What is This Writing's Value?

In my earliest twenties, I began to think that I should spend my life using words to win people over to righteous causes. I knew I had some rhetorical facility, and that rhetoric can compel, and I believed that what I believed was so eminently ethical and correct, truth and goodness themselves were on my side. I wasn’t entirely clear on how to get my persuasive writing to an arena where it would matter but I thought maybe speech writing could do it, not speeches intended for the mouths of politicians but speeches for people organized to effect more direct and less self-serving change—activists, which at the time I imagined to be (I’m sorry, you can laugh) people at non-profits. Or letters, or some type of communication to enact a conversion. Of course, it’s hideously embarrassing how little I understood then, as in a few years I will be mortified to reflect on how little I know now. But to put it more gently, I wanted to contribute. I wanted to be of service.

Up to that point, I hadn’t doubted that I would write—I was one of those kids who wrote before she could write by dictating stories to a mother who encouraged her and acted as a scribe, so even when I thought I might pursue some other career, it wasn’t as if I expected writing to leave my life—but I thought the writing I’d do would be “creative”: fiction, poetry, and maybe, if I felt frisky, a play. Then I went to grad school for poetry, became more disappointed by academia, and decided that poetry didn’t matter in a world where people couldn’t get honest representation or healthcare or clean, safe land to live on and soil to eat from, and actually it was profane to be spending time and energy and even a sliver of talent in this frivolous way. So I moved to DC and pursued a different graduate degree. I figured the deficiencies of the first one were a result of the discipline. How little I understood remains hideously embarrassing.

Before the first semester was out, my disillusionment was complete, and for me, disillusionment is never without a measure of nihilism. I dropped out of school and took refuge in sex work and, crucially, in sex workers, who were the most radical and passionate people I’d met. That tactic lasted for a long time, until it wasn’t so nourishing anymore, and then it lasted a while longer. Eventually, I tried to have a straight(ish) go at being only a writer. It was not a success and around 2018 or 2019, I resolved to stop freelancing because it was making me a poorer thinker, a worse writer, and an unhappier person. I don’t know if my writing/thinking did or will recover from that period, but I’m not bothered by the uncertainty anymore, maybe because I’ve come to see it as an exchange in which the education I received liberated me from certain desires and incorrect impressions, and so facilitated my becoming a truer if duller version of myself.

I spent the turn of this new year thinking about inaction as wisdom, non-action as the most beneficial action. If your cultural milieu is at all like mine, that phrasing conjures up the figure of the amoral self-care adherent who is never without a defense of why their own pleasure and self-promotion are more appropriate objects of attention than anything else happening in the world. But that is disengagement rather than conscientious inaction. The non-action I thought about was intentional and empathetic, a choice derived from considered engagement. An easy example would be not speaking out of anger and so not speaking at all, because the anger is too overwhelming.² And surely everyone knows at least one person who is perpetually busy but never seems to accomplish anything and often makes a situation worse with their frenetic approach, no matter how warm their intentions.

A more evocative exercise might be this: think of ten people who’d improve the world immeasurably if they stopped whatever they normally do and walked away from the keyboard, the courtroom, the gun, the microphone, the meeting. People whose mercy would exceed description if they simply retired to a cave and eschewed society for the rest of their lives. When I think of it this way, I find it nearly impossible to stop at ten. These are people I’d normally wish were dead, because death presents itself as the most reliable way to arrest the damage they do. But really, they don’t need to be dead. They just need to stop.

Part of freelancing as I knew it entailed creating material I wasn’t proud of, not because it actively harmed anyone but because it didn’t matter, it had no value, yet it entered the world and made it worse. This phrasing could be called melodramatic but it’s also accurate. The writing was content intended to be consumed and forgotten, and was treated accordingly by all parties involved. I can imagine the money it earned me was then sagely given away or spent on something vital, but I think more good would have come of not writing it, because writing it demoralized me and I thought less of myself after I had. Even more recent writing—undertaken with great conviction and determination, conceived with purity of purpose³ —I’m not sure was of any use. The state of things would be the same if it had not been written.

I’m also not certain of the benefit in shaping opinion anymore, nor of the opportunities to do it through long form composition. Though I once wanted desperately to help change people’s minds, I find more and more that I just want to help. Probably the worthiest things I’ve ever done in a day are to cherish a loved one, assist someone with their abortion, foster an animal, be kind to a stranger or pass money where it’s needed. Identifying those things feels gross, like trying to cobble together a resume, and anyway the choices more essential to my sense of self are abstentions: not taking money from a particular person or publication, not eating animals. From either end, these acts seem so little, it shames me to say them. And still, none of them require writing.

This is not an argument in favor of apathy or pessimism, nor a petition for reassurance. This is a diagram of a thought process and I only hope to persuade you that these are ways I’ve felt and thought, not that you should think or feel the same way, or that they’re admirable ways to think and feel. I don’t need counter examples. The beautiful aspects of the world, I know and love, which is why I care at all; the people I’ve connected with through writing are precious to me and not forgotten. I also don’t expect of anyone else what I ask of myself. I’m impressed by the principled writers I think of as peers who don’t seem to have this struggle, and I have no trouble believing they are stronger or wiser than me.

My disposition since childhood has been to wish almost everything were better than it is and the intractability of that to which I object is my perpetual sorrow. I’m prone to see wrongness and inadequacy in the foreground and I don’t know how others cannot when all around us are the inescapable errors of the human world. I don’t mean only the obvious ones, the genocide, or local headlines, or people living on the street, or extreme weather disasters, or cops. I mean also in every scrap of packaging, every attempt to buy a piece of clothing not made of oil or to drink non-carcinogenic water, and virtually every tweet even when I see the point the person’s trying to make because it’s made in the nastiest way possible. These are capitalist and imperialist examples because I live in a capitalist and imperial country. How can I be an exception? How can I be a rare thing that is right?

I’m not sure why or what to write if I can’t make my writing have the impact I wish it did. It’s not enough to write something that people like, not when there’s never been a deed or item or idea so foul that somebody somewhere won’t like it. I wish to be a benefit to the world because the world deserves improvement, and writing—my writing—is too limited, yet I insist on believing it’s the best tool I have. As long as that (mis)apprehension persists, it demands that I ask of what I write, what is this writing’s value? And ask again and again, and again, until I have a tolerable answer.

1  I’ve worked with some incredible editors through freelancing, and some good editors working for bad bosses, and I don’t intend to diminish any of them. This is a comment on the cumulative impact of my freelancing experience, not a blanket insult.

2  I too am a victim of treat culture but when I dwelt on inaction, I also thought about the destructive quality inherent in most treats which disguise themselves as curative because they’re the alternative to more overtly demanding action. Looking at social media is not harmless and buying something is not harmless. Training yourself (myself) in distraction and avoidance is not harmless. I started imagining myself suggesting (to myself and to others) “maybe the little treat can be sitting quietly and enjoying being alive.” It made me laugh. Maybe the little treat can be a laugh.

3  (I’m talking about this.)