On Writing (or not) Part Two: Death is the Ultimate Deadline
All writing projects have a due date, since we do, too
I had all these problem habits, and what was I doing about them? Mostly indulging them. Letting the Resistance win. I wasn’t writing. I did manage some writing in the form of storytelling for a storytelling competition called The Moth. Maybe you’ve heard of The Moth. Their deal is simple: you go to one of their storytelling shows. At the show, if you have a story to tell the audience, you put your name in a hat. The host draws ten names. Each person tells a story that’s at most five minutes long. Go too long and they cut your mic. A panel of audience judges judge each story, and the person with the highest score moves on to another round. Everyone who tells an effective story has memorized the story. But the key thing for me is that Moth stories had a deadline. If the magic day was Dec. 10, then I had to be finished, no matter what, by story time on December 10.
For most writing, the lack of deadlines meant I could always mean to start tomorrow. I’ve had novel ideas I’ve been intending to implement for more than a decade. To be fair, in addition to wanting to write, I’ve done a lot of other things: med school, residency, erratic emergency medicine jobs that mess up my circadian rhythm, visits abroad once I conquered my fear of planes, a committed relationship, friendships, enmities, new minor hobbies like baking. A lot of these things were genuinely absorbing in a way that left no space for writing—emergency medicine shifts are commonly 12 hours, and they require recovery time the day after.
But, if I’m being honest with myself, which I usually prefer not to be about this matter, there were a lot of days in the approximately 3,652.5 days in the last decade, or the approximately 5,478.75 days that constitute the last fifteen years, when I could have written yet didn’t. A lot of stories I learned and observed from medicine, I decided I was too tired to write down. A lot of rich medical material I didn’t realize was interesting because I had become so inured to it, my days so steeped in it, that I didn’t stop to really realize that it was like describing an afternoon walk on Mars to Earthlings. There were a lot of days—pretty much all of them, when I wasn’t working or recovering—when I decided to do something else. There were a lot of days when a long walk in the city, and a bike ride cross town, and a few errands, and a meeting with a friend in the park, or literally anything other than sitting down at my laptop and writing won.
Jake encouraged me to write so many times, and so many times I decided to do something else. I let the Resistance win. He says that I need to write. And that’s it. That’s his fundamental view, and now that he’s dying I’ve accepted it. Jake is not a perfect writer—no one is—but he has a useful attitude towards writing in that he believes what separates writers from non-writers is that writers write. Non-writers don’t. He tells me to finish things. He tells me to stop fussing with the organization and write something from beginning to end. He tells me not to write in pieces and to instead write from start to finish, to get in the habit of finishing a work.
I ignored everything he told me until I couldn’t ignore it any more. Writing , and writing with him in the same room, is the only thing I want to do, apart from finding him a clinical trial that has some chance, however low, of saving his life (the subject of a future essay). On April 26, 2023, Jake had a PET scan that showed a potential hotspot near his hyoid bone. Eventually, we learned through a surgical biopsy that the hotspot was a recurrence of the squamous cell carcinoma.
On May 25, 2023, Jake had a massive surgery that was supposed to remove half his tongue and replace it with a “flap” of muscle from his leg. “Was supposed to” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the preceding sentence. Instead, his surgeon had to remove his entire tongue—a “total glossectomy”—and some of the nerves in his neck. That was bad. Really bad. I worried he’d never speak or eat again. At least the surgeon removed all cancerous tissue. On July 21, however, he got a CT scan that was supposed to tell us whether he could use any jaw-stretching devices. Instead, the CT showed at least four new tumors in his neck, and maybe more in his lungs.
That’s many things, symbolic and literal. Suddenly, we had no time. Did he have weeks? We didn’t know. He began saying final goodbyes to friends, because the cancer was moving fast. And so, I realized what I knew but didn’t actually know years ago: time is finite. Stated that way, no one would disagree, and yet I didn’t feel that in a way that made me act like time is finite. Few of us do, or why would we waste time in petty squabbles, not showing appreciation to the people who matter most? Or why watch most TV? ? Time is finite and time is passing. Quickly. The time I’m not spending writing I will never get back.
Jake will soon die, barring a clinical trial miracle, but decades from now I will too, and what do I want to do with that time which is passing whether I spend it wisely or not? Write, or not write? I’ve been a champion not-writer. I’ve been a champion of letting Resistance ride me, instead of me banishing it. I have a expiration date, unless science ameliorates death. I don’t know when that deadline is—nobody does, because we’re humans, not milk—but it’s closer than it was a day ago, a year ago, certainly a decade ago.
Because Jake is dying at a much faster rate than most people, I don’t have time to wait. I don’t know why I waited fifteen years, but I did, spending far too much time faffing about on Facebook or, worse, watching TV. God, the TV: I watched so much and remember, and almost none of it is worth remembering. That’s maybe the worst part: none of the TV is worth remembering, so why’d I watch so much? Probably because it’s brain balm, like the soft hush-hush of a soothing favorite teacher when another student made you cry. Why focus on the thoughts bringing you distress when you can eject all the thoughts from your head? It’s the shiny, happy object that calms a baby in their crib by distracting the lizard brain. It’s reptilian. It’s a trap called “Resistance” but there are a thousand other names.
All of us know, abstractly, that we should do what’s important and ignore what’s not. But concretely, a lot of us, including me, choose any of the million other distractions. Marcus Aurelius says we need “certainty of judgment in the present moment; action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way.” I think we also need some mania, passion, and insanity, but I get it— and no one who has ever seen me mid-week at Burning Man has doubted that I have those things in spades.
