I’ve had a busy week, juggling multiple deadlines, and as fortune would have it, everything I wrote was published today: the latest of my weekly columns at New Republic and Washington Post Act Four, as well as a quick piece for Rolling Stone.
Here are links to those:
“The Personal Essay Economy Offers Fewer Rewards for Black Women” – New Republic
“The Perfect Guy and the Drawbacks of Colorblind Filmmaking” – Act Four
“10 Things We Learned from Cosby: The Women Speak Special” – Rolling Stone
I honestly don’t know I managed to put out these three pieces this week. Some weeks are just “How I Got Over” weeks; from the other side, you see the chasm between fixed points and marvel that you made it. In addition to those three pieces of writing, I had a few other deadlines, meetings, obligations, trips. And the requisite duties of full-time caregiving for a daughter who’s becoming increasingly expectant of my time and attention, because we’re together roughly 21 hours a day every weekday (and 24 hours a day most weekends). She used to care less whether I was nearby when she was younger; now any distance we have from one another seems to overwhelm her. That makes conducting phone interviews, trying to write coherent sentences in momentary emptiness of the next room, fielding work calls hard, or just finding an uninterrupted stretch of minutes to compose a single, complete, and purely adult thought very challenging.
I don’t know if I’m a good enough writer to convey just how challenging it can be, so I won’t belabor it. Just know that this week, in particular, it all got the best of me. It’s important to admit that — and if there’s anyone around to help when you reach that breaking point, that critical mass of responsibility, tell them immediately and be very specific about what they can do to assist you.
A few days ago, I was looking at Twitter like I do compulsively every day and decided quite extemporaneously to stop tweeting. I took about five days off before I tweeted out my articles today and thanked some folks for sharing them (Thank you, if I didn’t tweet you directly; I saw it and I appreciate it). It was a good decision.
I’m not a cold turkey person; I don’t handle sudden and total abstinence well. It’s just hard for me to make drastic changes and stick to them. So I’ve still been reading my feed, but I’ve been refraining from active participation. My life has gotten really noisy, and I’ve been looking for ways to quiet it. This has proven to be an effective way to do that, at least in the short-term.
That said, there are a few things I just can’t resist sharing:
- This local news clip I cannot stop watching, because it’s amazing from start to finish:
- This really endearing story about a boy deciding to forgo the use of his prosthetic eye, because of Fetty Wap — and Fetty Wap’s nuanced, self-aware response, which thanks the boy’s mom for being “a fan of him as a person” (if not a fan of his music, because… yeah) and thanks the boy for being a fan of Fetty Wap, the artist:
- I definitely would’ve tweeted yesterday about how I spent a few hours traveling by car to an all-Bilal soundtrack. I would’ve shared these two versions of “When Will You Call,” the raw, “She just left me, and I’ve forgotten the purpose of soap and water” original version and the “I’ve had some distance and I can be a bit more mature from a reasonable remove” Terrence Blanchard version. I would’ve noted that this song chronicles a textbook case of ghosting, which didn’t have a name back in 2001 when the track was released. I would’ve mentioned that I used to feel as anguished as he sounded when I listened to this as a 21-year-old. But when I listened yesterday, I wondered what he did that made her decide not just to leave but not to let him know why she was doing it. Age and experience can drastically alter the way we listen to songs. Early Bilal reminds me of when I was a senior in college (His first album dropped that year, and I’d never heard anything like it). In retrospect, he just sounds so impossibly young and petty and angsty — like we all were at that age and still are on occasion, if we’re being honest. I’ve connected with a lot of his later music (and I listened to a ton of it yesterday), but there’s something so nostalgic about First Born Second. Certain albums and artists make you feel like you can reclaim time; as long as you can revisit their past works, your own past — however naive or fraught– is never entirely lost.
- This was so good, I just went ahead and tweeted it, break-be-damned:
Please read that. It’s so important.
- Lastly, I *might* have shared this clip from early yesterday evening. It was around dusk and at that time, I was fielding second-round essay edits, stressing over a proposal, considering quitting professional writing, starving myself. So I thought it would be a great time to dance. My daughter, who was dealing with some toddler-level stress of her own, did not agree:
Stacia L. Brown 