beginnings and endings

january 1 | weekly warm-up

After reading today’s blog post and the referenced essay below, write about a season in your life (doesn’t have to relate to your writing journey) that you entered with hopes, dreams, and wonder that ultimately turned sour. What happened? Can you pinpoint the beginning and the ending? Can you identify the moment(s) of transformation?

Hello writers,

Joan Didion is one of my favorites. Below is the start of one of her most famous essays, “Goodbye to All That” where she describes her initial enchantment and eventual disillusionment with New York City. The essay is included in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and you can read the full piece here.

After rereading the essay recently, it made me think about a difficult time in my writing journey (from about 2014 - 2018), the sense of wonder that I lost during that time, and have rediscovered in recent years. In many ways, Didion’s relationship with New York City mirrors my relationship with writing during that time. I thought that I would reach success (which I had not defined for myself) in a few months after I quit my job in 2013—not many years later—because I expected things to come easily to me. I thought the red flags and warning signs and bridges I burned wouldn’t matter, but ultimately they did.

I went into it hoping writing would give me an identity. I fell in love with the sexiness of the highlight reel—”the way you love the first person who ever touches you”— because I’d finally found a way of being that seemed to fit. I made excuses to cover all the ways the reality fell short of my expectations. I told my family that I was making enough money, when really, I was barely scraping by. It was okay to be broke and planless because I was an artist and writing was my big city of dreams. “Nothing was irrevocable; everything was in reach. Just around the corner lay something curious and interesting…” Everyday I thought I would suddenly and magically prove myself. Someone in a particular position to put me in a particular position would discover me and make me a famous writer and it was all dependent on my ability to write fire day after day until that person found me.

Until one day I realized that writing was no longer a city of hope, it was a city of jealousy, despair, and disgust. I stopped believing in the likes and the follows and the attention. “Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen.” I’ve been trying to think about the moment that New York ended for me, and I haven’t landed on it yet. I’m curious about what you’ll come up with.

You can start reading the excerpt here:

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” Read on