you do not exist within lines

Brooklyn, New York - September 27

Sep 28, 2025

a still from Moon Dance Solo performed by Yang Liping

i’m sorry it has taken me so long to write.

i have grown impatient with the narrative of my life, constantly inundated with the possibilities of my own existence and never the action. i guess i am growing tired of being outside of my own life, and want to find a way in, no matter how much ugliness meets me on my way.

september is closing and new york is still hot and humid. late summer feels like a clever trick. though many may try to convince me of the fall, i still sweat beneath my bedsheets. summer’s warmth still resounds.

so i think my process is simply much slower than i allow it to be. i have been trained in the school of overnight life changes and thirty-day challenges, and while those have their place, for me, they have the effect of yo-yo dieting. yes, i can write everyday for a month, and then i can spend the next eight months dry-heaving at the sight of my laptop.

i think there can be a compromise between our most perfect selves and our present selves. If you are terrified of losing yourself in your passions, perhaps the best course of action is not to dive in headfirst but instead to acclimatize. Toes, then ankles, knees, more. building trust and confidence along the way.

i say this mostly because, as we know, creativity requires vulnerability, humility, yet every time i sit to unfold my heart toward the world, i am captured by grief.

at first, i thought it was mine, then my mother’s, or belonging to my lineage. after speaking with my counselor, he supposes it could be simply from having my eyes open, looking about the world in its current state. If you spend enough time looking, he said to me, you will never run out of things to weep for.

but, and we ended our session with this, perhaps in the midst of all the suffering, the goal is to make something worthwhile.

in Rachel Cusk’s Outline, the narrator has a conversation with a fellow writer where he attempts to describe the emotional conditions that led him to write his first and only novel, “life is sending you in one direction and you’re pulling away in another, like you’re disagreeing with your own destiny, like who you are is in disagreement with who they say you are. Your whole soul is in revolt.”

i keep thinking of this tension Cusk describes, and how much of it must be acknowledged, be acted upon to be relieved.

at a performance, a friend of mine, unsure if she was willing to dance with an injury during a show about the emotional spectrum of the climate crisis, said that pain was as much an experience to be honored as our joy and our wonder.

i felt that old stagnant grief bubble up in that moment, ready to cry on command. how funny is it that when you give grief a place to live in your life, it actually shows up.

Lucille Clifton wrote something on this desire to contain what obviously cannot be: