An Open Letter To Everything I Didn’t Do Last Year
But I did Bread Loaf! Is that "enough?"
Dear Everything I Didn’t Do Last Year,
Right now I’m looking out at country hayfields from the deck of a rented room, geese honk their joy across the sky, the air is chilly and dry in the way of high deserts, and all I can think about is everything I didn’t “get done” in 2023.
I am in my hometown of Gardnerville, Nevada for the holidays. It’s the winter solstice as I write this. As mentioned before, I’m not one to make New Year’s resolutions, thus I give myself until Imbolc (Feb 1) to reflect, set goals, and promise myself I’ll stop with the gluten / alcohol / doomscrolling / whathaveyou.
But the feeling of not-enough-ness is as strong as the coffee I’m drinking right now (made by Aeropress, btw, which I’m obsessed with since becoming a full time nomad (I’m doing that now, btw x 2).
……. Hi. Let it be known I stopped writing at the above point. That’s as far as I got on the solstice. Just a little writer behind-the-scenes for ya. Sometimes it’s like that. Strong start! Then: life.
Now it is January. The holidays were: niece and nephew time, a Bloody Mary in Virginia City1 followed by a warehouse party in Reno (with Daft Punk as the DJ2), a million other moments, then Santa Barbara for a flurry of good and lovely times leading up to my father’s wedding which was good and lovely.
As long as I’m hella sidetracked, for those of you who’ve been asking how you can work with me3, I’d excited to share: I’m teaching a writing workshop Saturday, February 3rd for the grand community over at Trust and Travel!
It’s one day only (low commitment!) and it’s called Great Beginnings: Create Work That Ignites the Page From The Very First Line.
Back to the feeling of not-enough-ness, and Everything I Didn’t Do Last Year.
Here’s the thing: I did a LOT in 2023.
🤩 I had my first original TV pilot optioned. Like, actually got money for it and we’re attaching an amazing director and sooner than later we’ll be pitching it to networks and so help my gawd if/when it sells I’ll get into the WGA and be a real live professional Hollywood writer. The show is an erotic thriller about sex, stalkers and skiing.
🤠 In the summer we moved out of our cabin in the sky, put everything in storage, and have been house + pet sitting digital nomads ever since (if you’re going out of town and need someone to watch your fur baby - hmu!).
🙏 The week before we moved, I decided to shoot a short film script I’d been kicking around for months in the cabin (if you’ve seen me and MBB’s feature Moon Manor, or our short before that Going Home, or my short before that Johnny and the Scams, you know I love to use the house I live in as a set (to all the landlords who never found out, bless you)). My preternaturally talented DP friend Ryan DeFranco (whose Sundance short film TROY recently got picked up by The New Yorker), hopped on a plane from NYC to shoot it with me, and thus my examination of romance novelists, avatars, and artistic relevance was born. The short is called I AM SILKY BUTTERSTONE and will soon be coming to a laptop near you.
The day after we wrapped the film, I packed up my entire life.
The day after that, the movers came (and inexplicably packed the leftover crafty from the shoot into a box which means there are bagels growing seismic mold somewhere in our storage unit).
The day after the movers, I got on a plane to Brazil.
The day after arriving in Rio, I broke out in delayed stress hives.
And that is when I realized:
even though I can push myself to physical extremes — something I’ve always weirdly enjoyed doing (see my misspent early 20s at raves, my well-spent late 20s in ayahuasca ceremonies, all training ground for the current profession of film director which often requires ungodly physical stamina) — it doesn’t mean I should.
🙃 I continued writing my first book for the third time. Because it’s the second year of my low-residency international MFA. This is why I went to Rio de Janeiro for a month, where I fell into the rough tropical delight of that intoxicating country.
Here’s an excerpt of a short story I wrote inspired by my time in Rio. I wanted to try something experimental (why else do an MFA?) and write from the first-person plural, as a pastiche of “The Virgin Suicides” (one of my all time favorite books).
In one of the great feats of voice, “The Virgin Suicides” is narrated by a Greek chorus of unnamed men, looking back on their adolescence and the suicides of five girls in their Michigan suburb.
— From “The Virgin Suicides” Still Holds the Mysteries of Adolescence by Emma Cline
In my story, the first-person plural is from the pov of unnamed sisters (who I imagined are the sisters from VS), as if they had traveled to Rio and lived an adventure, rather than ending their lives.
🤩 🤩 🤩 I signed with TV and Film agents at Gersh. 🤩 🤩 🤩
My IMDbPRO looks so fancy now! Navigated the WGA strike and closing my first two screenwriting jobs once the strike ended (the first jobs with reps and lawyers and all the things) with the help of Gersh and my endlessly amazing manager Anastasiya Kukhtareva, who formed her own management company this year!
✍️ And the really cool feather in the cap of my writing in 2023:
I was awarded the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award in Nonfiction.
