Volume 3, No. 28: I Don't Have Anything to Say

Greetings, book and treat people! This week’s issue would usually be for paying subscribers, but I’m sending it out to everyone instead.

It’s been a rough year, for me, for a lot of people. I’ve been writing through it, week in, week out, because that’s what I do, what I’ve always done. I wrote the rough draft of the essay I was going to send out today a few weeks ago. Yesterday, when I settled in to edit it, I just…stopped. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it. I could have. I could have wrangled it into the shape I’d envisioned. It might not have been the best essay I’ve ever written, but it would have been fine. I could have. I didn’t want to.

I shut my computer. Immediately, alternative newsletter ideas flooded my brain. A booklist? A review? Links to other newsletters I’ve recently loved? A reissue of a newsletter I sent out in the first months of Books & Bakes, when I had 62 subscribers? A note saying: I’m tired, see you next week?

I could have done any of those things. But thinking about them didn’t lead me anywhere new. It led me back to where I’d started, with the editing of the essay: I don’t want to. And then to somewhere else, somewhere truer:

I don’t have anything to say.

I said something similar to my therapist several months ago while talking about my creative writing. I phrased it differently, something like: “I feel like I don’t have anything interesting or important to say right now.” I don’t remember what her immediate response was, but in the course of the conversation she assured me that I absolutely have interesting and important things to say. It didn’t feel like a satisfying response, though I couldn’t figure out why at the time. (My therapist is incredible, btw—this is not a criticism of her!)

I can see now that I hadn’t expressed to her what I was actually feeling. It’s not that I don’t believe in the value of my own voice. I obviously do, because this is the 122nd issue of this newsletter, and that is a lot of words. What I was trying to say then, and what hit me so acutely and clearly yesterday, is that I’ve spent a lot of my life forcing words onto the page when they don’t come easily, and choosing new words when I can’t bully the first ones into existence. This isn’t a bad thing. Often it works. Often it’s necessary. Sometimes we have to speak up when we don’t want to, because some shit is hard to talk about. Sometimes, when you’re in the thick of a writing project, the only way to get to the good part is to push through the muck.

And sometimes you don’t have anything to say. It’s not because you don’t have anything to say. It’s because nothing new is going on in your brain. You’re in a fallow period. You’re chewing your cud. You’re a red oak bud in a January snowstorm waiting for April. You’re a bear in hibernation. Pick your metaphor. The world we live in does not value silence. It does not value cycles of rest and regeneration. It does not value all the gnarly roots and rushing sprouts and weird weather systems that exist inside of not having anything to say.

Two weeks ago, I did a midyear reading check-in. I wrote a little bit about the state of the newsletter:

I’ve been thinking a lot these past few weeks about the shape of this newsletter. I can feel myself on the edge of some kind of shift, although I’m not exactly sure what it is, or where it’s taking me. When I decided to write essays every other week at the beginning of this year, it was because I wanted a space to be a little freer, to explore books and ideas in depth. I’ve learned I can’t churn one pieces like these twice a month.

This is all to say: the newsletter is here to stay, but I’m not sure what it will look like in the future. This is part of any long-term project, although my spreadsheet-and-structure loving brain struggles with it. Things that don’t change don’t last, in my experience.

I don’t have anything to say about books this week. Things that don’t change don’t last. I have a regular newsletter planned for next week, but I might do something totally different. At some point, I might take a break. I don’t actually know where I’m going, other than: toward books, toward beauty, toward connection, toward joy. I’m meandering my way back to having something to say. It’s a hard, beautiful, foggy journey.