Pregnant with a Litter of Essays
letting the mind sprawl, reveal, and untangle itself
I’m pregnant with a litter of essays.
Yes! Tiny puppy essays live in my belly and I suspect they live in some of yours too, no matter if you have a writerly womb for them or not.
We can give birth to our essay puppies. It will be messy, some puppies may not survive, but we can nurture them, make them stronger and smarter, until someone adopts them as their own comforting pets.
The essay instinct lives in us, right next to the story instinct. We tell friends about our latest epiphany, carefully detailing what prompted us to change our minds. We often become the first generation to experience a new phenomenon. While narrating this experience, we pause at the right time to gather empathy, and conclude what we learned from it, craving to feel less alone. Not all essay ideas are personal. We want to offer our unique interpretation of a K-drama we love or comment on Web3 and the future of the internet.
So why are essays inside of us, often dormant and trapped? Why do they refuse to flow onto the paper? After all, we learned this form of writing in school.
Ah! That’s where it went wrong.
If essays are furry puppies with the entire universe in their eyes, school essays are low quality stock photos of such puppies. Schools have a passion for beating the life out of something, and essays, like most writing, haven’t been spared.
Unless you were in a school which encouraged original, honest writing about one’s own life, or about the world with a sense of awe, you grew up believing essays were five heavy paragraphs sitting on top of each other and repeating someone else’s ideas until you get full marks.
I remember the essays we were supposed to memorise and reproduce in Hindi exams. Strange essays like ‘Cow is my favourite animal’ and ‘Are computers a boon or a bane?’ were compiled in a book called the nibandh mala — literally translating to a garland of essays. English essays would sound even more fake and polished, as if we were still colonised and committed to lifeless I’m-a-good-girl writing.
I returned to essays once in 2011, and again in 2017. A few of them got published online, and one made it to a book. But it wasn’t until this newsletter, chiefly an essay project, that I got to practice the form and sharpen my voice. I have a long way to grow, but I found much spine and flexibility because of the essays I wrote here.
I always thought I would take solace in poems as a writer and a woman, but essays allowed me to sprawl, occupy more space, something I needed in this stage of life. The French word essai means, “to attempt” and I wanted to attempt more than assert or sing (the domain of poetry).
Essays allow us to ramble and digress, to make a point or so many points we could make Russian dolls out of them. They let us be honest and goofy, candid and vulnerable, an emotional wreck and a zen sage in the same piece. Nudes of the mind, essays allow us to acknowledge our humanity, something that is becoming increasingly difficult as we survive amongst machines and dehumanising regimes.
What essays unlock for me is the space to believe emotions, to confess grim thoughts. But that would make them no better than diary entries. The wish to write a good essay compels me to challenge my thoughts. To really listen to the ridiculous stories my mind is making (with the good intention to keep me safe.) While they call essays non-fiction, our mental-stories sound like they are written by experienced writers of romantic fantasies and horror stories.
The essay form helps me subvert my conditioned thinking and arrive at a deeper truth, a confrontation that emboldens me. Essays embody an evolution of stale thoughts into fresh new directions. I don’t just write my realisations, I realize through essaying, having breakthroughs on the page and leaving the final draft a teeny bit calmer, wiser, and braver. In this way, the form most resembles — if not replaces — a therapy session.
No wonder I’m eager to keep essaying. No wonder I want more people to join me.
Loved the litter analogy. Very very relatable!
This is beautiful. Thank you!