So I flew from Brazil directly to Vermont to attend Bread Loaf (founded in 1926, Bread Loaf has been called "the oldest and most prestigious writers' conference in the country."), where the brightest literary stars, agents and editors live together for ten days in Middlebury College dorms, eat together in the cafeteria like it’s freshman year, attend readings, workshop our own writing, and discuss principles of literary style. And have barn dances.
My Bread Loaf-ing should ultimately be its own Substack. It’s hard to get in, and it’s a peek behind the veil of publishing once you’re immersed in those grassy fields …. yes I should write about it …. what it’s really like to be there in the footsteps of Toni Morrison, the sexy “Bed Loaf” rumors, what I learned from the agents I met there, the craft and style takeaways …. but for whatever reason I’m not called to …. anyone else out there in Substack-landia feel like this? The subjects that would make obvious ‘Stacks just don’t feel right? Maybe I’m preserving the special-ness of it, what the experience meant to me? Pondering…
Writers’ conferences can be a strange Hall of Mirrors, everyone looking at distortions of themselves. The primordial yawp goes out and the scatterlings stop their typing, cash in their saved-up vacations, pack their cars or board planes, drawn to some remote spot, some sanctuary (in this case, an actual Vermont mountaintop) isolated from friends and family to consider art, and their aspiration to make it. In this new, temporary civilization, the real thing (the person with real books to her or his name) meets the wannabe, which creates a chain reaction of desire. In the isolation of the Vermont wilderness, at a fabled writers’ conference, then, wanting to write can become confused with many other sorts of wantings. Human vulnerabilities manifest as extreme, the preening and posturing and deep panic attacks of inadequacy are acute, occasionally insufferable. I’m quite certain that, were we to revert back to our primal selves in such a place, the peasantry would otherwise rise up and devour the hearts of the star authors. Everyone—if secretly—is thinking about their own ascendancy, or overthrow.
— From “My Summer Waiting Tables at the Writers’ Retreat” By Michael Paterniti
🌳 I also wrote another pilot this last year inspired by the years I spent in the ganja hustle. That pilot is currently being read by dream producers. So, there’s that.
And yet, and yet!, the hungry ghost of accomplishment is ravenous as ever and none of the above feels like enough.
Maybe because I rarely share any of these milestones with anyone, because I don’t want to seem like I’m bragging?
Because bragging is impolite and my “good girl” conditioning demands I am polite above all else?
Because everything could fall apart (it has in the past) and then I’d look like a real idiot for talking about things that didn’t come to fruition?
Maybe because I don’t know how to interact with Instagram anymore. Is it a highlight reel of my personal life? My professional life? My political beliefs? And if it isn’t posted on the ‘Gram, did it really happen?
Maybe it’s because …. (here comes the hashtag teachable moment) I’m full up with fear.
Fear I’m never going to actually “break through” … so never rest, never feel like anything is “enough,” because it isn’t, because you need to push harder.
Fear I’m just a selfish 1st-world moron, so caught up in feeding the capitalist machine I’m missing the entire point of this existence, which is to love and serve.
Fear of actually feeling my feelings (who wants that!), and work is the noblest of avoidance strategies.
While prime minister of the United Kingdom during World War II, Winston Churchill kept a crushing schedule, often spending 18 hours a day at work. On top of this, he wrote book after book in office. By the end of his life, he had finished 43, filling 72 volumes.
Churchill also suffered from crippling depression, which he called his “black dog,” and which visited him again and again. It seems almost unthinkable that he could be so productive in states so grim that he once told his doctor, “I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything.”
Some say Churchill’s depression was bipolar, and windows of mania allowed him to work as much as he did. But a few of his biographers explain it differently: Churchill’s workaholism wasn’t in spite of his suffering, but because of it. He distracted himself with work. Lest you think this far-fetched, researchers today find that workaholism is a common addiction in response to distress. And like so many addictions, it worsens the situation it’s meant to alleviate.
— From The Hidden Link Between Workaholism and Mental Health by Arthur C. Brooks
For my aforementioned short film I AM SILKY BUTTERSTONE, I researched strange phobias for the backstory of one of the characters. File this list from PsychCentral under “Strange But True:”
What are some rare phobias?
While you may have heard of some of the more common phobias, some rarer phobias include:
anatidaephobia: fear of ducks watching you
ambulophobia: fear of walking
anthophobia: fear of flowers
coulrophobia: fear of clowns
emetophobia: fear of vomiting
gamophobia: fear of marriage
gynophobia: fear of women
haphephobia: fear of being touched
megalophobia: fear of large objects
nomophobia: fear of being without your phone
plutophobia: fear of money
scopophobia: fear of being stared at
thalassophobia: fear of the ocean
trypophobia: fear of clustered patterns of irregular holes
I’m sorry — anatidaephobia and trypophobia — what???
I don’t suffer from any of the above (that I know of (yet)). But I do have a fear of junk in my Gmail. It’s surely connected to control. Remove all the junk, feel calm. But this means I spend the first chunk of my email-day deleting unwanted emails, trash, and spam.
