The Sunday Letter #30: Into the great wide open
The Sunday Letter #30: Into the great wide open
I did it, friends. I made that jump. As of now I’m floating (or free-falling, take your pick) in the great wide open space of full-time freelance writing.
Just over a week ago I resigned from a job that I have loved so dearly for the last eight years in order to devote myself wholly to doing the thing that I’ve loved for almost all of my soon-to-be-forty-two years. Writing, telling stories, getting swept up in words.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was roughly three. Before I could read stories, I knew that I wanted my name on a book. When I was five years old and in kindergarten, my parents bought a school memories keepsake scrapbook for me, and in the what do you want to be when you grow up space on the kindergarten page I wrote, “I want to be an author.”
I’ve never let go of that dream. And while it was a dream that I realized fairly early on—I started publishing things when I was eighteen, so I’ve been at this game for almost 25 years now—it feels both exhilarating and terrifying to think that I am actually, actually looking at life as a freelance writer from hereon out.
Exhilarating, terrifying, exciting and nervewracking and anxiety-inducing like nothing else I’ve known. I am feeling all the things, and just trying to sit with them all.
Earlier this week I watched a documentary about the Voyager probes, It’s Quieter in the Twilight. It’s a lovely film that carries just the right balance of humanity and science: an intriguing look at the technology that gave us Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 all those years ago, and a wistful glimpse into the people and politics that keep these little probes alive today.
Much of the film looks at the logistics that went into ensuring we could keep up communications with Voyager 2, which—because of the angle of its trajectory away from the Earth—can only be “seen” and transmitted to from an antenna in Canberra, Australia. The antenna was temporarily decommissioned for upgrades in early 2020, which necessitated years of preparation on the part of the Voyager team to ensure that the probe would continue to have enough power to operate during that period of time when no one would be able to communicate with it. Spoiler alert: it all worked, and communications with the probe resumed in February of 2021.
Even so, the probes are entering their twilight years now, both figuratively—they were launched in 1977, making them each a sprightly 47 years old—and literally, as each probe has now passed beyond what’s known as the heliopause, the outermost edge of the sun’s radiation and solar winds. They are officially in interstellar space now—though not, as it happens, outside of the solar system—and with every mile that they travel (38,210 miles per hour for Voyager 1, and 35,000 mph for Voyager 2), they get farther and farther away from the Sun, which provides them their power.
Scientists expect that the probes will stop communicating with us by 2032. But they will continue onward into the universe indefinitely, chugging along in the cold nothingness of space.
In about 40,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass by the star Ross 248, in the constellation Andromeda, from a distance of 1.7 light years away.
We might still be here on Earth then, but then again we might not. Modern humans have only been on this planet for—what? 200,000 years? And human civilization a mere 15-20,000 years of that. A blink of time, really.
While reading up about the probes I came across a quote from a NASA scientist, something about how the probes are destined to live forever in interstellar space. I can’t find the quote now but it struck me as both wonderful and heartbreaking.
Look at what we can do, at what marvels we can reach—and how even that, at the end of it, becomes a cold and distant memory of all that once was.
Learning about the Voyager probes earlier this week felt weirdly appropriate to me. Not because embarking on a freelance writing career is remotely as exciting or noteworthy as sending our longest-serving probes out into space (look, I know how my brain works and what it can do, and it definitely cannot do that) but because it made me think about how the grandest things we’ve ever achieved have all come from the careful piecing together of smaller things. The contributions of this person and that person, and this small metal piece attached to this other onboard motor and this shield and these binary code commands—all of these tiny things add up to something else. Something bigger.
When I think about my life as a writer, and this new phase of freelance life, it does feel like crossing through the heliopause into interstellar space. Not because I’ve come so far and done so much, although maybe that is a little true, but because I would not be here today if it hadn’t been for the work and input and advice and love and support from so many other people, all across these two-and-counting decades of time when I was readying myself to be exactly here. All of these tiny little moments and interactions and suggestions and choices that have brought me to this moment.
All of the grieving and loving and joy and laughter that has brought me here, to this moment of interstellar space. Will the writer survive? Will she stumble and stop going? Will her instruments flare out in some strange catastrophe, leaving her penniless and oriented back toward the safety of a regular job and everything she knew before? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe she’ll continue into interstellar space and discover things about herself she’d never have known otherwise. It’s anyone’s guess as to what could happen.
The Voyager probes were initially only expected to last for around five years. But advancements in technology have meant that scientists have been able to upgrade their code, and gravity assists from their fly-bys of Saturn and Jupiter have extended their missions to almost ten times what was expected. They’ll celebrate the fifty-year anniversary of their respective missions in 2027.
We will lose touch with them eventually—until warp drives actually become a thing, that’s just the nature of the beast with outer space!—but until then, they have given us so much.
Really: we have given ourselves so much. Look at what humanity is capable of when everything aligns.
Earlier this year I asked the Universe (both the cosmic one our science instruments can measure, and also the other one, the deeper one that we can only know and feel) for a sign to tell me that I would not be going back to work once my year of grant leave was over.
