What the Dark Makes Possible
Making from Memory: The Untold Thing | A 100 Day Creative Practice | Day Five
Friends, we’re five days in, and I want to pause and say, look at us!! Look at what we’re building together, one small made thing at a time. I see you here in the comments sharing your 100 words, and in the chat, sharing this steady accumulation of effort. That’s the whole practice, and you are doing it. Look at the art you’re making—compelling, strange, beautiful, moving, real, imperfectly glorious—so much so that I had to ask for permission to share here with the wider community, which I will be doing regularly through the rest of the project.
If you’ve missed a day, or two, or all five—truly, it does not matter. It just does not matter.
Start today. Or restart today. Start where you are. This is not a project that punishes lateness or rewards perfection; it rewards showing up, in whatever form that takes, for as many of the hundred days as you can manage. Ten thousand words by September are wonderful, but so are one thousand, so is one hundred. So is one single day of paying attention to your own creative life in a way you maybe haven’t lately.
Keep going. I am so glad you’re here.
And if you haven’t joined the project or the chat yet, here’s how:
Join Jeannine Ouellette’s subscriber chat
And while you’re in the chat, you’ll see me making Request to Share threads inviting you to specifically add things you’re fine for me to include in posts, first-name attribution only (I had thought I’d do it anonymously, and will by request, but something about how moved I am by these artworks made it feel weird to not celebrate their makers).
The array of creative energy we have emerging is wide and inspiring, including photographs of things you are making, like meals, and nature sculptures, and charms, and maps, and so much more. I can’t wait to keep sharing. For now, here’s a tiny taste:
And now for Day Five—the untold thing, which is about exploring the things we have not shared, or do not share, or will not share.
I am, by most accounts, an open person. I write about my life in public, on purpose, often in granular and unflattering detail. I have told you about my first wedding, about clapping for myself at twenty-one, about the chaos of a Paris Zoom call with the sun in my eyes. I tell you many of my foibles and most of my faults. And yet—and I think this is true for all of us, even the most open among us—there are things I have never told anyone. Not because they are shameful, necessarily, though some of them are. But because some part of the interior life simply resists translation. It stays exactly where it is, unknowable even to the people who know us best. This, I think, is part of what makes human life so strangely, persistently lonely—not the absence of connection, but the presence of this permanent, private part of us that no amount of connection can ever quite reach.
I taught Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “A Temporary Matter” recently, and I keep thinking about it. A married couple, grieving in ways they haven’t told each other, finds themselves with a scheduled nightly power outage — five nights of mandated darkness — and in that darkness, almost as a game, they begin telling each other the truths they’ve been withholding. Small ones at first, then larger. The story is devastating precisely because of what it shows about intimacy: that we can live beside someone for years, sharing a bed and a history, and still be keeping a whole self in reserve. Lahiri doesn’t moralize this. She simply lets us see how much can be true at once — how loving someone and withholding from them are not contradictions, but two ordinary parts of the same human architecture.