially afford to keep doing it, now under the return of an administration that is anything but life-affirming. There’s something a little embarrassing about publicly trying hard at something, especially the easily mocked statement, “I’m a writer,” at the bar standing next to a Vice President, while dealing with imposter syndrome from not having enough success. I know I’m not alone in this. But like I said—plainly, it sucks.

So I am writing this because Zeba said, “I think every writer should have a manifesto for why they write,” as we discussed Jessica Lynne’s “Finding Intimacy within Black Feminist Criticism,” where she reflects on the words of Barbara Smith in “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism,” where Smith is citing the work of other Black feminists. Another writer friend, Cinelle Barnes, describes writing that engages with the ideas of other writers as a dinner party. And that has been true of all of my favorite writing by Black women—certainly genre convention of Black feminist thought—I reach back in time to hold Lucille Clifton’s hand and I reach forward in time to hold a new writer’s hand, my physical body now just a memory.

Recently, I changed the accessibility settings on all of my devices, downloaded a minimalist phone theme, talked to my partner about not wanting to be on social media as much, and put my phone on ‘do not disturb’ except for my close family and friends. It might be a little extreme, but my goal is to create stillness again. The quiet time needed before the dinner party guests arrive. I know that if I keep thinking about success and its measurements, doomscrolling and overconsuming the news, and being overstimulated by my Instagram feed—I will remain disconnected from why I started writing in the first place. For now, I will hunker down to my writing life. Enjoying the five years of funding just to write and go to school, afforded to me through the PhD. Saving ruminating on the future for later. Though of course, I’ll probably “pull a Freda,” along the way.

Still, I’ll return to other Black writers, to this piece of writing, to my own body of work, to my physical copy of Gloomy Girl—and I’ll hold her close.

The Gloomy Girl Variety Show with Freda Epum

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