the parable of the spider in the sink

the error of comfort

There is a spider in the sink—a wolf spider. He appeared yesterday morning during the storm that was driving water through cracks sideways into the house.

I noticed him while I was washing out the coffee filter, unfortunately not before I had splashed some water on one of his legs and caused him to curl up into a little rhomboid.

Now that there was some water in the sink, the walls were too slippery to climb. I then tried to help him out by offering him a butter knife to walk along, but he seemed to interpret this as a threat, further compacting himself.

Then I had the idea that I would make a little bridge out of a piece of paper towel, which I secured under the hand soap bottle and dangled down within easy reach.

But instead of taking the bridge to safety, the spider curled up underneath it for the rest of the day. Every time I checked, he had stepped behind it, and shied away.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

I was frustrated in the way I imagine guardian angels must be. Here you go, I said. I made you a perfect solution to the problem you do not yet understand, which is that eventually I will need to scour out the sink, and even if I am careful then, I could knock you sideways and down the drain. So it would be better to take the solution I have offered and get out of the way! But instead you are hiding there, in an improvised shelter which is only temporarily preferable.

But, I figured, it was a storm. I didn’t care to do much that day either, and I didn’t totally mind having an excuse not to scour out the sink. So I let the dishes pile up to the side and watched a movie instead. Surely, surely, the spider will have moved on tomorrow morning, I thought.

But he had not.

I took away the paper towel and used it to wipe up a spill. So much for making things comfortable. Being comfortable won’t necessarily make you move.

But of course, I have to think of all the times my guardian angel must have been enormously frustrated with me. Watching me make a home within a temporary and improvised solution, only moving once it became too uncomfortable to stay in place.

Choosing comfort over surrender is probably the biggest “mistake” I’ve made, although to call it a mistake is maybe a little too cruel. It’s more of a tactical error which proves itself to be correctible. And one thing that I know about myself, to the absolute bottom of my bones, is that when the situation calls for it, I will take a deep breath and dive into the great and terrifying by saying what needs to be said, jumping over the creek, driving on into the desert, whatever it is. I might crawl up the last part of the mountain on my hands and knees, I might scream and curse, but I will get there.

Once, my therapist suggested that I make an appointment at one of those places where they let you break things. It was something about allowing myself to express anger. I asked J to go with me, and I told him it was something I found difficult and embarrassing, to ever admit to being angry. That he was doing something important for me in going along and witnessing, in other words.

But once we got to the place and signed our waivers, I picked up a baseball bat and smashed a bottle, then two, then just started pounding on a metal door which had been propped up on tires.

As we drove home, J said, “I don’t know how it felt, but that didn’t seem very difficult for you.” And in truth, it had not been. I had the resolve to do it. There is a layer of iron under all my various fears and hesitations. But I’m not always motivated to find it.

I like to suggest to writers that they give themselves a daily word count for a limited amount of time—1,000 words a day for 90 days has been my method for writing the first draft of a novel. The trick is that you must be ruthless about doing it every day in spite of whatever bullshit you come up with. You go in knowing that eventually, you will create some bullshit to get out of it. It won’t look like bullshit until much later, when you lament that you still haven’t written your book.

Of course, the obvious benefit to doing things this way is that you have a stack of pages with 90,000 words in them, and you are allowed to call that the first draft of a novel no matter how senseless and idiotic the pages seem to you.

But the hidden benefit is that by the end of the experience, you get to see and understand yourself as someone who has iron underneath.

Because you have proof—literal proof—in your hands. You didn’t want to write, and you did anyway. It seemed hopeless, and you continued. Even if you ended up tossing most of those pages (and I certainly ended up tossing all but 30 pages of the first draft of Marilou Is Everywhere), you now know that you have the iron underneath, and you can use it whenever you need to.

And because of that, you can trust yourself. You aren’t on a journey with some lollygagging complainer who will break down in despair the moment you have a flat tire or get lost. You are traveling with someone who will do what is necessary, who is not afraid. That person can take risks. And art is risk, so you really do need to travel with someone who can be fearless that way.

I just checked, and the spider has gone.

The next time something that comforts you is taken away, I invite you to congratulate yourself on the good luck of it. I invite myself to congratulate myself on the good luck of it, too, as I now have to shovel snow, something I don’t especially care to do. But I’ll have different muscles when I’m done. And the part of me that fears the cold will be quieter. Somehow, this changes everything, and that is writing.