The Urge to Write

Small business owner identity crisis things

It’s July: pride month is over, and we survived. Philly pride snuck up on us and then kicked us senseless. In my many years of living in Philadelphia, I’ve never attended the city’s main pride parade, nor have I ever intentionally gone out for Philly pride, so somehow the fact that a huge number of people do caught me by surprise, despite the fact that I’ve gone to New York the last two years to do exactly this. On the first Sunday in June, dykes began pouring through our doors the moment we opened them at 4:00 PM and didn’t stop until we closed. It was our highest sales day to date. This despite the fact that an arts and crafts workshop we had booked, forgetting that it would be pride, took up our second floor for the first four hours of the shift. One of our bartenders, who was off-duty, sweetly defended us on the patio to people who (reasonably) were wondering why the upstairs was closed for a trinket box decorating class on pride of all days. “They forgot what day it was!!” God bless her. The workshop ended, we cleared the space, and our hastily-booked dj ripped it until 2 AM. The whole night I had a feeling that I hadn’t experienced since our opening weekend: an exhausted surrender to the relentless crush, a type of mental disbelief that had no bearing on my body, which was moving without stop. At the end of the night, Clover and I wandered around, dazed, handing hundred-dollar bills to our staff to thank them. Then, wash the dishes, mop the floor, shoot the shit, fall asleep as the sky lightens.

We’ve been open a little over three months now, which feels like ages. Yesterday I remarked to Clover that I felt like my period was coming, but it seemed too soon, like I’d just had it. She laughingly commented that my sense of time might not be the most trustworthy at the moment. It’s true!

In other milestones, I graduated from Harvard on May 28th, a grueling but meaningful gauntlet of a day that during which Clover and I were both coughing and sneezing non-stop. And on June 21st, Clover turned 30, and we marked the day by closing the bar and throwing a rager, including a kiddie pool, a crab boil, and dj sets by our friends. Both days were so special, so memorable, so sweet, but I’m ready to be done with milestones for the time being. My need to always mark the occasion is not well matched to my level of available energy at the moment, leading to such occurrences as having a mini-meltdown while trying to boil 50 crabs in the bar kitchen. I’ve always had the tendency to take on too much and then freak out, but my mood is a little extra fragile at the moment.

The end of my time as a Harvard grad student is turning out to mean a subtle but profound identity shift. Not only am I not a student anymore, but I’m no longer part of an academic institution. Checking boxes on a fellowship application, I identified myself as an “independent scholar,” and I guess I am. The urge to write, which has been pretty much dormant since February, is stirring again, as I start to eke out a tiny bit more free time and brain space. Driving back to the beach on our day off, Clover was chatting about the history of psychiatry and I thought “oh, I’d like to do a newsletter about the feminist anti-psychiatry movement.” It felt so good to have that thought!

Execution is a bit more difficult. I sat down today to start the research for that newsletter, and was reminded again about my lack of institutional affiliation: no more Harvard library search engine, no more JSTOR. No more going to the coffeeshop every day to write, picking up from the day before. Writing time is now fragmented, spaced out, snatched where I can get it, between my more-than-full-time commitments at the bar and the dumbass part-time listicle editing job I do for money. Plus I need to go to the beach and hang out with my friends and have time to lay around by myself and do nothing or I will actually go insane. But mostly I’m absorbed by the role of business owner. A Val’s staff member asked me the other day if I always saw myself starting a business and I practically screamed the word “no.” It’s true, I can’t remember ever imagining that. I wanted to make this one specific thing exist in the world and in doing so I made a new version of myself: one who, however uneasily, owns a business.

On the phone with my friend Jonathan, I said that it would be really nice to get some sort of small fellowship right now, because I could really use some institutional validation for my scholarship. Jonathan laughed at me, saying “didn’t you just defend your dissertation at Harvard University?” It’s true, I did just do that. But now it’s done, that door’s closed, and if I want to still be a writer, still be a historian, I have no institution to legitimize me. I have to make the way myself. To write, I need a clearing around me of energy and time and space. I’ve got no such clearing right now, just a thicket of demands: the demands of the path I’ve chosen and for which I’m incredibly grateful, to be clear.

But I want to publish my dissertation research as a trade book. I want to write and publish my novel. Then I want to write my next nonfiction book. I want to write another scholarly article. I want to write a bunch of stuff in this newsletter - I have open drafts in various stages on the current state of “queer representation,” the history of feminist self-defense classes, and now the feminist anti-psychiatry movement. I tell all this to Clover late at night, and she makes an overwhelmed and concerned face at me. But there’s another junior academic who I vaguely follow on the internet who I like to compare-and-despair about every 18 months or so. They’ve written for a bunch of trendy outlets and appear to have two books under contract - one nonfiction, one novel. I look at their Substack and seethe. I read a novel by another queer writer whose career I’m jealous of and it sucks. I could write a better novel than that, and I will. One of the greatest things I’ve realized in my thirties is that jealousy can be a roadmap.

For now, I hold on to that glimmer of writing energy when I feel it and try to seize the windows of writing time when they appear. I try to trust that living this story will carry me through until I can hack my way back into the clearing once more.