Disaster has always been my most loyal muse. Whenever I glued my hands together as a child; I took to my diary. Whenever the dog I’m dog-sitting jumps out of the car I’m driving (it only happened once, and it was OK); I blog. Through bad dates, bad years, job fails, grocery-store disasters and the kitchen appliances I accidentally set on fire, I’ve always found the easiest, and perhaps least painful, path is to write about it.
Enter my favorite comic, “The League of Extraordinary Ladies” that Esther C. Werdiger writes for The Hairpin. THEY ARE SO GREAT. Nobody writes about social anxiety, miniature tea sets and ghost dates with as much subtle wisdom and charm as she does. Anyways, as the TIna Fey of comics, she’s basically the kind of writer/artist who instantly makes you feel less alone and my lady friends and I were all very sad when TLOL disappeared for a month, last fall, and then another month. Would the extraordinary ladies ever come back?
It did! In the latest installment on The Hairpin, Esther tells us that she has a new boyfriend and is in a disaster-less season of life, which has made it harder to find time to write and to know what to write about. “As our lives change, so do the stories we tell.” she writes, “Sometimes those stories are handed to you…other times you have to work a little harder for them.” It is a clever and practically perfect meditation on creativity and happiness.
Sometimes you accidentally set a microwave on fire and need to write about that. Other times, life has seasons of genuine abundance and the story line changes — but it’s OK to write about that, too.
