Superstition

I once worked with a surgeon who never washed his OR shoes. The old sneakers were a deep shade of red, not because they came that way, but because they were covered in the dried blood of hundreds of patients. They were a gruesome good luck charm, a symbol of the life and death he’d literally walked through in his profession. He feared that if he washed them, he’d lose some part of his identity, his flow, his mojo.

This culture of superstition exists across many acute healthcare settings. When I worked the weekend shift in the OR at a trauma hospital, no one dared to arrive on a tranquil Saturday morning and say Wow, it’s really quiet today! Such remarks were a curse, a jinx, ensuring we’d get barraged by trauma cases the rest of the shift. My ICU nurse friend recently shared a similar story about hospital repairmen that set up a ladder on a Friday morning to fix ceiling lights on her unit. After the shift went remarkably well, the staff asked the repairmen to leave the ladder up until Monday morning, hoping it would be a good omen for the weekend. When the night-shift arrived later that evening and saw a massive ladder standing in the middle of the unit, they asked, What’s with the ladder? To which the dayshift hissed, DON’T TOUCH THE F***KING LADDER! The ladder was left untouched, and as you can guess, the ICU had no trauma, no drama, and no COVID admissions that weekend.

Superstitions seem to arise when humans must face their status as mere mortals in a vast and mysterious universe. They can be silly and pseudo-soothing as we seek control in situations that are far beyond our sway. Since I stepped away from my nursing job last year to write and teach full time, I’ve found myself searching for my own pair of bloody shoes, my own f***ing ladder, some sort of constant I can count on amidst the uncertain terrain of the writing process and the publishing world.

My own creative hocus-pocus has involved setting up various work spaces around my house, hoping yet another location will finally help me achieve a predictable writing flow. Or, some mornings I’ve woken up at 4:30AM, thinking I can outwit resistance by sneaking through a back door of my consciousness in the obscure morning darkness. Each of my methods maybe worked for a day or two, but then I ended up exhausted and the magic eventually flopped. It’s so romantic to think that if I just tweak one external thing then I can get the results I want, but eventually the ladder must come down.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can’t move my f***ing ladder, because I don’t have one. I wish I did. The unsexy truth about writing—and all of the best things in life—is that as soon as you try to contain the magic, you lose it. Yes, we must put in the hard work, but even then, something about it always feels tenuous, a force we get to experience but can never quite possess. Writers across many genres feel this. Poets are afraid that the last poem they wrote is the last poem they will ever be able to write. And, as memoirist and editor Lilly Dancyger recently tweeted: My absolute favorite stage of essay writing is when I first arrange the tangle of notes into an order that starts to look, through a squint, like the shape of an essay. It’s the part that feels most like a magic trick, because it feels impossible every time, right up until it happens.

I recently watched an extraordinary documentary on HBO called 100 Foot Wave, the story of surfer Garrett McNamara, who set a world record for riding the biggest wave of all time in Nazaré, Portugal. One of the episodes is called “Dancing With God,” a title that captures what McNamara and his comrades seem to be after—interfacing with the gigantic power and mystery that creates and sustains our world—an energy that can rebirth you and annihilate you. As I watched the series, I wondered if these big wave surfers had a screw loose, but other times they seemed like the sanest people on the planet. I identified with their desire to encounter the essence of life as well as the inner torture of their quest: the paradox that in chasing the elusive 100-foot wave, they risk missing the actual wave, which is life itself.

When I sit down to write, I guess I’m contending with similar dynamics. Somedays I feel crushed by the churning of my own mind. I can’t get anything down and wonder why I’m wasting my time. But other days the words flow and form a perfect curl, and I experience connections that open me up to life in new ways. It’s like the surgeon’s shoes, covered in blood, the proximity to life and death disturbingly close, so much of it out of my hands, all the while using my hands to wield and yield what I can.

Over the past year, I’ve learned to write whenever and wherever I can. No superstition. Rarely perfect conditions. There is no true work-life balance, just a haphazard juggling act. Last week I wrote at the Honda dealership while my car got repaired. The next day I wrote at my kitchen counter while plumbers ripped drywall out of our bathroom, searching for a slow and destructive leak. As you can imagine, I didn’t get much done on those days. But then, last weekend, I was able to get away for a solo writing retreat, something I thankfully planned just over a month ago, and as I crossed the long bridge from Nag’s Head to Manteo in the Outer Banks, I felt like I was driving into Narnia. The painful work earlier in the week was part of what made the weekend so magical.

Last night, while I was talking to my husband about all of this, he reminded me of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, when the children return to the professor’s house after their grand adventure in Narnia. They wonder if they’ll ever be able to return and how they will get back. The professor reassures them that they will return, but it won’t be the same as the first time. Don’t go trying to use the same route twice, he says. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all. It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it.

Do any superstitions inform your life or writing practice?
Are they helpful or a hindrance?