journal of a solitude
eclipse season is over
“And now I am trying to master the Hell in my life, to bring all the darkness into the light. It is time, high time, that I grew up.”— May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
April 1st
Sometimes I find myself very happy for no reason at all. It has nothing to do with my inbox. It may slightly have to do with caffeine intake. The red carnations from Trader Joe’s bloom on the kitchen table, the blinds slatted open so a little bit of sun comes in. I look up why carnations are bad flowers. They’re considered “cheap filler flowers,” but also the Internet tells me this isn’t necessarily true. They’re long lasting and versatile. Their affordability doesn’t mean they lack quality or beauty. Reddit says they can be found at the grocery store, and that’s apparently a telltale sign of a less sophisticated aesthetic. Red carnations are a classic symbol of love and admiration, of passion and affection. An agent emails me that although she is passing on my query, she wants to assure me that she deeply considered the work, and that she will be cheering me on from the sidelines. Fuck off, I think and almost want to write back, but the email is from Query Tracker, and there’s no option to keep the conversation going.
April 2nd
From my Yoga Teacher Training reading: Look at a situation in your life that is charged in some way. Write down your thoughts about it. Then, one by one, consider each thought and ask yourself, “What would I be without this thought? Notice how your breathing, your energy, and your mental experience shift. Consciously replace the thought with one that feels empowering and real-such as "I am free to choose my attitudes" or "There is another way to see this." Notice whether this new thought brings greater spaciousness to your mind.
April 3rd
I'm back at the Christian coffee shop. It’s still lovely. There’s a free drink on my account from three years ago. “Hell yeah,” the barista says, and I raise an eyebrow. The décor is all blue and white. The company logo is have a nice day! all lowercase. The coffee shop is attached to a local university. I’ve applied here multiple times and never gotten called for an interview. One of the application questions asks, “What is your relationship to Christ?” and my answer was always something like, “He had a lot of wild ideas I’d like to unpack.” Maybe leading with being Jewish isn’t helping either. Another writer once told me that maybe agents keep rejecting me because I state that I'm Jewish in my query letter. “So maybe you should take that out?” she suggested. “Oh,” I’d said in response, but really what I meant was “Fuck you.”
April 4th
For no real reason, it seems, I don’t feel like doing it today. Writing. I don’t want to do it. I'm sitting outside the coffee shop so I won’t smell like burned caramel. Three girls at the table next to me talk about what it’s really like to live in Christ. This isn’t even the Christian coffee shop. “I just need to go spend time with the Lord, like, time on my own, you know?” “I have thirteen roommates, and we’re actually looking for more.” “I’ve been working really hard on not having any unfinished business, and it’s really hard.”
I think about my to-do list, its never-ending nature. I’d really love to spend this afternoon at the mall. Sitting outside is nice. I should do this more often. The keys on my laptop are getting hot.
I need to write a monologue in the voice of a pet AI robot. I want to write an essay about writers who are starfuckers. I want a cookie. I sip my cold brew. It needs oat milk, but they charge extra. I miss the place in Nashville that had oat milk out on the counter, the place where I wrote so many essays, the place that’s since closed down and that makes it easier to miss. If it still existed, it might be unbearable to think about. At least now, no one can have the free oat milk, the paper straws, the zucchini muffins, the first table for two with the charging outlet right by your feet.
April 6th
A white Mercedes flies down the 5 South. The driver looks like my brother. A glitch in the system.
April 7th
Still working on the starfucker essay and feeling weary because it’s so provocative. But maybe that’s a sign I need to keep writing it. 3 rejections while I sit here. The book doesn’t feel like a good fit with the overall direction of the agent’s list. The book is funny and emotionally attuned, but it’s still a no. The book is too long.
Dizziness sends me to urgent care. They take my blood and tell me to rest. I am prescribed medicine for vertigo. I sleep at an angle or else I'm on a rollercoaster.
April 8th
The Glendale Galleria has so many shuttered stores. There are many new ones, too, but mostly high-end luxury brands. The mall smells like cinnamon pretzels. I walk over to the Americana to see my novel and she’s faced out. I buy a pair of jeans from Abercrombie & Fitch. It feels like 2011 for some reason. I order a matcha latte from what used to be a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and is now a very yellow storefront that feels like an Instagram post. The straws are shaped like hearts. It tastes very good.
April 11th
Happiness IS BY Choice NOT BY Chance, reads an inspirational poster in the bathroom of the sushi restaurant. And it’s not wrong.
