get good
Stubbornly, you’re still in the middle of your story: I was well, then, a rupture, now, I’m sick, and – you don’t know what happens next. Something will – despite the suicidality among Long COVID patients, you are determined to have a future. It’s just that in order to create it, you need to be able to tell a true story about yourself.
And inevitably, any story you tell will be a bridge between your dilapidated shelter and other people, so it has to be perfect, ambassadorial: it might be the only disability narrative this particular person encounters. Equally, it has to contain and metabolise all possible narratives and stereotypes of disability. It must know its history and transcend it – oh, and be entertaining, too. It has to be good. Of course.
This is exhausting. It’s a bad day, an in-bed-in-the-dark day, and you scroll online until a post brings you back here: someone on Tumblr complaining about someone on Instagram (the palimpsest of the corporatised internet) saying: You shouldn’t post your art until it’s good.
Tumblr hates this, but you think, yes: you, too, shouldn’t share your writing until it’s good. You’re an editor, after all. Obviously you think that.
This is how I never get things done. The judgemental eyes of my own perception filling my mind with shouldn't and shoulds; setting unattainable standards that stagnate creativity. They handicap my mind as my body handucaps my ambitions. I am in a box of disability of my own making. I do this with most of my endeavors. But I'm finding now at an advanced age, with the hard fought knowledge I thought I needed for good rebuttal was a form of gaslighting that just postponed my reply. And my reply never changed, it was my interpretation of my reply that changed. And the person I was replying to had disappeared long before. Don't kneecap yourself with self doubt and fear of mistakes. Even this, I "should" delete but honestly it can only get better if we put it out there. That's how we get good.