Finding my voice again

Has anyone seen a plush Solzhenitsyn?

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be cancelled. Fortunately, I’m not important enough for anyone to cancel me. I’ve had people cancel coffee dates and even real dates, but no one has tried to end my career. I guess it helps that no one really cares what a substitute teacher thinks.

Still, while I was working, I was afraid to write. Afraid that if I wrote the truth I’d lose my income, and the connections I’d worked so hard to build. I felt like part of the team… until I didn’t. I felt safe… until I didn’t.

Now that I can write again, something is happening that almost never happens to me.

Is that writer’s block?

I’m a person who can’t stop writing. I write in my head all day when I’m walking or at the store or even trying to sleep. I have articles stored up for miles on everything from gender politics to trigger warnings to why texting will destroy us all. I never stop writing.

But today it’s hard. I’m finally writing something important, that I’ve been supposed to do for a year. And it’s not coming. That never happens to me.

What am I afraid of?

Maybe after being no one for so long, it’s scary to think of being someone again. I can’t even figure out what to wear now that I’m not in my teacher disguise. Fortunately yoga pants will do for today.

Being a writer is essentially a solitary sport, and I am an extreme team player. As much as I love the quiet and the lack of “nigga bitch pussy!” while I sit at my desk in my apartment, I’m lonely. I want someone to play with, but all of my friends are scattered across not just the country and the world, doing important things. Ari is in Jerusalem, God is in is heaven, and I’m in West Philly where I don’t belong, wondering if I should just clean the house instead of writing.

It never hurts to clean the house, I suppose.

I called my pal Mark Judge, but I guess he’s writing his own articles, or more likely skateboarding. Last night I was talking with a friend from the neighborhood whom I don’t know well, and I mentioned Mark. She was shocked that I’m friends with the guy who was drawn into the Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford scandal.

“Are you glad that Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court?” she asked.

I was shocked for a moment that someone actually believed the Brett did anything wrong… I guess I’ve been hanging out with Mark for so long that I know the backstory of the opposition research hit they tried to pull on Kavanaugh, dragging Mark in and nearly ruining his life. A less strong man would have been driven to suicide. I’m so glad that Mark is as strong as he is because without him, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing. Without him I probably wouldn’t be any number of things I am now.

When I first started writing for Splice Today, which is more libertarian than anything but definitely not progressive, one of my ex boyfriends from college told me I was being manipulated by conservative men. This was the piece to which he referred, The Beauty of Female Passion. It has never ceased to amaze me, from 1992 on, how liberal and progressive men tell me I don’t know my own mind, while conservative men ask me questions and seem genuinely interested in what I think.

I remember a conversation with another Mark, many years ago, that started when he asked me why I was a liberal. As we got about three hours into talking (we were in a van on the way to DC and stuck in traffic) the thought flashed across my mind, so clearly I can remember it verbatim, 33 years later. “This person is genuinely interested in what I think.” Not in proving a point or converting me to anything.

That progressive ex from college got mad at me when I told him I was reading Bari Weiss. Not that I took any particular stance, just that I was reading her. Thought crime? He unsubscribed from my blog over my stance on Israel. We haven’t talked since.

So here we are. I used to write with a copy of Mark’s book The Devil’s Triangle on my desk but I can’t seem to find it now. It will turn up. With as much as I cling to pieces of writing, maybe I should get a teddy bear or something. Have you ever seen a plush Solzhenitsyn?

This dude would NOT make a good teddy bear.