When story feels inpenetrable

On writing through oblivion

Photo by Jordan Wozniak

My attraction to essay writing lies in that unique feeling of recognition between reflection and analysis. All humans crave the structure of a story to make sense of our experience. Essayists shape that story and draw some type of meaning.

In Haley Nahmann’s 200th Substack essay, she talks about the discomfort of when those stories feel impenetrable. When you are full of experience yet unable to put into words what that means. She cites a definition of oblivion — “a state of affairs about which there is no information or knowledge…only ambiguity and potential.” It’s the place we sense something is happening, but we’re unsure of what.

My recent attempts at essays have felt like I’m wading through that oblivion. They’re imbalanced. There’s an abrupt quality to the writing, and I don’t feel like that’s a style where I thrive. I’m more comfortable in prose where I can stretch my legs.

I find myself losing connection with my voice whenever I’m I experience this type of confusion and suffocation. Because I feel this sense of anxiety to dig into an idea, but with no place to start, I shift into this strange sense of floating, viscerally uncomfortable and unable to find my thread of thought. My mind stuffed like mid-December sinuses.

It makes me consider the question of why writing matters so much to me. I think gaining a more stable access to my voice lies in understanding that answer. Knowing why, in a deeper way, I come to the page in the first place. Why I care to find meaning.

I’ve spent the last two years really trying to understand myself as a writer, so much so that I’m deathly sick of talking about it. Partly because I feel as if I’m still standing at the starting line of a race I keep claiming I’d like to run. But also because it’s really not that interesting. What person hasn’t felt slightly alienated from their creative brilliance?

Someone the other day said that when you reach your late 20s, you one day wake up and just think differently. I think that’s accurate, at least in my experience. The transformation was so quiet, so void of the dramatics we imagine around major life shifts, that it almost feels to unremarkable to write about. I went to bed one night with dreams and worries and longings and specific plans for how to contend with all of them. And then I woke up and I was this person and everything felt less urgent and that was that.

Now I have to build this new understanding of myself and my identity without the urgency of youth pushing me forward. I wonder if this is why so many people feel like they have to figure out everything immediately or else they’ll never accomplish anything at all. It’s a much calmer place to be, but also it’s also unnerving. Life used to feel like a constant looking forward. Now I get to stand still and catch my breath. I’m not used to it.

I start to get anxiety when I write about this too much because it feels so static. I seem to keep talking about this idea around identity and voice and not moving forward. I also hate feeling like this small receptacle that needs filled with advice. Like I’m asking for what will inevitably feel like condescension. That’s not it.

I guess I’m just saying I’m in that oblivion right now. But I think it’s benefiting me to lean in to that for a bit, absorbing the action until the meaning starts to unfurl itself. To sit in that unknowing, but not just sit there, to breathe there, become aware of my surroundings. Then one day that ambiguity and potential starts to congeal into some sort of concrete direction and my discomfort can lead me out.

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