Tenacious Resistance, Creative Menacing, and the Ongoing Horrors of Being Perceived.

This Is What I Know To Be True {A Journal of Real Life} 03.12.25

Photo by Millo Lin on Unsplash

i.
This is hard.

I don’t want it to be hard. I resist the hardness. Deny it. Turn my back on it and bury my head in its sand and cover my ears and eyes with my hands and sing ‘lalalala’ in my outside voice to drown out the voices inside my head (you know, the ones that say a whole lot of nasty bullshit that can be summed up very easily as ‘this should NOT be so fucking difficult for you, loser’).

Showing up here? Spilling words on the page? It should be easy. More than easy. I should be greedy for it, ravenous, even. After so much silence, so much time doing everything BUT writing, I should have such a gluttonous pile of words saved up inside me that it’s almost too much. The sight of a blank page and a pulsing cursor awaiting the shape of a whole new story? Well, it should leave me entirely undone in some sort of holy rapture.

And it might, quite honestly. It might. If I let it.

It could be that once I truly start (once I locate the damn release valve and exhale this breath I’ve been holding for almost the past two years), I won’t be able to stop and I’ll write and write and write and write until I’ve written the truths of 27 lifetimes and laid it all bare and I can rest, empty and spent and as satisfied as any sort of artist worth their salt has a right to expect.¹

But truthfully, it would appear I’m doing my utmost NOT to find out if this is correct (I am highly skilled at not finding things out when I decide I don’t want to; ask my besties, they’ll tell you a tale or two about my stubborn tendancy toward unknowing).

To find out if I would keep writing, I would have to truly engage with the practice of writing again, and that scares the bejesus out of me.

I can’t entirely tell you why.

ii.
Even if it IS true that I’m not sure exactly where that truth lands, the whole point of this post is to tell you what I DO know. Just to make good on that promise, here are two things that I’m really solid on.

1. Writing (and all that it holds, much of which lives far beyond the limited scope of language) is my thing. What I came here to do. My purpose. My raison d’etre. The whole point of the entire shebang (said shebang being my existence on this particular planet in this particular body/spirit/heart, at this particular time). It’s my why. My gift. My offering. My healing. The blood and guts and bones of me. At the risk of falling headlong into hyperbole, it is why I’m alive.

2. After 20 or so years of writing publicly, of it being the most unquestionable, automatic, reflexive part of my practice, I suddenly found myself almost entirely unwilling to be perceived. Not just reluctant, not just uninterested, but totally and fundamentally opposed.
   

   

   
   3. And so (as you may have noticed), for the most part, I stopped. Writing. Posting. Showing up. Offering myself for public perception. This is all well and good, healthy even (except, you know, the part where I make my living on the back of some measure of visibility, and well, you know, the other thing about being a menace).

iii.
What is the thing about being a menace? I’m glad you asked.

There is a movie that I believe everyone should see especially if you are a creative anything (and also if you think that Cate Blanchet is basically a singular example of perfection and should marry you, as I do). But if you make art, most certiantly if you resist making the art you are here to make, it’s a must-watch.

There is one clip from this film that is so deeply, fundamentally true that I watch this little minute-and-a-half over and over whenever I need a little tough love pep talk. Whenever I need to remember why the fuck I’m here and what the answer is (and yes, the answer is always the same).

In it, Bernadette’s friend and colleague Paul says to her:

”People like you must create. That's what you were brought into this world to do…If you don't, you become a menace to society. I think there is one simple answer to all your problems. Get your ass back to work, and create something”

And that, my friends, basically sums it up.

Like Bernadette, without this work, I’m just over here tenaciously, un-creatively menacing my way through life. I picture the beasts from Where The Wild Things Are when I write this. I’m just gnashing and roaring (silently) and woe-is-me-ing and generally making a nuisance of myself. This part is not hyperbolic, you can ask anyone.

Menace. Pure and simple.

iv.
Of course, this is not the first time that I’ve struggled with the pull to the page. There have been periods where I didn’t want to write the story and periods where the story didn’t want to / wouldn’t agree to / wasn’t ready to / couldn’t yet safely be written.

There were times when I was too deeply involved in the living of the story to extricate myself enough to step back and write it. And, of course, there were times when I wanted to write so badly it hurt, but the pool of inspiration seemed to have dried up overnight (oh muse, oh muse, why hast thou forsaken me?)

This hasn’t been like any of those times.

Telling you this time was different makes me feel as if I am now supposed to (by virtue of some imaginary rule of writing) tell you what it IS like this time. But even the thought of this makes a wall of resistance rise in my chest. Much like the unwillingness to be perceived, the words (in their presence and their absence) feel utterly disinterested in offering themselves up for explanation.

And, wouldn’t you know it, this understanding feels like its own sort of freedom.

Why am I pushing myself to explain the why, how, where, and what of my not writing when I could simply start to play with what is here and present right now?

v.
This is mostly a rhetorical question. If I could answer it, I suppose I wouldn’t need to be stream of consciousness sharing it with all of you. But here we are, you and I, so let’s make the most of it.

vi.
Right now, I’m doing what makes the most sense to me. I’m rewatching The Vampire Diaries from the start for the third time², and I’m trying to eat less pizza and more salads and I’m mending torn clothing until my tendonitis plagued left-hand aches, my tiny uneven stitches repairing something that was broken into some form of wholeness.

