There is a reason we forget. And those of us who remember, well, it is hard on us. It exhausts us.
―
I recently came up for air after a grueling two-month book-deadline push, the kind of sleep-deprivation experiment that leaves you utterly spent, and it reminded me of how much exhaustion is a theme for every working writer.
George Orwell (Eric Blair) pretty much wrote himself to death, authoring 1984 in declining health, but at least he produced a masterpiece.
You always wish you had more to give. You always balance the need to make progress with the need to sustain yourself. And if, for example, you have other work obligations and small children, sometimes you have to work through the night. Sometimes, you sacrifice your health.
The problem with being completely wrung out with to-the-bone exhaustion is that a writer forever bounces back and forth between self-lacerating doubt and some small tendril of belief, or at least delusion, that one can actually put words down that aren’t irretrievably pointless. It’s a tiring struggle under the best of circumstances. Listless and easily worn out, it moves closer to impossible.
I mention all of this because I think in the time of Trump all but a few writers have felt some unending exhaustion, some energy drain, that has been hard to understand or identify. The indignity of every day’s fresh descent into the absurd turns imagining on its head; there can be no imagining so long as the unending clown show continues, so long as we’re living in Orwell’s world.
“Most of us continue to play catch-up, still baffled and demoralized by the inescapable feeling that our reality has been hijacked, bracing for a long struggle of fighting for our beliefs, and opposing bigotry and authoritarianism,” I wrote in March 2017, and alas, the words seem as true as ever now.
The struggle remains exhausting. It short-circuits writers from focusing on all they’d be focusing on in less dire times. As for me, I felt a wave of hope this week that Donald Trump really can be defeated in November, and by a wide enough margin that he might not be able to cheat his way to claiming victory. It’s a tentative hope. We’ll see. But imagine, if he could be ousted, the daily freak show contained, and we could all stop feelings so exhausted all the time?
– Steve Kettmann
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