Show me a green elephant, I said. If I’m not meant to go back to work, show me a green elephant. And then I shoved that thought to the back of my mind.
Several months later, one night as I signed into Instagram, the first thing that came up on my feed was a woman showcasing a shelf of ceramic elephants she’d discovered at a thrift store. Front and centre on that shelf was a dark green ceramic elephant with its trunk curled in the air.
Okay, I thought. So maybe that’s it.
Me being me, I still hemmed and hawwed over the decision. I got the specific sign that I’d asked for and even so there was always that whisper—you got what you asked for because you were looking for it, which is hardly magic! It’s what we call the frequency illusion!
I also had the sense, even as I first registered that green elephant on my screen, that the choice would still be mine to make. Here, it felt like the Universe was saying. My delightful, hesitant skeptic. You have a choice of two paths in front of you. Each choice you make will lead to something else. Each path you choose will have its own difficulties and rewards.
The point is: you’ve put in the work to make those choices now, whereas you didn’t know how to make these choices before.
In the days leading up to sending in my letter of resignation, I kept repeating this phrase to myself: Leap, and the net will appear. It felt both silly and true and I kept repeating it, even though I was only ever 50% sure, at any given time, that the proverbial net would pop into place.
I heard the phrase for the first time months ago, when I was working through The Artist’s Way. It felt right (see: true) and also preposterous (see: silly) because it’s easy, isn’t it, to read what someone else says and think: sure, but I bet this is all much easier for you, Julia Cameron, who used to be married to Martin Scorsese!
Then, a few days into my ruminations on whether or not to leave, I had a long phone call with a good friend and former writing instructor who informed me that leap and the net will appear is actually an old Zen Buddhist saying. Which felt like another sign of its own, in a way. I’ve been on a Zen Buddhist path in these latter years of grief and discovering the origin of the saying felt like another little pebble slotting into place.
Then, in researching for this entry, I discovered that the actual quote is usually attributed to the American naturalist John Burroughs.
The point, I think, is that even this—this sign, this piece of something that I held onto to make my decision—was made up of a bunch of other, smaller things.
Nothing that we do or say is ever done in isolation. The words we speak, the things we do and make, the probes that we send out into interstellar space—all of it is done as a result of everything else.
We are the cosmic web, really, when you get right down to it.
Now Voyagers 1 and 2 are out there, the farthest away from us that anything human-made has ever been. Radio telecommunications signals that are sent to the probes take 22.5 and 18.5 hours to reach them, respectively, and communications from the probes to us take another 22.5/18.5 hours to make their way back.
They are very, very far away, and even so, they haven’t yet reached the edge of the solar system. None of us will be here when they do.
Why not leap, I guess, when the cosmic scales of life around us are at once so enormous and yet so vanishingly small?
When my agent and I first received the offer for my book about Jess, they asked me to hand in the final manuscript (that is, a manuscript that had already gone through a round of edits and changes) by January 1, 2025. I knew right away that that was too soon, so we asked for an extension.
Sure thing, my editor wrote back. We’ll extend the submission date to April 1, 2025. How does that sound for you?
April 1 is Jess’s birthday.
I can hem and haw and be skeptical about signs all I want, I guess, but the Universe keeps saying: if you don’t think this is a sign, then I don’t know what else to tell you.
And so, and so. Here I am, facing down a life of writing and trying to cobble together enough money to keep going. It is everything I’ve ever wanted and also absolutely terrifying at the same time, and still somehow I feel held by all of it.
By Jess, by the universe, by the tenacity of those far away Voyager probes and the dedicated team who keep them working and transmitting data back to us.
By the signs that do, yes, keep showing up for me again and again. When the worry over the gradual dwindling of my income (like the way that the power is gradually dwindling for Voyagers 1 and 2—the metaphor that keeps on giving!) comes up I return to my breathing and say the words again and again: leap, and the net will appear.
I am going to be my own net. I know this. I know this because being here on this little planet of ours is just one long exercise in transforming into exactly that. The griefs that we encounter, the terrible and beautiful things that we see—all of these things are opportunities for us to let ourselves be held, to enter into that state of free-fall, into that void of interstellar space, and discover the things that wait to keep us going even when we don’t think that they’re there.
Exciting and terrifying and all of the things.
Now, let’s see what happens.
Currently Reading: The Possibility of Life, by Jaime Green
Currently Watching: Ascension
Currently Eating: This Roasted Carrot and Lentil Salad from Wandering Chickpea (v. good, you should try it)
Currently Listening: E41 (“The Art of Laziness: Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There!”) of The Way Out is In, the wonderful Plum Village podcast which has been helping to save my life for months and months. <3
Wishing you the very best of luck with it 🤍
Goosebumps! Congratulations! Since you wrote this over a month ago, I have to ask - how's it going? I may find the answer in more recent posts, but I'm hoping the net has appeared or at least started to - the signs seemed pretty clear!