Nothing: An Introduction

Welcome to my newsletter

Hello and welcome to my first newsletter! It’s so lovely to have you here but I have to be frank with you:

I feel like a giant wanker.

Let me explain: Last week I read an article titled ‘An Italian Artist Auctioned Off an ‘Invisible Sculpture’ for $18,300. It’s Made Literally of Nothing’.¹ Starting off my Substack feels kind of like that. The blank slate yawns wide, I tip forward, lean into the open maw and the smell of fermented fish rises up, I can hear bubbling in the monster’s gut. The monster is me, by the way. I tend to write about monsters a lot. And my point is that the initial beginning of anything is terrifying. But there’s deeper, darker stuff underneath, and it’s been brewing for a while.

Untitled [portrait with four-panel White Painting, Black Mountain] ca. 1951

Part I | Naked and Afraid

The Leo full moon last Monday was like a giant slap to the face. I was an unpublished writer, mouth gummy with baby milk, teeth uncut. Nobody, nothing, no-one, no the modifier of nouns: no work to show. Unknown, unrevealed, untold, –un the prefix of not. Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.

It’s a funny little picture I’ve painted of my despair. It would seem as though I had been railing against the literary gates for an age with barely a look in.

But this was the thing – what had I done to put myself out there?

Absolutely nothing.

And nothing was going to change unless I did.

“I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.”

Oscar Wilde

I’d been hiding for so long, my identity cloaked in so much shit and shame that it felt like a second skin, coarse and shrivelled.

Yet under the magnifying glass of a full moon, it is difficult to shrink into the shadows, even harder if She’s in the sign of Leo. Here are the lessons of identity and creativity; Me, Myself, I, Yazmin, who the fuck do I think I am? (Who the fuck does she think she is?)

Creatively I’ve been a tepid shadow, watery around the edges. I’ve skulked and sulked, arched from the light, I smell of burning flesh, my skin paper-thin. I was not corporeal, my heart had calcified, frayed wires with congealed ichor sticking out at odd angles. I was alive and not alive. I had no substance as a writer and desire alone is poor sustenance.

“I must be made of nothing to feel so much nothing.”

Michelle Hodkin

What I needed was blood.

Imagine it however you want, the blood that beads along the finger after a papercut, a shy sting, superficial; the deep heavy dark blood of menses, pungent and cloying; blue blood, the alien one pumping through the vein, cold, mercurial, a shy blush to red when discovered; it doesn’t matter. But blood pumps and throbs. It’s gasoline, it’s fuel, it’s petrol. It reconnects me to my heart with an electric shock that makes me choke and gasp, slam back into my body. I was dry kindling, I was the sound of rattling leaves, I was an abandoned newspaper inked with COMING SOON for far too long.

It was time to set myself alight.

Like the pyres that Pippin lights to call Rohan to Gondor’s aid, my work is meant to be seen. But releasing the child-like fear of being discovered is terrifying. And the reality is that a book publisher isn’t going to walk past me one day with their tinfoil hat and telepathic senses and catch that I have a manuscript just burning inside me to be released to the world. I mean it’d be lovely if it worked that way but it doesn’t.

“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

Ernest Hemingway

If you think I’m going down the route of my first newsletter being some kind of hack-hustle-grind-culture-shite thing, you’re going to be disappointed. I hate capitalism, I really do. I am tired, I have a chronic illness, I’d love to be paid to sleep eight hours a night and write plays and do a one-woman performance of That Scottish Play. And if I want this to become a living (and I do) then I had to get off my arse, swallow my pride, and try to get my stuff out there. Hence why I feel like a giant wanker.

Am I terribly self-conscious? Yes.

Do I feel like I’m dragging my soul, naked and pink and raw, kicking and screaming to a giant circus stage to be scrutinised? Yes.

Am I going to do it anyway because my desire to be seen as a creative is a bone-shaking embarrassment but in that embarrassment is radical self-acceptance? Yes again and the mirror in front of which I stand stays whole, my knuckles soft and bare (I have shattered it before and plucked the glass from in between my fingers).

In the same way last week’s full moon was about releasing long-held beliefs about identity and hanging up the proverbial coat of shame, so too can we choose to shrug on new furs, ones that bristle and smell like animal and fear, a mixture of the shadow and the light, of bravery and vulnerability. I am brave in releasing my work, no matter what I or others think of me. It either gets out there or it doesn’t. It expands or atrophies. It lives or dies.

“Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.

Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.

We have time to grow old.

The air is full of our cries.

But habit is a great deadener.

At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing.

Let him sleep on.”

Samuel Beckett,

Part II | Newsletter news

Thanks for reading the above! Fuck I’m morbid! People who know me well are probably laughing at all the vampire imagery (they can’t see the sense in becoming one much to my chagrin).

I’m working on my first essay for my Substack – ‘Murder Yet is But Fantastical: Why Publishing Your WIP to Social Media is Doing More Harm than Good,’ as well as my first short story, ‘Candy for the Children’. They will both be released free for all subscribers over the next few weeks.

Finding the time to do all this has also been an absolute task since uni goes back in about two weeks and it’s been tight enough as it is. So far I’ve been waking up at 5am every day to write, stealing five minutes here and there whilst being on the loo (if you’re judging me then you’re not a writer). I’ve even been getting to work an hour early to use the peace and quiet to get these essays done.

Hopefully, my next newsletter will have an update as to how I remedy this such as time travel although since I dropped out of maths and science at the tender age of sixteen, it’s not looking likely. And if you’re about to ask if I’ll have a regular posting schedule (I know you’re not but humour me) I’ll have to be honest and say who knows. I am going to be as consistent as possible, I’m just unsure how much I can churn out before I become a husk.

Finally, I want to officially thank all of you who have subscribed. You wonderful, magnificent, brilliant friends and humans who I have not met (yet). Words feel thin and inadequate in expressing my love and gratitude. Thank you again.

See you soon. Stay weird,

Yaz

“To do nothing is the way to be nothing.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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1. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/italian-artist-auctioned-off-invisible-sculpture-18300-literally-made-nothing-1976181

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Image: https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/art/artwork/untitled-portrait-four-panel-white-painting-black-mountain