This is why God made Emojis

Re: Ted Mosby, Writer's Block and "Check Yes or No"

Once upon a time in my mid-20s, I met Ted. He stood, besuited and dashing, in the corner of an upscale lounge across the street from an independent theatre in San Francisco. We struck up a conversation and a few days later I woke up to an email in my inbox. He thanked me for a review I wrote of his independent film, complimented me on my writing and — in a reference to a popular episode of the How I Met Your Mother — asked me who won the break up I’d mentioned to him in conversation. I fretted over what to reply for hours.

“Tell him country music won your breakup,” my friend Sacha said.

I didn’t get it. I still don’t. I went with it.

I hit send.

I couldn’t sleep for days.

…

You think I’d be more comfortable with banter. I obsess over words but maybe that’s the point. When someone I admire gifts me with sentences that feel especially kind or warm the pressure for thoughtful engagement — for striking precisely the right tone and rhythm in response — becomes crippling.¹ I imagine what a cooler, more put-together version of me would reply and over-edit until that supposedly cooler, put-together version of me sounds either depressed or psychotic. Sometimes I don’t reply at all because, if I don’t botch the follow up, I can’t alter whatever impression moved someone to write me in the first place. I want to protect the moment instead — screen capture it, re-read it — do anything but engage. Like how I don’t want to ever wear my most expensive favorite cashmere sweater, or eat that cute chocolate bunny because I just can’t bear to bite off the head. The more perfect the text or email the more I want to collect it; the less likely I am to respond. 

…

I’m told the difficulty in writing lies in using words to get to a place beyond them. Similarly, people love to say ‘there are no words.’ But so long as I’m able to observe humans and events I usually find there are words, actually. They might not feel sufficient, or poetically moving when strung together in a row, but they’re at least sitting there, ready to serve.

It’s when I refuse to surrender control — when I seek to create reality, not capture it— that words fail me.

…

Is this why anger, as an emotion, feels like an “override”? If being flustered shuts down my verbal abilities, anger before a fait accompli tends to set them in motion. Take, for example, a mini-novella I once authored for some guy named Patrick in 2018. At the time, he appeared to have ‘ghosted’ me and in that case, what’s one text versus 50? I lay on the sand on a beach outside Miami, drafted a dozen possible rejection texts he could have sent me instead of disappearing and delivered them to his phone in rapid succession — a modern-day “check yes or no” love letter updated to “check all that apply.”² 

While I waited for Patrick to overcome his own writer’s block, I submitted my texts to the New Yorker and received the closure I sought elsewhere. 

I think what I’m trying to say is: maybe writer’s block shows up as a reminder to fall back into our bodies, surrender and observe. Ted Mosby aka Josh Radnor is now a singer/songwriter with a beautiful Museletter if you want to subscribe, Mercury is in retrograde and maybe that’s why I’m so tired I can’t quite think of a closing thought other than:

I think I understand why God made emojis.

1. A sentiment somewhat adjacent to this is — at least the anxiety that comes from knowing ones writing will be actively read and observed — is, I understand, why

Lauren Hough

sometimes turns off comments.

2. This worked, for the record. Alicia: 1. Ghost: 0.