Terror and transcendence go hand in hand.
Every time I do a big scary thing, I learn more about how these feelings co-exist, how one creates a path for the other one to follow.
The moments of learning have come whenever I’ve taken a big leap and gone somewhere new: Going to LUMS for undergrad and moving to Pakistan despite never having lived there, ever; Relocating to Boston for 6 months to go work at a startup; Getting married and moving from Dubai to Memphis. Going to Vermont every semester for the MFA residency. Each time, I created space for myself to expand, to grow past the confines of who I was before the big, scary thing. I learned more about who I was, and who I didn’t want to be.
More recently, I experienced this when I had Amelia. Sure, I had 9 months before the actual big, scary thing to anticipate childbirth and prepare for it. But the week before it happened, I was terrified. I didn’t want to do it. Can’t I just stay pregnant forever, I would wonder. The process of giving birth seemed unreal, unimaginable and I wished for a way out of it all. Once the induction started, I calmed my nerves by listening to birth affirmations and Quran recitations on YouTube (It’s weird, I don’t adhere to the guidelines of a ‘good Muslim’ but the Quran has always been a source of solace for me…but this is a whole other thing we can get into in a later post). I found that zen place to go to and I’d rush there every time the nurse came in to check my progress. And when it was time to push, I was amazed by the strangeness of the situation. Fear left to make way for odd observations like angles of my knees and the many, many washcloths on the floor. Amelia showed up 6 minutes after midnight on September 25, 2021, and every month of motherhood since then has brought with it an array of big, scary things.
And, although it happens on a much smaller scale, I feel terror and transcendence every time I write. The act of building something that didn’t exist before I put words to paper to creating anew – it’s potent. And it happens regardless of what I’m writing: an email eloquently laying out complex, critical information for a client; a Substack post like this one; a paragraph describing the shrubs and plants a character is watering in her garden; a monthly Instagram post where I share Amelia’s latest quirks. It’s like a release, a shift in my internal makeup where the real me is liberated just a little bit every time. I think that’s why my writing career stalled these past couple of years, I would get to the terror part and just pause there, never committing to the action and the work required to get to the transcendence stage. I was afraid to learn and actualize into the writer I’m supposed to be, and that fear became a really cozy and comfortable place to live.
It doesn’t come easy, that high, that feeling where your heart is a golden, glowing thing, that flutters and creates and thrives and lives to its fullest, brightest potential. It’s hard work and it requires discipline – and discipline looks different for everyone. There is no one size fits all approach to having a disciplined writing practice. It doesn’t have to include a regimen of writing at the same time or the same amount of time every day. You don’t need a dedicated writing space (though I have visions of what mine could be) or an assortment of writing snacks to help you think and create.
What I’m learning now is that is starts with the heart. My heart tells me to write. i ignore that voice and turn to my head and its never-ending list of house chores, baby to-dos and work priorities. I’ve done this routinely, and I’ve been aware of it too. It takes discipline to listen to your heart and do the things it’s telling you to do. It’s a discipline of self-love – my heart is the purest part of me, it houses my highest ambitions and deepest desires. It helps me produce, it’s where my words come from. To honor it is to love my self. The more I can stay connected to that voice, the more I’ll write and find, again and again, terror and transcendence waiting for me to join them.
It’s a daily battle though between the heart and the head. And that’s okay. The words are coming, slow but steady, again and again after a long pause. What matters is that I keep going.
And in the spirit of doing more and more of the big, scary things, here are some of my recent writing wins:
- Interviewing Morgan Talty about his book, Night of the Living Rez, for The Maine Review
- Being selected for Best Small Fictions 2022, forthcoming this fall. The flash piece chosen for it also won The Baltimore Review’s Winter contest last year.
- Nothing to hyperlink in this one, but I revised a novel chapter last month and submitted it as a short story to 8 places. Fingers crossed!
If you’re still reading, I’m glad you’re here. And if you’re also a writer or a creator of any sort, do the big, scary things with me.
Image source: Brainpickings. You can read Rilke’s full poem here. It inspired this post.