"Tell me about yourself?"

The way in and the way out of--

I have returned from a week and a half in Italy and for the first time in years feel like I was actually granted a break from the reality of daily life. I haven’t taken a vacation that lasted this long for nearly ten years, and it’s shocking how for once I feel like I got somewhat of an actual reset. While the problems I left behind haven’t gone away, I feel much more energized in terms of having to deal with the basic banalities of reality and also invested in what my day job is (something that I do truly love, but due to its nature tends to be exhausting when there’s no relief).

One of the things about actually getting a break is that when that break is over there’s a level of energy where it feels possible to return to the things that one keeps in the back of their head as necessary—the creative work, the essentials that tend to get bowled over by being ‘responsible’ or being stuck in the hamster wheel of work hustle followed by brainless expenditure, rince and repeat. Even though I have already suffered petty annoyances since returning, I finally feel like it’s once again possible to actually focus on the work. While I know I talk about the necessity of allowing pleasure (whether base or complicated), my own place in the world requires the sort of creative impetus that I can bring to fruition or else I feel more and more removed from myself. While recently I have found I can point towards this by merely putting effort into throwing an outfit together (thus further fending off the void one selfie at a time), the deeper satisfaction, for me, comes less from the completion of a project than the feeling of being enraptured with the work itself. It doesn’t have to be flow state, and sometimes it is indeed a struggle, but it is what makes me feel, among other things, actually like myself.

“Research,” something that I have predicated a bulk of my life on, feels like momentum: it pushes towards the work, and is ultimately a part of it, but it’s when I can approach the synthesis and actually inhabit the state of working that everything falls into place. This working, of course, fails to be satisfied by the work that is a day job, if only due to the fact that I am stubbornly against productivity in the way that the western-capitalist imperative frames it. Again, I find my job satisfying and often even valuable when it lands with the correct students, but it does not scratch the itch that the work itself does.

When I am in hustle mode, and someone asks me to tell them about myself, I often hit a wall where I’m not quite sure how to answer. My self-definition, at least in terms of what is most often circulating in my headspace, is often something that escape language—not so much as aporia, but because I think of myself in terms of my work, so sometimes to answer the question I want to hand someone my latest chapbook, or maybe even point them to a more thorough “essay” on here to explain, but I know that’s often a cop-out. Self-hood is a construction, and I am passionate about many things and while I often do insist on synthesizing all of these cultural products into a singular thread, that thread sits outside of me, despite the level of intimacy I might have with it.

While I feel optimistic about returning to this vague articulation of self, I also feel the precipice of the hustle calling, as unsurprisingly I have returned from a vacation with far less money on hand than I need to make my life easier. The hope, this time, is perhaps that I can figure out a way to stay on the edge without falling off, without losing myself again to the siren-call of banality that is the hustle, but can instead navigate the fine border between work and hustle.

For the aforementioned reasons, I have been a bit “lacking” both in terms of my output here (where I have several half started essays that I could easily just…finish) as well as in this years publishing project, which I think I can actually lock in now that I’m back and refreshed. There will always be more, there must. I can do nothing but push forward.