Lift

Breathing through a little turbulence and finding my way back to the page.

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“How’s your writing going?”

It’s a question I’ve been asked several times in the past few weeks. In “Clarity,” I describe my realization that I had taken on too much this winter; as a result, my writing suffered. It wasn’t what I planned, but I have stumbled enough times in my life to understand that difficulty often presents opportunity. In the meantime, I’m still dusting myself off.

In the last month my youngest turned 10 (wonderful!), I rushed the cat to the emergency vet following lily poisoning (the cat has fully recovered), and I am currently healing from a small dental surgery (which I might write about another time. For now, I’m A-okay). Each of these events would have been taxing on their own; all of them at the very time when my primary goal was to get back to work resulted in a deep urge to curl into the corner of the couch and binge One Day (which may or may not have happened).

In the fall, I had created a solid routine and had logged over 17,000 words of my novel. I had momentum. My main goal now is to right this ship, to reestablish my routine and anchor my writing practice to better withstand the currents of daily life. 

How to conquer this paralysis?

As my 14-year old recently reminded me, “Mom, you always say to ‘just start’ and not to worry about what comes next. So maybe that’s what you have to do. Just start.”

Children have a knack for holding up a mirror, usually when we have been avoiding our reflection. I knew he was right. 

On a recent afternoon, I headed to a coffee shop across the street from our tiny local airport. Latte in hand, I chose a table in the corner of the patio, the umbrella angled to shade my workspace. A few buildings blocked a full view of the tarmac, but planes glimmered in the spaces between while maintenance crews zipped by on carts.

Now I would focus. Now I would write.

I jotted a few notes and journaled a bit, trying to get my mind in gear. Meanwhile, the heady scent of jet fuel wafted across the patio, carried on a gentle breeze, and my eyes drifted across the road to where sunlight gleamed off the fuselage of a taxiing plane. 

Travel nowadays evokes groans and nightmarish tales: turbulence, illnesses, overbooking, delays (remember Dallas 2023?), extra charges for pretty much everything, carbon footprints, and badly behaved passengers. And, if all that weren’t enough, now we have to worry about door plugs.

But I’ve always loved flying. (As someone who doesn’t love heights, this is hard to reconcile. I don’t get it either). We’ve all heard stories of people who live in the flight path of an airport (or perhaps lived it ourselves?), usually describing the misery of the situation. Those stories always make me wonder if I might not mind so much, watching those planes come and go at all hours.

I checked my watch. An hour until school dismissal. I sipped my coffee and turned back to my writing, trying to focus. The threads of connection between my ideas felt elusive, like I just couldn’t find my flow. When a private plane took off, I was easily distracted, noticing that it seemed to shoot into the sky, faster and at a sharper angle, than a commercial jet.

For those readers who are unaware of my background, this is a good time to explain that I grew up in the Middle East—Saudi Arabia, to be precise. When I was 13, I attended a boarding school in the U.K. where I completed my secondary schooling and from there, on to the U.S. for college and beyond. It’s fair to say that international travel shaped my childhood, and it’s funny to think that I could navigate an international airport long before I could drive. Suffice to say, from a very young age, I spent a lot of time on airplanes, and some very big ones at that.

Photo by Brice Cooper on Unsplash

Our flights from Saudi Arabia always left in the evening. Each time we departed, after presenting passports and boarding passes at the gate, we fell into the line of passengers trekking across the tarmac to a 747, aglow in the warm desert night. Like a line of ants, we filed up the narrow stairway towards the oval light at the top of the plane, the sheer enormity of the jet’s engines dwarfing us as we passed. As a child, I was mesmerized; as an adult, the sheer size of those engines are a reminder of human ingenuity as well as the inherent risk of leaving solid ground.

I continued to work, finishing my latte and eventually closing my journal. School would get out soon and I needed to get home. I didn’t have the draft I had hoped for, but I had shown up, put pen to paper. I had started. 

Preparing to leave, I stood and gathered my pen, journal, my computer. Looping my bag over my shoulder, I reached for my empty cup. As I pushed in my chair, the unmistakable roar of a jet exploded from across the street.

Within moments the nose of a United plane lifted over the buildings, its hulking fuselage climbing, climbing, powering upwards…and suddenly airborne, conquering gravity, a miracle of physics every single time. It continued to ascend, mightier than the private plane, and banked toward the Pacific, framing itself between two palm trees, nothing more than a glimmer in the sky within minutes.

When I was a girl, flying signaled vacation and reunification with family. Bedtimes and time zones didn’t apply, and getting there was just as much fun as arriving. When I fly today, I still feel between worlds; I find comfort in that liminal space. Having lived in many places, I often say I’ve left a version of myself in each. In the sky, just as when I write, the limits of our earthly world loosen.

I watched that plane diminish into a sparkling pinpoint in the afternoon sky, and it tugged my heart as long as I could see it. I will always yearn to travel, just as I feel I will always write. It’s who I am.

Not for the first time, I allowed for the possibility that I might be overthinking and overcomplicating things for myself as I return to my writing. Maybe this isn’t about righting a ship or withstanding the stormy currents—or turbulence—of life? Perhaps it’s more about riding those currents, acknowledging and deflecting pressures, and creating the kind of lift that carried that jet into the cloudless blue.

Substack Shoutouts:

I’ve recently discovered

Clover Stroud

, an accomplished memoirist. Her pieces On Losing Home and Everything In It and On The Way Home Feels follow her recent move from the U.K. to Washington, D.C. with her family. Her writing is honest and intimate, and the way she tackles the idea of “home” resonates deeply with me.

Book Recommendation:

My beautiful little sister gifted me this book right when I needed it most. Believe the hype! It’s a gorgeous read. Also,

Katherine May

is right here on Substack.