I think I watched all that TV because it was a way of avoiding writing. The shows are a blur: 90-Day Fiancé, BBC comedies, I can’t even remember the names of most of them. I told myself I earned those days off, when I watched too much TV, because I was tired from my cognitively and physically demanding work as an emergency physician and deserved a break. And while that’s true, it’s also an excuse. Because that was the time I had. And in taking a break that I had ostensibly earned, I was making a choice. Why not both? The next day I had another shift. Just like that the potential of time had been reduced to a day spent zoning out. Even when an excuse is legitimate, it’s an excuse.
I now think there’s a better way to decompress, one that’s more generative. Journaling, for example. Some journaled ideas turn into something longer. When I journal, I still have self-judgment, but I’m able to ignore it. If I’m too tired to write a full story, I’ll write a few bullet points or thoughts. If I think my writing is uninteresting, I still write. My memory is poor, and I think that I know that if I don’t, the day is lost. In making the notes, I’ll frequently come up with an idea or an analysis that I wouldn’t have come up with if someone had put me on the spot to espouse it. But in the process of jotting a few quick notes, there is the idea. Journaling is both a useful tool and a larger lesson. Entire eras of my life are just gone, barring some stand-out details.
This isn’t to say I’m not allowed a break, or that trying to create art after a hard day at work is the best way to write. But if that’s the window I have in which to work, then I need to find a way. If I’d written, I’d have all those written artifacts to refer to. Instead I have nothing, apart from all those years of intending to write and then not.
The best habit is the habit of simply writing itself, and not letting Resistance win. When I was younger, and more foolish, I’d be working on a novel and letting my many litany of writing problems stymie me. Where to put this scene? How to connect this idea with that one? What should happen next? And Jake would tell me: “Let me write it.” He’d offer to write whole scenes, or to connect a bunch of passages I’d written. I refused him, which turns out to be as insane as arbitrarily declining sex with the man you love most. He said he didn’t care about school-type things like “credit.” He said he wanted to read the novel and get it done. I thought I should do it on my own.
“Why?” I now ask myself. Who cares? Our minds are merged. Jake tells me that an “eternal golden braid” connects us across time and space. I used to think he was joking, playing with my own spiritual proclivities—I once took him to a sweat lodge, where he shared that his intention for the ceremony was to figure out ways to increase GDP, which, while an excellent goal, didn’t quite align with the vibe. Now, I realize he’s serious, and there’s also a serious philosophical work, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals about the importance of raising GDP, enhancing scientific innovation, and creating a better, bolder future. In the present, I hope the eternal golden braid connecting Jake and me isn’t severable by death. We share a mind, so why not write a book together? He’d say that I could write parts of his novel, but I never did—the Resistance was too strong. “I can do it myself,” or rather, I wanted to be able to and thought that doing it myself was a sign I was “meant” to write, or some other ludicrously imbibed belief made worse by school.
I’ve talked to Jake so much about my writing problems that he wrote the first draft of this essay. He started, I doubled its length, and finished. We wrote it together, we wrote it separately, who cares, the point is we wrote it. Who would know, if I didn’t confess? And who cares, either way? Even the people who know us best wouldn’t be able to say which parts are “my” sentences and which are “his,” a wholly unimportant and impossible distinction in a collaboration. If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably enjoying it, or you’re an AI chatbot who doesn’t understand it anyway. An essay that gets you this far will probably get you to the end.
Without Jake starting it, I might never have filled it in, edited it, and finished. The process of two people writing instead of one is a lot more pleasant, too. Independence is overrated. For years and years, Jake has been sending me links to articles and interviews about the many writers and artists who work together with their spouses or lovers. Writing with Jake seems like a lovely habit. He’s not only writing for me, but I’m returning the favor when I edit him—I’m adding sentences, paragraphs, openings, closings. When he reorganizes an essay for me or adds in a wonderful line or paragraph, I see it as talent and magic, and making my life easier and better. Yet, when I do it for him, I’m doing exactly what he’s doing, if only I let myself see it. The only thing standing in the way between me and the writing, is me. I let Jake do all sorts of things for me (as I do for him), and with me, and writing should be among them.
If you’ve gotten this far, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding Jake’s ongoing care.
Part Three (coming soon): What I’m Doing Now, and Will Continue to Do
It is astounding how many of us there are...writers, at least in our imaginations, who continually find reasons to not write. Here's hoping that this post gives me a little kick in the behind.
All the best with the clinical trial. I hope Jake makes geniuses out of those doctors.
Hi Bess and Jake. Your story has touched me deeply. I think maybe I even happened to meet Jake once in a Barnes and Noble in Tucson, back maybe in first or second year of med school. I remember running in to you and a handsome guy in 2007 or 2008. He said something about philosophy regarding the books in my arms and blew my mind. I’m a philosophy dummy so anything philosophy is intimidating and WOW to me. Anyway., please text me or call me (520-220-0100). Bess - 100% I know that you can write because I have heard it. You wrote a beautiful long speech at the end of first year of medical school that was to honor the bodies that were donated to our anatomy lab. I had wanted to write something myself but I did not know how to put my feelings into something presented in public. You did. It has been a long time since then, 2008, so around 15 years, but I still remember it being phenomenal. It hit on everything I wanted to say myself and more. What you said about my anatomy lab patient touched my soul and made me cry. Like ugly cry in public. You put feelings into words and thanks into words in a way that I remember being deeply emotional and so touching. So, I know that you can write. This blog touches me deeply too. I know we weren’t super close in med school put please count me an ally. I live in Gilbert with my wife Sarah and our new baby. If we can assist you, please message me. I’ll send you my number in a FB message.