Dear Friends,
Boy, have I been distracted. The season is shiny and new, complete with its own color palette and flavor profile (autumn’s branding: 10/10) and I’m trying to build, grow, and sustain projects all at once. Which is great fun until someone asks about my writing, and I realize I can’t remember the last time I sat down for more than a handful of minutes with my own words.
But today, I want to talk about that other thing that happens to writers, which is this: you have a blissfully free morning, your notebooks and laptops awaiting your touch with reverent anticipation, and someone starts banging loudly at the door of your mind—it’s you, reminding you to buy new water filters.
You don’t even need new water filters.
Wasn’t an hour alone with your writing precisely what you’d been pining for? Why, then, are you suddenly calling a distant aunt, rearranging the kitchen cupboards, and getting dressed to fetch stamps from the post office?
Because you have an intimate interruptor.
In “Of Power and Time,” Mary Oliver calls the internal force that pulls us away from our own work “the intimate interruptor.” She doesn’t go into why this inner voice distracts us, but she’s unequivocal about the need to ignore it at the price of unstocked pantries and unreturned phone calls.
Thanks to Oliver’s description of this internal antagonist, I recognized my own intimate interrupter immediately. How she “helpfully” shows up to remind me of menial tasks when I’m mid-thought, almost as if—could it really be this—I can’t stand the intensity and reverberations of my own mind.
Creative work needs solitude, but we’re so often fundamentally uncomfortable with it. “It needs concentration, without interruptions,” Oliver advises. “It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once.”
I know what she means by “that certainty.” It’s that moment when an idea has enough momentum and shape that you can confidently walk away from the page, knowing that it will continue to breathe on its own in your absence.
I relied on “that certainty” to write this very piece. As soon as the idea came to me, I was faced with comical evidence of Oliver’s theory—I interrupted myself four times before I actually sat down to write. I “needed” a snack. I needed to edit another writer’s writing. I needed to answer an email. I needed to charge my Fitbit.
More likely, I needed a break from the pressure of my own creative energy, that very thing I covet but sometimes fear once it’s in my grasp. Now it really is up to me. Now that the game is on, I might let us both down.
But Oliver reminds me of what lies on the other side of all of this resistance: “The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame.” I want to be stained with light. And, so, I march myself back to my desk. It may not always be as soon as I wish it were, but the poem gets written, and the fear dissolves along the way.
So, friends, I’d love to know: do you recognize your own intimate interruptor? How do they manifest for you, and how do you invite them to take a quiet seat beside you, instead of chasing them around the house?
Let me know.
xM
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I reckon my Interrupter (let’s call her Madge) considers my Intentions as the interruptions 🤣
I have been intending to get back to writing (albeit my scribbles are very rudimentary), but Madge has me busy making mountains of sourdough biscuits and cakes and bread for my adult children and my grandchildren. She has me slogging away at the day job three days a week, which leaves me exhausted in every sense. She has me tuning into various binge-watchable TV shows, contemplating the garden, hugging the dogs.
She has me deciding to wash the sheets, the towels, the teatowels.
In my consious mind, all of this is subconscious compost for whatever I may eventually write.
But is it?
I am getting older, and life is short.
I may have to give Madge a redundancy package soon. If she will take it. 🤣
But your writing Maya is precious. I actually quoted / paraphrased some of your words in my brief speech at my son’s wedding. People are still telling me what a good speech it was, five months on!
So I hope your Interrupter takes a back seat because we need more of your writing! ❤️
Oh, the interruptor! She comes in so many guises. The need to care for others. The garden, so vulnerable to the elements. Painting, because I've committed so many resources to materials and supplies that I've obligated myself to that which used to bring me joy. Cooking, because it's fun and stress-relieving and obviously productive. In the end, I prioritize everything above myself. Wrong choice.