On doing the work in a pandemic, by John Proctor

From Re/Creation founder John Proctor:

You may have noticed a lapse in communication on my part over the past couple of months - there are a few reasons for this that I want to share with you, and also give you a little insight into my personal challenges lately in the (hopefully) late stages of this pandemic.

I recently shared on social media that both of my parents and one of my step parents have recently had Covid-19. My dad had it in November, fortunately with only mild symptoms. My mom had it significantly worse after my stepdad brought it home just before Christmas, especially since she's recovering from having a third reconstructive back surgery in September, but she now seems to be finally out of the woods. 

One by-product of being born to teenage parents is you tend to think they'll live forever, or at least as long as you do. Spending a couple of weeks with your mom on an oxygen monitor and waiting for her to make a turn for the worse can dispel any notions of parental immortality.

Another thing I’m really struggling with right now is more quotidian, perhaps less existential. As I define and execute my workdays from home in the middle of a pandemic, I’m having a hard time defining what it means to act. 

This morning I was reading Andrea Stuart’s 2017 essay “Travels in Pornland” in which she notes that we live in an age “where more and more of us conflate doing with watching.” I’ve spent hours and hours adjusting and readjusting my to-do list to orient myself to a bias primarily toward action and secondarily toward reflection, but I’m finding, as a writer especially, that I sometimes have a hard time defining which is which. Perhaps more pressingly as a teacher and storyteller, I’m starting to question my own suppositions about which is which.

Most days I find myself trying to divide my time between “service work” and “creative work.” For example, here’s how Tuesday’s to-do list fit into this dichotomy:

Service:

• Plan for second semester - finalize syllabi & texts

• Re/Creation writing workshop tonight

• Organize shared folder, esp Antonio Battle stuff for Rekha

• Put together group meeting between our students and Cornell around parole prep

Creative:

• Read from and annotate Best American Essays 2017

• Edit reflective piece for Joni’s pub 

• Archive journal, pulling pieces for Goodman project and I Love You reliquary

• Make master list-narrative of threads for Goodman

The struggle I encounter daily is perhaps reflected in the order I put these “halves.” In the past four years, I have de-prioritized my own creative work. This has been a conscious choice, a decision to prioritize the voices of my people over my own. The problem I’m running into now is that I need to create, perhaps not as much as I need to breathe, but in a way so pressing that I start resenting the world and myself when I don’t feel that space is given to me, or more accurately, when I don’t give myself that space. I see this impulse, in my work with my people in opening these pathways to creative expression, as a need that is pretty close to universal. 

And yet, the stuff on my to-do list that I define as “creative” always gets shoved to the bottom of my list at the start of the day, and I all-too-often feel a pang of guilt when I dive into them, like time is passing that could be better spent in service. And then, when I’m doing the work I define as “service,” I find myself guiltily looking forward to my time alone with words. Worse, when I do get to the creative work, my mind is spent and all I want to do is read instead of writing. I find that, like now actually, I’m only writing when the need to create with words overcomes me. I think I’ve perhaps written some viscerally appealing pieces out of this desperation in the past four years, but only intermittently. I wish I could find a way to write that’s more regular but no less immediate, desperate even.

I don’t know how to get past this, to achieve balance in my life between these elements of myself and my work, but I’m really trying. I’m going to ask as many people as I can in the days moving forward how they do this.

But there is an important reward to this struggle. Led by the recent addition to our team of our literary editor Jaclyn Watterson, we’re now getting the dispatches to embrace our focus toward the panoply of voices of our writers and facilitators. I can’t even tell you how gratifying it is to share the stage with powerful voices like those of Marvin Wade, Carolina Soto, Sonny Jackson, and Prisoner K, and Jackie and I will continue to weave them and other workshop members and facilitators into the mix of these dispatches. 

What this means moving forward is that we’re planning every Friday to get a dispatch out from one of our workshop members, facilitators, or community partners that focuses on the carceral apparatus from their perspective. You’ll still get dispatches from me as well, making announcements and giving my own perspective as needed. And we’ll have lots of announcements to make over the next few weeks!

But enough about us. How are you doing? If you’ve read this far, you’re part of that “Us.” As I try to find balance in both my personal and professional life, I’ve been asking everyone I see on Zoom/Teams/Google Meet how they do this.

How about you?