“Often it feels like overwhelm is a constant heckler and I’m on stage unable to formulate the next joke, word, sentence, line—entire stories robbed from me by this hack clown. When this was an intermittent problem instead of a chronic one, I came up with a solution I turn to more and more. I call it my Recharge List. The list is a catalog of activities that break through the clutter and allow imagination and sentences to flow again. There are different cures for different moods. Acute anxiety might be beat back by taking a long walk or sitting by water watching the boats come and go. Frustration borne out of the current political situation might call for aggressive, revolutionary music: Public Enemy, dead prez. Frustration borne from a lack of autonomy might call for aggressive gangsta rap: Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Tupac’s All Eyez on Me. I won’t go through the entire list—seeing movies in the theater, riding my bicycle, and writing in my journal are all on there—but if there is one thing that seems to work for all moods, all shades of blockage, it’s visiting a museum. Being immersed in a curated world of art, science, or history, conversing across ages with varied minds, allows me to get out of myself and for the sentences to flow.”
—Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You (Liveright, 2019)