Then I tell myself that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. I have, after all, not missed a single column deadline ever since our child was born ten months ago. That is something. I’ve even managed my monthly columns for another publication that are premised on art criticism. But this voice inside me tells me that while all of that is important, those are other registers. What I miss is transcribing the thoughts that literally flow through the recesses of my body, swimming through my bloodstream, percolating through my pores, oozing from the inner depths of what I imagine to be my soul. Some of these sentences continue to live inside me, but many have floated away after I tweaked them in my head, and some haven’t even had the opportunity to surface, they are buried and are eagerly waiting to be excavated.

In some ways I am in fact experiencing what I always imagined I wanted to nurture—a life of the mind. In the absence of an audience, or given that I am unable to cater to an audience, I am the sole recipient of this non-writing, or these insights that I articulate to no one other than myself. There’s a startling intimacy to this experience of living entirely in one’s head. I’ll admit, it makes me feel so interesting as a person, I am able to appreciate the eccentricities of my own thoughts. But I miss the feeling of being ‘in flow’, when my ink pen desires a mobility that my fingers struggle to supply, when I enter that sacred headspace in which my body feels like a channel or a medium, and I begin to sweat from the psychological labour of it all.

Poll

Who will win the Punjab Elections?

BJP 32.76%

AAP 43.10%

INC 24.14%

Submit

View All In Poll

I met an artist friend last week after several months. She is herself a mother to a child who is now almost three. I asked her how she was doing. She said she had been painting a lot these days, with the kind of absorption she had never before managed. I asked her if it was because she felt like her time suddenly belonged to her more than ever before. She confirmed that was precisely it. After having sacrificed so much time to the intricacies of maternal caregiving, now, as her child was becoming more autonomous and was content to be in daycare, she was experiencing her time differently than before. 

It felt, to me, like a form of promise. I look to people like her and so many other mothers who, after such an all-consuming interruption, find in themselves the grace to return to the labour of creating art. I don’t even want to get into the fallacious question of whether women can ‘have it all’. Rather, I am interested in what it means to be able ‘to have’ whatever one ‘has’ when one is able to ‘have it’ once again. For years I told myself that to be a writer, one had ‘to write’. Now I tell myself that I am still a writer, even if I haven’t written. For being a writer involves embodying a state of consciousness. It cannot be reduced to a verb.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.