It’s December 23rd, I’m waiting for my plane to take off from the Paris CDG airport, lifting me towards my hometown for the Christmas holidays. “Girl you sweet like Fanta, Fanta” is banging in my AirPods for about 15 seconds before I anxiously switch to another short musical blurb, and then another. Whenever I find myself in a particular state of mind, when my thoughts are short, uneasy, frantically jumping from one to the other, inevitably, my Spotify playlist follows.
If no coherent thought manifests itself to me start-to-finish that means I am nowhere near ready to experience the present mindfully for 4 minutes straight.
Under the Bridge by Red Hot happens to shuffle in next, which is funny as it would also make for a good soundtrack of this moment. I never worry, now that is a lie… (as I am currently very anxious). Take me to the place I looove, take me all the waaay… (as I am flying to a nice city, and it would be impractical for the plane to land half-way).
Despite the lack of coherent reflexions, I stay true to my usual writing process: simply start with no plans ahead, see where things go.
“Заповядайте за Вас малко чоколет” — my already scattered flow of mind is interrupted by Bulgaria Air’s flight attendant offering me a piece of low-quality milk chocolate.
I accept.
Not infrequently, it seems to me, a writer can have inspiration, yet their inspiration being so indirect and evasive, one needs to enter polite negotiations with their intuition, convincing her to give a little – a tiny bit, a breadcrumb. The same we ask of our objects of desire, frankly…
Before I got on the plane, I underlined a paragraph from Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo, cited in Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins I am currently reading:
Now, having dined, comfortably lying in my overstuffed lounge chair, I am holding a pencil and a piece of paper. My brow is unfurrowed because I have dismissed all concern from my mind. My thinking seems something separate from me. I can see it. It rises and falls… that is its only activity. To remind it that it is my thinking and its duty is to make itself evident, I grasp the pencil. Now my brow does wrinkle, because each word is made up of so many letters and the imperious present looms up and blots out the past.
It captures how I sometimes feel in front of my laptop, staring at the blank Google Docs file, my thoughts separate from me. It is as if I am fighting relentlessly in order to formulate something so intuitively simple: easy for my inner understanding, which produced the thought one second ago, but convoluted for the outsider who now writes.
Moreover, I feel myself somewhat of an imposter in the world of writing, as I have never been the inventor of fictional worlds — no foreign lands with beautiful yet weird creatures, no magic or fighting evil, not even a single character that is neither myself, nor a wish-fulfilling proxy for myself!
I remember when I was younger, me and my sister used to play the video game Sims 2: my first ever entry into Hyperreality. And in this hyperreal realm of Sims, my older sister was always knitting complex webs of life trajectories and plot twists for her characters, downloading extensions, unlocking all kinds of interesting universe modifications: enchantments, castles, vampires, zombies…
Meanwhile, the only characters I ever played were:
My self-representing Sim was always conventionally pretty and unhealthily skinny. An A+ student. She had a cute boyfriend (or was the cute boyfriend) who, after the right amount of small talk and flirting (including serenades), would eventually ask her hand in marriage. She would say yes, get married and Woo-Hoo (a lot). The End.
Unsurprisingly, my sister now writes fantasy books and short-stories, which I find all wildly creative. And I, write about how we used to play Sims 2!
After more than one year of having the blog, I turn to reflecting on why I started it and why I still do it.
The truthful answer is: I have no clue? While at the same time: It is obvious to me? The calling to put my thoughts in the format of a blog article or personal essay (be it inspired by a book, a reality TV show, or a long flight), is quite similar to my thoughts while I write: outside myself, I only watch it rise or fall.
While I feel incredibly shy to compare my writing to American essayist and writer Rebecca Solnit, I remember how when I first read her collection A Field Guide to Getting Lost, I found a teeny similarity (at least with what type of personal essays I aim to publish). Her nonfiction is autobiographical and personal, while using a particular example (historical episode, personal anecdote, artwork or myth) as a lens through which to build upon and think, philosophize, or offer a way to reclaim a meaning and make new sense of it. She does so in a beautiful and enchanting way, and has thus shown me both that there is value in that endeavor, and that there is nothing embarrassing in using your life experiences, or somebody else’s artwork as a framework or inspiration. Yet, with a background as a historian, Solnit’s examples tend to be more sophisticated, and I never cease to be impressed by how masterfully she entangles them in an ever-flowing imaginative exposition.
So, since I often bring up stuff like Hinge dates, Sims 2, the Bulgarian edition of the reality TV show The Bachelor, in a 0-filter, unliterary kind of way - what kind of writer am I? I still wonder.
Maybe the problem was never that I lack imagination, but that my imagination insists on staying close to the ground. On what is already there. On the ordinary, the awkward, the slightly embarrassing.
I do not invent worlds like my sister, but I linger in them – following “the tickle” as my high school Philosophy teacher used to say, and trusting that meaning sometimes emerges not from invention, but from attention.
As the plane has just landed at the Sofia International Airport, and the superstitious Bulgarians on board have finished applauding the flight’s crew, I feel as if the process described by Zeno’s Conscience has reversed… While I was not writing, my brow was wrinkled and my anxious mind scattered. Now that I have filled up the previously empty Google Docs, I have dismissed all concerns and, even though my musings didn’t fully make themselves evident, my brow is now serenely unfurrowed.