Reasons to watch yourself, but...

Writer anthropology, but no disappointments, promise.

When I was a kid, my idea of winking was to close one eye tight and immediately try to angle the other eye over to see the result. I knew from my family’s reactions that I was getting some part of this exercise wrong, which only made me try harder to use one eye to watch what the other one was doing… resulting in the picture above, which is actually a still from a home video where my mom has just cheered me on: “Wink, Emily! Wink!”

It’s one of those well yeah, this is me in a nutshell kind of photos. Of course I couldn’t just wink—I’d also want to see how it’s happening and understand why it’s working or not. Of course this little gesture that’s supposed to be a social one—you’re supposed to wink at someone, after all—becomes an inward exercise of intense observation for me. I don’t really care what others see while my face contorts. I’m in a bubble, examining one eye with the other, in the middle of our backyard at my brother’s noisy birthday party.

This picture is one reason I named this letter creative attention. Besides creative attention in terms of being a writer, I’m curious about creative interpretations of attention itself. When I was a kid trying to wink, I was just improvising another way… I was paying attention, but not to the part people had asked me for or in the way they expected.

To this day, if I attempt to wink, my first instinct is to slide the open eye over to try and watch the wink happen.

I’ve always been someone who needs to observe themselves. This got even more literal as a kid, to the point of narrating myself internally, in the third person. I’ve got an essay coming out soon in the Kenyon Review that unravels this more as it relates to my neurodivergence and ADHD, but for today, I’m tinkering with the watching in the space of writing and creative practice.

There’s a question I've swirled toward after many years of self-watching, observation, field note-taking after my writing sessions, and so on:

But what do you need?

I've started asking myself this more quickly, sometimes impatiently, when I notice frustration with something in the process of writing—or especially in the absence of writing.

The question is simple and even a little sharp. It jabs back at frustration. It doesn’t try to dress frustration up or give frustration too much (if any) credit for being sophisticated. I’ve been trying to get more honest about it: some feelings in the creative process are just very basic and plain and ugly. Sometimes I’d rather think my problems are deep and elegant and very personal and worthy of more complex questions. Usually this just leads to creative rumination. You can bullshit yourself for a long time this way, and likely never get any writing done.

This is maybe why the question—but what do you need?—has stuck around so easily. It calls bullshit, and it speaks too fast to be ignored.

The “but” is doing something I don’t quite understand yet. Something about it is a helpful interjection. Like, “I hear you, but I need you to be more specific.” Or, “I’m trying, but could you speak a little louder?”

But what do you need?

With practice, I've been able to hear more unguarded answers.

Usually the inner replies are not fully formed statements. There's a terseness to them that surprises me. I wonder if the most honest inner voice prefers the urgency of fragments to sentence-scaffolding.

I ask, But what do you need?

I hear, space!

But what do you need?

Play!

But what do you need?

Looser. Looser. Too tight.

Blink and you'll miss it, unless you slide one eye over to watch.

I’ve started to realize the replies are often repetitive/perennial/cyclical. I know some of them by heart. Almost like mantras of need. Maybe someday I'll make a map of which ones happen in which part of the process, to see if there are any themes.

For now, I’ve been playing with them as tiny directives. Lenses I can lay over my practice to ask things like:

Ok, if I need space, then how can I make more space… with what I know/have right now?

For me, spaciousness is sometimes just a matter of clearing off the desk. Like weeding the garden before you can begin the work in earnest.

The opposite of spaciousness is claustrophobia, so sometimes it helps to ask instead: What feels claustrophobic in my writing life right now?

For me, there’s almost always a physicality to it, such as clearing the desk or making a cup of tea or changing the lighting… which, luckily, can be easier to address than esoteric problems.

And the feedback loop is so much shorter this way: you change something in the environment and observe how it feels. You remove a weed, drop a new seed, and watch what grows. I’ve weeded out a lot of creative rumination this way. When in doubt, get down to dirt-level.

Do I watch myself because I feel sorry for myself? Is this a kind of self-soothing? (How gross do I feel even writing that?) I hadn’t been thinking of it this way at all, until I read Elissa Gabbert’s piece in Poetry on writing and self-pity. Apparently other writers also have little, cyclical need mantras too.

