I write because it’s what I do best, and Reasons for Living is where I share my most personal, thoughtful work—the kind of essays that don’t fit anywhere else. If you enjoy what I write, I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber.
Paid subscribers get two exclusive essays per month and my deepest gratitude, plus access to a sizable library of resources about writing, living with limitations, and journal-keeping.
Your support doesn’t just help sustain this newsletter; it helps sustain me as a writer and artist who is physically and psychologically unable to work at a traditional job.
If Reasons for Living has moved you, challenged you, or given you something to hold onto, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. If a paid subscription isn’t possible, a free one is just as appreciated. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.
Before I write anything else, I want to let you know that I’m sure there are readers of this newsletter who play the guitar, play it well, and take it very seriously. If you are one of those people, you might grimace when I describe my tuning issues. You might be convinced that I chose a terrible beginner’s guitar when I should’ve bought xyz instead of zyx. If you want to shout about it, please hang your hat somewhere else and shout there.
And now we begin.
Recently, I purchased an acoustic guitar. I bought it as someone who claims not to have any hobbies, who has financial anxiety, and thus instinctively wants to monetize anything I can do well. This guitar, though, wasn’t purchased as something to be monetized; I’ve just wanted to play the guitar since I was a teenager. Back then, I didn’t have the discipline for a new musical instrument. I was a former competitive pianist, and my interest (and skill) in piano waned dramatically once I entered my torturous adolescent years. The guitar purchase wasn’t for becoming a competitive guitarist (apparently not a thing that exists) or to busk at the local farmers’ market. I just wanted to learn to play, and then play, the guitar in my home, the way one might pick up a language because of the increased ease of learning due to apps like Duolingo.
Before I made my big purchase, I browsed to see what was out there. My criteria were fairly simple: I wanted a guitar that was good for people with small hands, already restrung for lefties, and was considered a decent guitar for beginners. After browsing around and making a mental list of the ones that looked good to me, I researched guitar forums, blogs, and Reddit to see what people thought was a good beginner’s guitar. And the one that I’d had my eye on—a smaller and more lightweight guitar for lefties with small hands—kept coming up over and over again: the Baby Taylor, also known as the guitar that Taylor Swift helped to design and the one that she carried around for songwriting on tour when she was 16. She’d designed it for children/adolescents, but those very characteristics made it exactly what I wanted. There’s a remarkable kindness in finding tools that meet you where you are, particularly when you have a disabled body. So I found one on eBay and bought it.
When it finally arrived, I was both thrilled to receive it and stymied by my first task: tuning the guitar. Even the casual guitarists out there are probably laughing at me about this, but I could not seem to get the D and G strings to be in tune, according to the two tuning apps I tried; The D string would jump from one extreme of the tuning app (TOO HIGH) to the other extreme (TOO LOW), which I absolutely did not understand, and the G string kept sounding like the D string. At some point, I just gave up on the tuning apps and sang the six notes, trying to get the D (at this point, the last note that wouldn’t tune properly) to sound even vaguely like my voice. This turned out to be a foolish endeavor, as I don’t have perfect pitch and soon began to feel like I had no idea what I was hearing at all. I wondered if something was going on with the guitar—was it not standard? Had it been strung unconventionally?
The only thing I could surmise was that I was tuning the guitar to the point where one note was turning into the note above it or below it—not helpful when you’ve just gotten a guitar and just want the tune the heckin’ thing. But I kept trying—with the tuning app, of course, I’m not an animal—and eventually, it was tuned. After getting it tuned, I learned to play the E minor chord and immediately found that I was muting a note with my middle finger. Over and over, I tried to perfect my E minor until I got it to be “pretty good.” I finally understood why guitarists have calluses on their fingertips; repetition marks the body, much as how I have a permanent callus on my left middle finger from handwriting.
But why buy a guitar in the first place, beyond the desire to have a hobby?
I’ve had an autoresponder up for my email because of my mental health issues (my diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, which means that I experience the ups and downs of bipolar disorder, with psychotic episodes in between; this can often be well-managed by medication), including a depressive episode, a hypomanic episode, and a period in which I was (and still am) at high risk for becoming psychotic—it’s been a rough time. Add to this a heap of nervous system dysregulation, and you’ll have a trembling woman who is looking for something gentle to help calm everything down. I bought the guitar as nervous regulation, as gentleness.
I mean, I have my dreams. In the future, I’m in a band called The Revelries, and I’ve written lyrics for songs that don’t exist, sung into voice memos. In my dreams, I learn songwriting and can play guitar to accompany my lyrics. What’s key is that I’m not pressuring myself to do this. Learning the guitar will take time, and I’m going about it gently—not rushing, just learning one chord at a time. I have E Minor (sort of).
On my left hand’s middle finger is a solid, forever callus. It’s from writing, and I’ll have it all my life—a mark of my life as a writer. As I held down the strings on the fretboard, I realized why guitarists talk about playing until their fingers bleed and develop calluses; it takes a good deal of pressure and strength to press the strings all the way down. Keep going, it says. One day, you’ll have calluses too—markers of an endeavor you took up for fun. ❤️
Dust-Dipped
Play Audio
BY INUA ELLAMS
We were wild children / we moved through space / like blades
We were tame children / we fell to sleep / like gunpowder
We were poor children / we ran to showers / like harvests
We were rich children / we clutched our towels / like fences
We were loud children / we bit and bickered / like mice
We were quiet children / we meditated / like drill sergeants
We were pious children / we read Marvel comics / like scripture
We were godless children / we claimed Christ healed / like Wolverine
We were stupid children / we plucked hot coal / like fruit
We were smart children / we hoarded fruit / like fossil fuel
We were lazy children / we lifted toothpicks / like javelins
We were sporty children / we evaded tests / like hurdlers
We were humble children / we studied stars / like afronauts
We were proud children / we graduated / like thunder gods
We were hopeful children / we charged out / like lightning
We were hopeless children / we fell to earth / like dust
I write because it’s what I do best, and Reasons for Living is where I share my most personal, thoughtful work—the kind of essays that don’t fit anywhere else. If you enjoy what I write, I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber.
Paid subscribers get two exclusive essays per month and my deepest gratitude, plus access to a sizable library of resources about writing, living with limitations, and journal-keeping.
Your support doesn’t just help sustain this newsletter; it helps sustain me as a writer and artist who is physically and psychologically unable to work at a traditional job.
If Reasons for Living has moved you, challenged you, or given you something to hold onto, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. If a paid subscription isn’t possible, a free one is just as appreciated. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.
If I hold myself very still and tilt my head to listen, I can just barely hear, far in the distance, the sound of strumming. So lovely. And it's you.
Also, it's so good to hear from you, Esme!