Invisible Work

Writing your way toward something to say.

I searched my inbox the other day for the last time I had corresponded with a particular friend, and accidentally ran across this paragraph I wrote in the second year of my PhD:

I’m in one of the weird periods where I don’t have anything to say in public writing, in the sense that I am too alienated from what people are talking about and not expert enough yet in what I want to say to do so. In those moments, I really feel the absence of private writing from 2016 life; the more I study intellectuals, I realize how central correspondence has always been for intellectual community and the development of ideas. I’m trying to do it more, and find it relieves some of the loneliness of not being in public writing mode.

It was one of those strange, relieving things to encounter: your past self feeling exactly like your current self, a reminder that such things are recurring patterns. Later that year, I wrote an essay for Jacobin that led to publishing my first review essay in TNR, and the following three years was my most productive period of public writing thus far. But the “lost” period before that was real: during that time, I started tons of essays and blog posts, but they all felt “off.” I was phoning it in, my heart wasn’t in it; my life conditions and intellectual inputs had changed—now I was consuming philosophy and history, not “the discourse”—but my skills hadn’t caught up yet. I had lots of material, but not enough purchase on it to have anything I felt confident saying.