It made me wonder if some of mine aren’t meant to change anything—maybe they don’t need a reaction or exercise from me. Maybe they’re just small, strange comforts along the way of writing.

When I led workshops and ran out of steam during the freewriting time, I would sometimes catch myself writing over and over again: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

And I guess, yeah, I felt bad about it. I really felt bad if my I don’t knows showed up on a night when other writers were sharing especially vulnerable or experimental stuff… that can feel a bit like wading at the shore while everyone else is taking the risk of swimming in dark waters. When people are going deep, I’m usually the first to say a big yes. I’m the one cajoling us to go deeper. So I don’t like finding out the shallow waters come even for me sometimes. But what could I do? I couldn’t force it. I don’t know.

I hate pity as an emotion, but I’m willing to try it on a little here and admit that I might have just been feeling sorry for myself. Maybe that is its own kind of spaciousness?

I still hope watching myself doesn't sound like one great act of self-pity. Mostly I try to imagine it as a generosity, like sliding the eye over in anticipation of a happy surprise. No judgement, lots of curiosity. (Sometimes I imagine it as one half of me writing, while the other half is an anthropologist watching me write, taking field notes on the local norms and practices… I am always inside and outside of myself. It’s just always been that way.¹)

At its best, the watching happens in the stance of possibility, rather than correction.

A funny memory keeps popping in as I try to write this, so ok:

I once (over)worked for someone who told me to never use the word “but” in conversations with clients. Because it would signal that I was about to disappoint them, and I should avoid disappointment at all costs.

They informed me of this by asking me to stop by their desk, where they had printed off copies of client emails I had sent and circled the word “but” in each one.

At the time, I was so very burnt out, so very embarrassed at the call-out… and also so very violated that this person had been reading through my emails, watching me at this minute level, when I had no idea. They barely had time to talk about meaningful project work with me, yet they had made the time to track my emails like this.

No matter how much I efforted or tried to relax into this job, I was being watched. I never really felt at ease, even before the “but” conversation. (And you can imagine how it felt to write client emails after that.)

Maybe this memory is showing up because I’ve also been thinking about the word surveillance as an extension of watching, and how it relates to skepticism. It was hard not to take the email surveillance as a skepticism—a loss of faith in my ability to write simple client messages.

I find a self-skepticism showing up now, as I write more into and from neurodivergence (e.g., free-associating much more freely, synethesia showing up on the page, remixing words to create different sounds, etc.). I find it hard at times to not inadvertently hover over myself, one eye trying to do something new and the other eye waiting to judge the outcome.

I don’t want to surveil myself like this, but sometimes when I try a new sentence pattern or riff for a very long time, I feel the sudden skepticism: am I just performing this voice? What is the true-true voice here? What am I even checking myself against? Will people be able to follow this? Can I be trusted?

It’s not much different than a few emails with the word “but” circled.

Now that I write all this, it’s ridiculous how literal that memory is. “But” is itself a divergence, one my boss was making a point to get rid of.

If “but” signals I’m about to get something different—something that might surprise me, something I didn’t expect—then that’s a risk I know all too well, living with the bodymind I live with.² May I learn to follow its lead with less skepticism.

Hannah Emerson has a wonderful poem called “Peripheral” that I return to a lot:

Yes I prefer the peripheral
because it limits the vision.

It does focus my attention.
Direct looking just is too

much killing of the moment.
Looking oblique littles

the moment into many
helpful moments.

Moment moment moment
moment keep in the moment.

Maybe that’s what I’m after: a littling.

To watch myself from the periphery, in the moments of practice, of trying something new.

To catch even the smallest glimpse of my honest, unfiltered voice.

To focus my attention there.

1. This is an area where I’m very curious about the intersections of neurodivergence and trauma / lifelong hypermasking wedded to hypervigilance / vs. the natural temperament of an artist, someone who is pulled to notice and observe and draw meaning from things. I’ll never be able to parse these out entirely and that’s not really my goal, but I do think it’s something I need to think through as I keep unmasking my voice… there are certain modes of writing for me that are actually masking or coping skills in disguise (e.g., overexplaining myself, strong reliance on metaphors) that may not be true or needed anymore.

2. The language of bodymind is something I learned through Dr. Nick Walker’s Neuroqueer Heresies. More in interviews like this one.