I write stream-of-consciousness rants on a blog. These pieces aren’t really essays, and they certainly aren’t academic or journalistic in nature. I try to do research, but I don’t know how credible my essays are, and therefore how convincing my conclusions are. If there is any consistency in my work, it’s that I try to talk about “big subjects,” but I do it haphazardly. I am not an expert on economics or climate science. I worry a great deal about things I don’t understand. In short, I haven’t been taking some very basic writing advice: write what you know.

I am desperate to communicate, failing at every turn to get out what I want to express. I am committed to working. I don’t self-entertain, I never did as a child because it was trained out of me. I write, I do housework, I keep everyone fed. It doesn’t seem like a lot of work to me because my housework load has been so heavy in the past. If I dedicated all my time to focusing on finishing my book, I think my mental health would decline even further. I’m not okay with my thoughts. I don’t like reflecting on them, yet I gravitate to writing in the early morning, I write with an insatiable desire to just type, type, type, whatever it is that comes into my head. The really painful thing is reviewing what I have written.

Perfectionists never measure up to our own standards. I am tasked with improving my craft as a writer with the best tactics I can learn. I want to, but my motivation is also a deep drive I can’t describe except to other people who can’t stop creating. While I have impossible standards for myself, I also have no way to gauge the difference between what’s perfect and what’s just okay. I expect greatness from my book, and therefore put a lot of weight into every piece that actually makes it into my draft. I would say that over the past seven years, I’ve put about 5% of what I’ve written into the book draft. I’m going to turn 30 before I finish it, which scares me, honestly, but it’s just a fuck ton to explain.

The beginning has been moved and rewritten so many times because I don’t know where to begin. Right now I’m working on a beginning where I recount everything I can remember about the births. It’s been weeks of work, adding bits at a time and recounting the stories aloud, constantly triggered by the vivid images I’m recollecting as I write. Even this post has taken many days of work, many attempts, and I finally pieced the beginning together from several entries before I could write. It seems clunky because it is.

A massive obstacle to writing directly about my experiences is my mental health. I have PTSD from what I’m trying to dig up every day. I don’t think I want to know how many people with PTSD have tried, and how many have failed or succeeded, at trying to write a memoir about the things that gave them PTSD. This makes every writing session gratingly painful, distracted, dissociative, and grief-stricken. I tend to put on music that pulls at my emotions as I write, because it helps to recognize that I can feel my emotions about these things. I couldn’t express my feelings at the time, but I can now as an adult.

I have been writing about what I don’t know because the vagueness of injustice and inequality has been easier to discuss than my own trauma. This is a way of keeping my defenses up. It’s also a way of minimizing my own experience. I still have a warped sense of self-importance in the world, thinking my writing can influence a reversal in the trajectory of human history as it happens. I am learning that I am one small human, and perhaps I can’t save the world, or anyone at all. I can only offer some words about what I have observed, and maybe it will offer something worthwhile to those who read it. I can only do that if I talk about what I know.