I think it’s safe to tell you all that I’ve been working on a book proposal. If it’s not, then I guess I’m about to find out if it’s safe to tell you that. The only positive thing I have ever thought or said about writing book proposals is “you get to know your book really well.”
But this is forced learning.
This is staring at your computer screen, listening to your playlist of the saddest songs that you broke down sobbing to on multiple occasions during the proposed time period, and fighting to make sense of any words in front of you. Then, because it’s a book about your life, you realize that you’re actually trying to make sense of yourself. This usually fucks me up for an entire day. Sometimes a week.
If I’m being totally honest, the thing that really fucks me up about book proposals is that you’re often marketing your trauma and making it sellable. But I try not to think about that one too much.
What happens to me during these times of forced learning, either through writing proposals or the actual book I had proposed, is I lose my ability to write in my head. Everything is done on the page. I throw things down without really thinking them through first. Then I have to make it make sense. I toil over sentences, cut entire paragraphs, and add words back in. This is not how I normally write. It’s uncomfortable because my brain doesn’t work that way. I am a thinker writer. I write things in my head, even to the point of hearing it in my own voice, then get it out in one huge, lightning-bolt of a dump.
In the spaces between physically working on a big forced learning project, I end up thinking quite a bit about the book’s premise. I have to force myself to do that, too. Since it’s all I’m thinking about, I talk about it to anyone who’s in a room with me for more than ten minutes in a constant fight to make it all make sense. I am consumed. I am a sponge. I get to the point where I annoy myself.
Last week was my final event for the Spring’s speaking gig season. I don’t have to travel for work for another six weeks. I also realized last week that I was done with my book proposal for now and didn’t really have to think about it for the time being. So I did what any rational Virgo would do: I blocked off this entire week in my calendar with the title “Step week off to organize house and yard.”
As you can possibly suspect, I am not good at taking time off. It’s impossible for me to stop working, even on vacation (yes, that post is slowly brewing and will be written soon). Cleaning my house is my top choice on a week off. This is normal behavior for me. But this time, that wasn’t enough. I realized I had space to be angry about something, and somewhat chose how my town is currently treating folks who don’t have secure housing.
From traveling and talking to people at organizations all over the country, I know that Missoula’s housing crisis is not uncommon. Our housing prices, however, do seem to be off the charts and unreasonable.
Some of you might have seen the viral video of a young male realtor showing you a small, junky-looking house, saying “This is what one point one million dollars will buy you in Whitefish, Montana.” When I first saw it, I seriously thought it was a joke. But it’s no joke. Not even close. Our housing prices are currently comparable to places like Seattle, for god’s sake. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s no comparison. Has anyone gone out to eat at a decent non-American restaurant here? Did Taylor Swift bring her tour to Montana? Do we even have a professional baseball team? Do we have an ocean? No? See, I rest my case. No comparison to Seattle. But I digress.
With housing prices skyrocketing, you might have guessed that the homeless population has been affected negatively by the swarm of gentrification. I’ve been quietly watching the occasional news stories about it. Camps are constantly swept, even in the middle of winter. Entire communities are broken apart. Tents are slashed with knives and picked up by the claws of large equipment and dropped into dumpsters. Human beings’ lives are devastated for someone else’s comfort. For tourism. For people with money’s ability to go camping. Just think of the children! I heard it all on Monday night at a local city council meeting.
A friend had successfully fired me up enough to attend and give public comment about their proposed resolution to severely prohibit urban camping. I had originally reached out to this friend because I was fired up about something else and needed a statistic of how many children in our public school systems are homeless in a given year. She did the math and said “28%…that can’t be right…” but I knew it was aligned with the national average. We got to talking and one thing led to another and suddenly I found myself downtown on a weeknight to go hang out in a soul-less brick building next to a bar to watch 12 people argue over where homeless people in our town should be allowed to sleep and use the bathroom.
Friends, I am not kidding you. Between council members’ and the public’s comments, the conversation went on for six hours. Since the council decided to push it to the end of their agenda, the floor wasn’t opened for public comment until after the shelters had done their intake for the night, meaning the homeless people who were present would have no choice but to sleep outside. They didn’t adjourn until almost four in the morning.
Through all of this fidgeting on an uncomfortable chair for the ten hours (TEN HOURS!) that I was there, I rightfully starting thinking a lot about anger. This emotion did not seem to be allowed in that room. The mayor made attempts to silence it out of this particular group constantly, and even tried to prevent it from happening.
At home the next day (granted, on three hours of sleep), I wrote about it in my head. I couldn’t stop. I did multiple long posts on social media. I even fumbled through making a TikTok about it. I wrote what I am going to say today for the council’s vote on the ordinance that would basically criminalize homelessness. I wrote the bulk of what you’re reading now at 11:45pm after the opening paragraph came to my head while I was brushing my teeth and I told myself I would just take a minute to get that down real quick and one hour later my teacup was empty and my husband had been snoring for a long time.
I’m not sure where all of this writing energy came from. It hasn’t been there for months. Suddenly I feel like I could go through that file in my notes app where I just have a list of possible subjects for these Substack things and get through all of them. That op-ed I’ve been stuck on and putting off for months (months!) suddenly seems clear in its purpose and narrative.
On Monday night, when I met up with the group of advocates and service providers on the courthouse lawn where they were cooking giant hot dogs before going to the meeting, I shook hands with a couple of organizers, and after one thanked me for coming I said, “This is actually my week off, but I think I needed to get angry about something.”
I miss freelancing for that. I used to tell people that freelance writing was a good outlet for my anger. I desperately needed that. After years of people with authority over my ability to eat telling me to sit down, shut up, and fill out the damn form, I discovered that I was really fucking pissed off. And if there was a lull in what I could write about, I could easily go looking for things to make me angry so I could pitch a piece on that, too, because I needed paychecks a lot more than an outlet for anger. I didn’t always write about things I was mad about, but the angry writing was the most satisfying because I could actually do something about it.
Maybe that whole process is the part of writing that fulfills me, or makes the most sense. The best part of my early days of being a working writer was when I realized that I could bring attention to issues I cared about, and find national outlets that would publish them. I could fight for people who were currently in the same demoralizing situations that I had been in for years. Has anything that I have written changed legislation in the ten years that I have been doing this? Not that I know of. But people see me fighting for them. They know they’re not alone. That’s what matters to me.
Until next time…
xo,
-step.
I am with you on the angry front - especially about criminalizing homelessness, it happened here in my city. I so very much relate to what you've shared today. Thank you.
Thank you for stepping into that hornet’s nest. It takes voices of people with “cred” to garner any attention, especially with the issue of criminalizing homelessness. The insanity of what’s happening nationwide—soaring housing costs, tearing down tent cities, punishing those without housing for being homeless—has gone on way too long.
We must channel our anger into action: speaking out at local government forums, writing books, op-eds, blogs…and (gasp!) civil disobedience when nothing else works.
Good that your book proposal is done. This is going to get ugly.