In other words, I prioritize the junk, which must be a metaphor. Lately, I resist the Almighty Delete and start by responding to the two most important emails.
I wonder what to call the phobia of being afraid of your feelings?
And what to call the phobia of not accomplishing enough?
I am reminded of the winter I traveled through Southeast Asia with a love from the UK who was a vegan minimalist and made a face when I asked,
“After Thailand, should we do Vietnam or Laos?”
“Don’t say that,” he responded, “that you ‘do’ a place. That’s so American. You can experience a place, observe it, immerse in it, but you can’t ‘do it,’ like it’s something to check off a list.”
What do you think? Is “doing” a place an American approach, or just semantics? Is traveling an accomplishment, or something much deeper?
One technique I’ve picked up along the way is naming my different parts. All the iterations of Erin that shout for the attention of my inner council.
There’s the avoidant party girl (my arrested development / the part of me that will always be 20, the age I was when my mom died).
There’s the wise curandera.
And the voice of not-enough-ness … which sounds like … my parents? Who (understandably) rewarded good grades and good behavior, who took me to third world countries at a young age because they worked in the wholesale nursery business, where I was rattled to my core to see how little others had compared to the standard of living in the U.S., where I developed a sense of guilt for my privilege, for which the only antidote was to never take any of it for granted. To be hardcore accomplished meant making my parents proud, which was the ultimate goal — they had given me so much.
(This is from Parts Work, by the way, an approach to therapy I’m guiding myself through, along with Inner Child Work and Internal Family Systems).
Perhaps the whole issue of not-enough-ness is because all the accomplishments listed above are outer check-marks developed in the matrix.
What about the milestones of my inner life in 2023?
The daily gratitude lists.
The picking myself up again and again in the face of all the rejection that accompanies a life in the arts.
The texts and voice memos to friends offerings resources, encouragement, compassion.
The plant medicine ceremonies (including my first experience with Noya Rao, the bioluminescent “Tree of Light” … remember the tree in FernGully from which all wisdom and healing sprung forth? It’s like that.
Okay so is this Substack now a Hallmark movie?
Is it totally cheesy to end a thought train with positivity and “it’s on the inside that counts?”
Why do I feel so Carrie Bradshaw when I write questions within my essays?
Now we’ve arrived at the point where I should actually address the subject of this open letter: all the things I didn’t do in 2023.
What’s hilarious is … now I can’t think of a single one.
After acknowledging everything I did do, and releasing the pressure valve a bit by sharing it with y’all, and taking the time to think about my inner life, now I feel … content?
And like Amanda Palmer would be proud of me. Because Substack is connecting with people who’ve already sought out my writing, you are who matters, you are who I am writing to and for.
I started reading Amanda Palmer’s book The Art Of Asking the day after the day after Christmas, and it’s rewired my whole sense of how we do art in the digital age. Highly recommend.
I can also recommend (aka recent things I’ve consumed and loved):
Movies: Fair Play, Saltburn, In The Mood For Love, Bound, Impulse (the forgotten erotic thriller from 1990, directed by Sondra Locke, which has a backstory that involves Clint Eastwood worthy of a movie all its own), Dream Scenario
Books: Optic Nerve by Maria Ganza, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, the short stories of John Cheever, The Crying Book by Heather Christle, Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin, The Guest by Emma Cline
And the writing projects of a few good friends (aka good work and congrats!): The Blue Years by Erin Rose Belair, The Blue Hour by Tiffany Clarke Harrison, and one of my MFA advisors Maxine Swann started a Substack about her adventures as a Drag King, and another advisor Ada Limón won the MacArthur “genius” grant (she’s also our current U.S. Poet Laureate) (no big deal).
And so we’ve come to the end. Parting thought:
To all the things I didn’t do in 2023 … whatever you are … see you in 2024.
Later,
xoxo Erin
and I hope to see YOU on February 3!
Virginia City is a nutty Old West town near Reno, haunted by the ghost of Mark Twain, and considered the real birthplace of the Summer of Love.
I wanted it to be true. I thought it could be true (stranger things have happened in Reno). I believed it to be true as I danced before two guys in the famous Daft Punk motorcycle helmets, playing all their hits, thinking, It’s really smart to be Daft Punk and where those helmets, no one knows if it’s you or not. Turns out, it wasn’t.
Just kidding, no one’s really asking me that. I mean, yes, occasionally it happens, but I wanted to throw it out there like people do on social media, like when they say “Welcome to all my new subscribers!” and “I’m so moved by the response to my last post” … and the rest of us have no context if it’s true. A chupacabra for fanfare?
I was so happy when this was in my inbox the other day! I came back to it like 3 times to read it all the way through. So delightful. I’m so happy for you, and not surprised at all by all of the accomplishments.
delighted to be a lil ducky watching (& cheering) youuuuu