The tremendous weight of words

Putting pen to paper sometimes feels like nothing short of inscribing time itself. Reading what I wrote is enlightening and akin to resurrecting a consciousness deeply steeped in experience

I did it!” I exclaimed to myself at 5.15 am on Monday. I was alone in our living room en route to the toilet when I paused to look at the time. I was proud of myself. I had managed to clock in about five hours of sleep on the guest bed. It may not sound like much, but it was the first time I had ever managed to sleep alone under our roof. I had battled the separation anxiety that had, until then, prevented me from even attempting such a feat. But I had a sore throat and was prone towards coughing. We had already been through two weeks of restless nights because our toddler had an ear infection, then a cold, then a cough. I wanted to relinquish the fear of waking my partner or my toddler up with my coughing, so chose not to co-sleep.

I laughed when I heard myself say I did it, because it is something our toddler says each time he successfully completes a task independently. It doesn’t matter to him whether he did it well, or on time, or even to his own satisfaction or ours. If he breaks an egg into a bowl and then scrambles it with an eggbeater, he’ll exclaim, “I did it”. If he washes his hands and mouth on his own, he’ll announce his success. The other day, as I was cooking, he managed to un-assemble and then re-assemble to perfection a 24-piece puzzle featuring a firefighter rescue scene. It is meant for children older than 3 years. He quietly sat by himself and completed the frame first, then the middle, and when he was done, he said, “I did it!” I felt awe.

What I’m learning, through our interactions, is to similarly celebrate myself. It costs next to nothing to revel in one’s small achievements. Daily, I feel like, as a mother and an immigrant woman, I have to frequently summon a superhuman strength. And I often fall short. I run out of steam. I feel exhausted. Spent. And then, somehow, I unearth some source of resilience that gives me the energy to either begin again or to continue. And for the longest time, I have not cherished my tiny successes. I defer my relishing of them because I have ten thousand other things to do. But these days, I’ve been wilfully trying to alter my behaviour by making the time to pause for ceremony. 

I did it. That’s all I need to say to myself, and I don’t need anyone else to listen. The validation is purely self-directed and self-initiated. The more I perform this, the less dependent I feel on external sources of acknowledgement. The more able I am to revel in my self-hood, as if it were a private realm with its own metric system that is independent from other people’s views, judgments and opinions.

When I find the time, I try to transcribe the chapters I handwrote last year that are meant to constitute my next book, Milking Time. I allow myself to feel astonished by my own writing. I enjoy that I do not know how a sentence will end. That I could be unpredictable to myself feels marvellous. The fact that everything was handwritten means I am yet to discover how many words all of it amounts to. I am about three-fourths done and I am at 45,000 words. Each word feels like something that was carved out of my flesh and shaped by my breath. I was thinking about Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, my pursuit was different. I feel like whenever I seized the opportunity to write—usually when our toddler was asleep—I was inscribing time, sculpting it intuitively. Re-reading it feels like resurrecting a consciousness or a subjectivity that was so deeply lived, so profoundly felt in my bones. Re-reading feels like re-living, but with the comfort of distance.

Who knows when I’ll finish transcribing, and when I’ll find the time to edit and send the manuscript to my agent and to a future editor. Some writers have the luxury of dedicating themselves entirely to writing. Some writers, like me, write only when the weight of the words that have emerged from the body gets too immense to bear and so the act of writing is a form of relieving oneself, like a cloud burst. It feels astonishing to look back at the haze of early motherhood and witness the strange clarity of my thought. When I read what I wrote, I see how I waded through the mist and the fog, my words a kind of torchlight tunnelling through, offering perspective and insight while continuing to ‘feel’. Sometimes I compare my last book and this one and feel astonished by how significantly I have changed in this intermediary time frame. This next book is fleshy and full of emotion. Yet, given the circumstances, how difficult it is to find the time to attend to it, it’s even likely it will remain unpublished, nestled between my hard disk and the shoe box in which the handwritten notes live. Strangely, I would be okay with that. What matters most is that I did it! I wrote another book. And I love it.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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