Belonging
The other day, I woke up to a text message from someone I’d never spoken to before. It was a follow-up to an email that’d been sent the night prior, at 9PM; the sender had gotten my number from a mutual acquaintance and hoped I didn’t mind. I didn’t. But I also didn’t reply. I closed the message, got out of bed, washed up, and began my routine of an hour’s reading before resuming my daily wrestle with words.
The email wasn’t an important one — or rather, it’s more accurate to say that it wasn’t important to me. Certainly, it was pressing to the person who’d sent it, who’d wanted an answer about my interest in attending an event that was to happen in a fortnight’s time. The event, which was organized by people I didn’t know, had its guestlist outsourced to a PR company, whose job it was to ensure that a certain number of people showed up, took an interest in the evening’s proceedings, went away, and talked about it to their friends. The manager at that company had probably set a timeline for the employee in charge of pulling together RSVPs, which, in turn, led to that employee cold emailing a series of possible guests in the middle of the night, procuring as many of their cell numbers as possible through various means, and bumping the invitation to the forefront of their minds first thing in the morning. That is to say, it was a job, necessary and important to the person performing it, something I fully understood and respected. It just wasn’t mine.
In the past decade, I’ve gone from student to salaried employee, to freelancer, then finally, now, to writer. In each role, the question of time as responsibility has manifested in different ways. To whom does our time belong, to what do we owe our immediate attention? What is the leash on accountability? The answer morphs depending on circumstance. When I was willingly enmeshed in the infrastructure of employment, I chased answers, lived off push-notifications, and had an average email response time of 2 hours. Later, as a freelancer, I leased my time out in blocks. Although one of the widely acknowledged benefits of freelancing is the autonomy of time management, ultimately your time is still centered around answering to a scalable profit model. The tools are different, but the trading floor is the same. The marketplace of attention fluctuates based on the rules of demand and supply.
But as a writer, my greatest debt is to the unbroken solitude of an afternoon, in which arguments ruminate and, vaguely and mysteriously, decide whether or not to eventually knot themselves into a string of words. It is the greatest emergency I attend to, the conscious and physical fight to stay suspended in a still-forming reality, the crisis to which my time adheres. I can stay in that state for three to four hours, and on a good day, up to six. After that, I’m exhausted, I hit save, I decompress and make something to eat. And then, in the hammock of an hour before it’s time to start reading again, I open up my emails, check my messages, and slowly thread through the commitments of this reality.
Often, emails and messages and alerts bring me joy, certain correspondences make my day, and if people need to know something, I try my best to get that information to them within the week. I do not deliberately withhold responses to make a point. But as a whole, I have come unstuck from time, moving in a direction that’s completely antithetical to the pace of our modern life. It is frustrating for the people who live by a contemporary clock, it is frustrating for the part of me that adores the efficiency and immediacy that technology has rendered possible. I, too, am prone to impatience, to irritation when a webpage takes too long to load, when three working days has gone by and I still haven’t gotten a response from the bank about my request for a late fee waiver.
And yet. Existing between the contradictions that the different aspects of me perform, I find myself constantly renegotiating the boundaries between space and courtesy. Who decides what the line is between a reasonable and rude amount of time it takes to formulate a response? What is sacrificed in the name of acceptability? And who benefits from these choices? In an essay for Catapult, Melissa Febos writes about the importance of the artist cultivating a personality of unreliability. “If the answer to that important question: “Must I write?” is “Yes, I must,” then do not die at the feet of others’ expectations”, she says. “Do not die of emails.”
In a world where immediacy and responsiveness is prized, a world which, until very recently, I was completely immersed in, I find myself consistently disappointing those who wait on my reply. I don’t mean to deliberately complicate their existence, even though it’s inevitable that I do. Perhaps — and this is likely — eventually I will gain a reputation for being unresponsive, people will get annoyed at me, they will decide that my company or time is not worth the effort, they will lose interest in me. At that point, surely, I will feel a sense of loss, for it is human to derive validation from being wanted, from being pursued. But on the other hand, if the casualty of writing is my likeability, so be it. Besides, as time goes by, I realise that what I want isn’t to be liked. It’s to be read, to be understood. If every “No” brings me a step closer to that goal, isn’t that where my words, my time, my attention belongs?