April 12th
My daughter eats a peach cobbler in the sun at a Cowboy Festival. She has a yellow bow in her hair. She pans for gemstones in the pioneer village and rides a small tractor. She falls asleep quickly for her afternoon nap. Sometimes the days feel like blessings from the great beyond. I tuck moments into my pockets and slow each second down like I'm moving through mud. I want to remember. I want to remember. I want to be here forever. This is my family. This is my life. I made this little girl. She is a part of me.
April 13th
Argued with an Amazon bot for twenty-three minutes. Felt like something.
April 14th
The defense mechanism is no longer serving you.
You’re not living life; you’re living in the mind.
What if the whole problem (read as opportunity) is the avoidance of being here?
Get in the now.
Know yourself; know you are present.
I am looking for ease, for a state of ease. The ego wants a better moment.
A pose is a gateway to discover who you are.
What happens if you close in a pose?
There is nothing other than the now.
“My ego/consciousness felt this.”
Module 1 of Yoga Teacher Training is complete. On to Module 2. I am still the obstacle.
I want to put strawberry cold foam all over my life. The lights flicker in Starbucks and I only have forty-five minutes to write. I take a picture of a giant fluffy dog and expect Apple to tell me what kind of dog it is, but that feature isn’t a thing yet. When my test results come in, they read as high risk because I’ve had abnormal results before. They should really title them something else, since in the end the findings were negative. A thought: I really do create most of my own suffering. A feeling: Cool.
April 15th
While you have an interesting story here, I’ve found stories similar to this one to be difficult to sell and break out in the current market. I really hope you’re able to prove me wrong though.
We loved the energy in your writing and the nostalgia-steeped love story, but in the end, it leaned a little too coming-of-age for my list. It’s totally subjective, and while we’ll be stepping aside here we wish you all the best in finding representation. You’re certainly deserving!
Thank you so much for reaching out and sharing your work with me. This sounds like a worthwhile project but I’m afraid it’s not the right fit for my list at the moment.
April 16th
My therapist asks if the intrusive thoughts can be classified into either helpful or not helpful. I answer not helpful for each one that pops up. “That’s what you should work on this week,” she tells me, “sorting the thoughts into those two categories.”
Is it helpful or not helpful that I think if I don’t consistently check in on my family that they will all hate me? Or that if something bad happens it will be my fault? Or that, just in general, their wellbeing is my responsibility?
Probably all going into the unhelpful bucket.
April 17th
At Starbucks before my daughter’s Easter egg hunt at school. Two women talk about their lives at the table next to me. I'm supposed to be outlining the opening of my novel, but one of the women is a dancer and the other has a vicious cough. The dancer has been booked solid with work and this was the first chance she had to get away. She doesn’t feel guilty; she knows she’s not supposed to feel guilty. But she’s also angry with everyone in her life, resentful of their un-busyness, the space they have to be free. I eat a yogurt that I brought from home and an agent requests the first 50 pages of my manuscript. I send 53 or else they’d be in the middle of a scene.
I finished Journal of a Solitude last night and I think the moral is that the work is only meaningful if you have people to share it with—whatever that means to you. The woman at the other table keeps coughing, a dry cough. “Diva, step out!” the dancer says, but she’s in the middle of another story.
I have a few new followers on Substack. Who cares, lol? Not that I don’t appreciate it, but my thoughts drift to: is anyone actually reading this thing? My therapist asks to read something of mine, so I send her an essay that made people angry.
“Wow Brittany. I'm blown away. You're an amazing writer! That was moving, raw, and brilliant. Thank you for sharing.”—but is she only saying that because she’s my therapist? Is it even HIPPA compliant for her to read my work?—all these thoughts are going in the unhelpful bin.
April 18th
Good Friday. The call that it’s time to say goodbye to my husband’s father. In Atwater Village at a photo shoot. I eat brisket tacos on the car ride home and feel nauseous. I cry when hospice is on speakerphone. I look out the window. How have I only known my husband for nine years? It seems I’ve known him all my life. I'm not hungry when I take my daughter to In-N-Out for dinner. I give her my hamburger and she eats most of it. “Mommy try ice cream, Elaine try ice cream,” she says when she wants a chocolate shake. After she goes down for bed, I eat cold noodles on a paper plate and stare at my computer. I query more agents. It’s a holiday. It’s a weekend. I don’t know what I'm doing anymore. I stare at the screen. My husband texts me from the hospital, Just helped my dad send a text to all his friends basically saying goodbye. How do you do this? How does anyone do this?