I am reading books, writing quotes in my notes app, and showing up for a tedious day job that pays the bills (one cannot support oneself with words when one is refusing to write them, after all) and offers health insurance.

I am spending time with my girlfriend and allowing myself an entirely new experience of relational healing. I am wishing for another dog (my landlord will not allow it), dreaming of charting a new beginning somewhere where the air feels more alive and plotting my 50th birthday in Scotland (yes, you are all invited).

All these things are likely metaphors for much larger themes, and doings, and undoings, but I find myself less and less interested in trying to untangle the underlying meaning. Or, at the very least, I’m less interested in taking the time to do it cleanly enough that it makes sense outside of the confines of my own body.

My life is small and quiet and deeply internal. This is mostly okay, except in the ways that it is really not.

I feel like some of you will know exactly what I mean.

vii.
i texted her that i was worried about her, pushing hard, burning the candle at both ends.

She responded, “But I am so alive. Even though it’s hard, I am so alive, so it’s okay”.

I asked (just to clarify because text, you know), “Alive as it more than normal alive?”. She said yes, but instead of being happy for her, I felt myself sink into a deeply embodied sadness, a bowling ball lodged right between my ribs (oh, the still novel awareness that comes with a year of somatic therapy).

I abandoned my desire to write here or work on Etsy or anything else I had planned to do, and gave myself permission to lay down and release the crazy exhaustion that came over me in that instant. Because another thing I know to be true is that I am feeling anything but 'so alive / more than normal alive / lit up by the experience of living. And fuck, I miss that feeling.

viii.
I am aware that the above sounds quite depressing/concerning/potentially alarming. But it isn’t, not really. It is a useful piece of information, wholly explainable by various and sundry logistical realities of present-day living (both up close and personal and the dumpster fire of right-now politics).

It is also an invitation (and this, too, I indeed know to be true) to be with what is real and to lean into what I already know (and know so well I’ve written the instructions already, leaving breadcrumbs for myself more than once).

If I want to feel alive (especially if it's not coming easily), I better damn well go and chase that aliveness down like my life depends upon it (because, you know, it entirely does).

jeanetteleblanc

A post shared by @jeanetteleblanc

ix.

x.
Right now, I believe, resistance is everything. So, you know. Read the poem.

“Resist disappearing from the stage,
unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,
the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face
that has become your own, though all your life
you have resisted it.”

xi.
I feel resistance right now to ending this thing.

It’s different from the resistance I felt to begining it, but rooted in the same soil, I believe, and it’s not a soil that I have chosen and cultivated³ for myself. It’s the ground laid for me by culture and society and expectations and history and all the protectors and naysayers and critics in my head. One that wants to convince me there is a way to do this and a way not to do this and somehow I’d better fucking toe that line.

I didn’t know that when I started to write this paragraph, but I know it now—such is the magic of continuing to write even when you’re not quite sure you have anything to say.

So the voices are still shouting, only now, instead of listing all the reasons I should not start, all the things that are more important to do, and all the possibilities of failure, these voices are nagging that I have not made enough statements of any degree of importance to warrant closing the loop.

I should keep going, they say, keep writing, keep pushing the boulder up the hill until I have made a point (though I do not think the voices know, any better than I, what that point should be). The summary of this whole cacophony of doubt is that I have not written anything good enough to get me off the hook from writing more.

This is, of course, utter bullshit. A meandering Substack post that never had a specific point to begin with does not need to end with any sort of absolute wisdom or undeniable elegance. It just has to end. But the fact that I am here now, talking to all those voices with their knickers in a twist over my lack of an ending, well, it means that I began and that I kept going. And that means that the resistance didn’t win tonight.

I think that, all by itself, is as solid of a close as I could have possibly hoped for.

xii.
What’s the thing that haunts you, the thing you’re meant to create—the thing that calls your name even as you turn your back on it? Whats the thing that, without it, you become a menace? Tell me about it.

1. I frequently tell my (often dissatisfied) students and clients that satisfied people don’t make great art. The tension creative souls feel between what has been done and what could be done is a necessity, a holy gift, the fuel to a fire that needs to be fed. I stand by this, even when I really wish I could escape it myself.

2. Delena forever. IYKYK

3. I recently created a whole line of products for my shop based on a poem called “Don’t Bloom Where You’re Planted,” which now makes me smile. You see, another thing I know to be true is that writing weaves distant and disparate pieces of life together. It reveals relationships, compounds wisdom, and illuminates, just like that. And yes, we are often born, or transplanted into soil that is not of our choosing, or our liking, soil not conducive to our growth and becoming. It took me a long time to realize that I didn’t have to stay where I was planted, that I could choose my own garden, and watch myself grow into riotous bloom.

While we’re on the topic, please check out my shop and all the new products (candles, clothing, mugs, journals, and more). Though I have not been writing, I have been putting my whole heart and creative soul into growing my line of prints and products, and I would love to have you stop by for a virtual visit.

https://jeanetteleblancart.etsy.com

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