It was on the fourth hour of trying to get my brain to produce something interesting that I gave up and decided to take a break.
If there’s one thing you should know about me is that I’m pretty bad at doing, well, anything unless I “feel like it.” Those three words were probably the bane of my parents’ existence when I was a child. Chores? When I felt like it. Homework? When I felt like it? Showering? When I felt like it. Eating? When I felt like it.1 I think my parents probably thought I would develop enough self-discipline to grow out of it, but joke’s on them, I’m thirty-eight years old and I still can’t seem to do anything unless I feel like it.
Including writing.
I am in something of a media rut.
Earlier this year, I wrote about the lowest common denominator, about how I can’t seem to find anything to hold my interest or attention. Back then I blamed it on the algorithm (and I still do), but I’m wondering if there isn’t something still a bit more insidious at play.
I think it’s a lack of boredom.
The longer I exist in this increasingly interconnected world, the more I’m beginning to wonder if humans just aren’t meant to process the amount of information we are subject to everyday, every hour, every minute. The news is never good, and the takes are always worse. Always, always, always, there is something that demands my attention, my activism, my moral clarity and condemnation. I can’t escape the horrors of the world, nor do I want to. I can’t look away, not only for ethical reasons, but for the exact same reasons I found it so difficult to quit smoking all those years ago. It’s a compulsion, an itch I have to scratch, and yeah, it might be slowly killing me, but that’s a problem for the future.
None of this leaves any room in my brain for silence.
Something I’ve come to understand about myself is that in an incredibly saturated media environment, it is not only impossible to enjoy myself, it is also impossible to create. The definition of creating something is to bring something into existence from nothing. How can someone create when everything already exists everywhere all at once? I don’t have to work to find anything to occupy my mind anymore. It already exists at the tips of my fingers.
I have to work to be bored.
So I had been working for four hours when I decided I need a break. Twenty minutes is usually long enough for me to consume a YouTube reaction video, or if I’m feeling particularly unmotivated, I will allow myself one hour to watch a YouTube essay instead.
But today, just as it had been every other day for the past several weeks, there was nothing on my YouTube algorithm I wanted to watch. Having hyperfocused on all my interests in the past weeks, the algorithm has been unable to serve anything new or different. The problem with the algorithm is that it might be a little too trainable. Now that I have sufficiently fed it everything that catches my attention, I’ve grown bored of it, as though YouTube and I are in a long term relationship that has grown stale.
Of course, I have a plethora of other streaming services to choose from, and I can’t remember which one I finally decided on, but one of the suggested titles that came up was the 1989 Studio Ghibli film Kiki’s Delivery Service.
All right, I thought. I remember liking this as a kid. Why not give it another go?
The thing about Studio Ghibli films is that they are exquisitely vibe-driven. I have…thoughts about vibes, but honestly, when done right, they set the right mood. Ghibli films don’t have world-ending stakes in the same way western narratives prefer; in fact, many of the conflicts are intimate, personal, small. Gentle. I could use gentle. Gentle is good because I can put it on the background while I distract myself with other things, like doomscrolling through The Site Formerly Known as Twitter. Of a necessity, I’ve devoted a lot of my energy to bearing witness, donating to humanitarian causes, and calling my representatives for a ceasefire. Gentle was good. I needed gentle.
Kiki’s Delivery Service made me cry.
There is something about aging that keeps tears all too near the surface. Perhaps that is due to the years of emotional accumulation and life experience, and the fact that I have the depth to appreciate the beauty in wholesomeness in a way I could not when I was younger.
Nevertheless, Kiki’s Delivery Service—ostensibly a children’s movie about a thirteen-year-old witch—hit hard.
The basic plot is simple. Kiki is a young witch who moves to another town in order to figure out how to witch. One of her joys is flying, and she finds out she can use that gift to provide a service to the town by delivering things that need delivering to people. But the thing about turning a joy into a job is that the easy grace that once came with a gift disappears, and you suddenly lose the thoughtlessness that made your gift a joy in the first place.
Kiki loses her ability to fly.
Without even thinking about it, I used to be able to fly. Now I'm trying to look inside myself and find out how I did it.
I feel like I have lost my ability to fly.
At a certain point in the movie, after she’s seemingly lost her magic, Kiki talks to an artist friend for whom she is posing. Ursula, the artist friend, talks about her times when she has artist’s block, and counsels Kiki to take a break. Take walks. Look at scenery. Sleep in until noon. And pretty soon, without thinking about it, she believes Kiki will be able to fly again.
How many times have I told myself about this when it comes to writing? Refilling a creative well is important, but unfortunately, wells cannot be refilled simply because I need or want them to. Such things take time. Sometimes, we don’t have the luxury of that time, especially when we need to rely on our gifts to make a living, as Kiki does. I have been at this exact spot so many times in my writing career, and every time I know Ursula’s words are true, even if they are hollow comfort in the moment. Ursula talks about the times when she can’t paint, when she was copying other people’s work, and the realization that she has to discover and develop her own style—her own reason—for painting.
“We fly with our spirit,” Kiki says.
We make art with our spirit.
My spirit is very tired.
And then the stakes of the movie kick in.
Towards the end of the film, an airship accident puts one of Kiki’s friends in mortal danger, and she finds she must be able to fly in order to save him. But that thoughtless ease is no longer there; she must be intentional about it. Her control is erratic, she bounces off walls, but soon learns to use the wild flailing of her broom and body to use these obstacles as aids to get her where she needs to go.
And then I started to cry.
I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite, formative books, The Amber Spyglass, towards the end of the story when Lyra is no longer able to read the alethiometer.
“Why—” Lyra began, and found her voice weak and trembling—“why can’t I read the alethiometer anymore? Why can’t I even do that? That was the one thing I could do really well, and it’s just not there anymore—it just vanished as if it had never come . . .”
“You read it by grace,” said Xaphania, looking at her, “and you can regain it by work.”
“How long will that take?”
“A lifetime.”
“That long . . .”
“But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you.”
I have to believe this. That my writing will be even better after a lifetime of thought and effort. Grace earned is worth more than grace granted.
And it will take not just time, but conscious intention.
In hindsight, the ADHD was so obvious it’s kind of painful.