A friend publishes an essay about her house burning down. Someone avoids me at a reading. I pretend not to notice. I ask a question about croissants to the author. “Why aren’t you in Nashville?” she asks and we hug. “We live here now. My daughter is two.” My friend and I both parked in the same lot, and we stand there talking, trying to give each other hope about things. I feel very young for a moment, like before I came of age as teenager, the innocence of what the word friend meant then, like two tiny souls greeting each other in a hallway, curious and confused, and I feel held, I feel loved. And then I drive home and call my husband to debrief. He’s putting away dishes and there is so much clanging in the background, I start to laugh.
What is the point of keeping a journal? Of journaling? Every therapist I’ve ever had has told me to write one. I can never keep one though because I feel the art is wasted if no one else sees it. That’s probably a wrong thought to have, something about the inability to do something purely for myself. But writing and sharing feels like doing something for myself.
I text my brother and he doesn’t answer. Maybe writing makes things hurt less. It’s like cleaning up a wound. It still needs to heal, but at least there’s been a bandage applied.
My daughter sleeps soundly upstairs. A screen glows on my face. I am illuminated by high-energy visible blue light, the kind humans see during the day, the kind that can keep you up at night.
April 20th
It’s really infuriating when park bathrooms don’t have changing tables.
April 21st
I don’t want to do the work. But I have to do the work. Accepted to a conference I can’t afford. Even with a scholarship, I don’t think I can make it work. Another rejection sends me spiraling. I cry at the gas station before picking my daughter up from school. I wear electric blue to hot yoga. I have to return something to Target. My stomach hurts.
I enter part two of a new novel uncertain. Every day, I must try not to lose steam. Slowly inching back toward God, toward purpose, toward meaning, toward higher Self, higher esteem, higher Art. And yes, I say this as I write about the mall and sleepaway camp and influencers and Los Angeles and Florida and on and on. To me, this is Art.
Cold brew in the afternoon keeps me alert and focused. Not really though because then someone is reading The Iliad at the coffee shop and I just can’t understand why. The couple at the end of my table is staring into each other’s eyes, but they’re supposed to be doing math.
April 23rd
Everyone goes on social media breaks and then they just come right back.
Praying on the living room couch and crying and thinking about how it was our last Christmas with his father and it gets darker in the room and our daughter is coughing upstairs in her crib from a cold. None of us will ever see him again. I feel so sick all the time. I should take a shower. I should do the laundry. I should read a book.
April 24th
I dream I'm going to some faraway destination and I'm unprepared for travel. I can’t seem to get my things together in time. I pause on various items and forget their meaning. And then I'm at the airport and my bags are falling open on the floor. And it’s always a rush, very urgent, no more time to waste.
I argue with another bot, but this time, about a toddler pillow.
Large iced caramel coffee with oat milk. Extra ice. I forget to water the flowers. Or I just don’t want to.
This was a really tough decision for me. It’s obvious how strong of a writer you are, and these pages are engrossing. Even though this has all the marks of a stellar book, I simply don’t think I could place it. I am sure this is failing on my own part and I apologize!
I wish you great success, but I don’t think I’m your guy.
I scream FUCK at the computer.
The friend that checked in on me for a fire that was nowhere near me. The same friend says nothing now as my father-in-law vomits black on his deathbed.
I draft a text message and delete it. Draft and delete. Draft again, delete again. Then I finally hit send.
We gave it careful consideration but ultimately decided that it does not meet our current needs. We wish you the best of luck.
Our daughter asks to read the Children’s Bible before bed.
My father-in-law passes away peacefully at sunset, his two sons at his bedside.
April 25th
I drink coffee and answer emails. The garbage truck comes. The mailman delivers mail. But we feel like ghosts.
My husband got Chick-fil-A and wondered if reality was what he had entered into, or if everyone else was real and he was not. Which experience was more true? Bubbles on the edge of my coffee mug because I heated it up in the microwave after it had gone cold.
I don’t think I’ve ever really understood exactly what salami is.
April 27th
Eclipse season is over. I enter the next module of Yoga Teacher Training. I wake up sick, so I Zoom into class. My husband sends me a picture of our daughter at the park. I save it to my phone and then try to send it to his dad. The last of our texts was a string of photos of our family. He used to text us every morning with a nice little message. I knew that one day the texts would stop. I understood logically that would happen. But now it seems impossible that I can’t write to him, that I will never be able to write to him again.
Yesterday we went to breakfast at the same spot we always went with him. The hostess looked at us strange, only 3 of us now instead of 4. One of the servers is pregnant and showing. She’s having a boy, due in August.
New life, that old cliché. Life goes on.
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This is beautiful, Brittany.
I’m a fan. Rejections fucking blow. Keep going!