one

keep going.

I question showing up here. And I think that’s important. Do I have the right to write? Sure. Quietly in a notebook. Do I have the right to share what I write? It’s a question I’ve wrestled with for years. My mind usually sees a few (two or three or four) distinct ways to go about something that I want and then it attacks itself continuously as I watch. Doing nothing.

I wonder if other writers feel this: write, share, hide under the blankets of their inadequacy and humiliation. I’m sure some can relate and some cannot. I happen to hide for months. Or years. Most of what I have written is hidden away on a Google Doc called “A Memoir”. (It does have a working title, this memoir, but one that even now I’m scared to share.) I used to visit the file frequently, 200 pages, an outline, comments, edits, highlights. I visit “A Memoir” less so now. Another Google Drive called “BWC” where my musings based on Molly Rosen’s poignant prompts accumulated over three years circulating her programs. Many of the words that spilled out from those years have settled in “A Memoir” and many have not. Many sit there uknown to anyone, even to myself. Sometimes I’ll revisit them and wonder if it was me who wrote that down.

The truth is I’m scared to share my writing. My feelings and thoughts. My opinions, especially is not well formulated. My writing has been rejected (albeit minimally because I submit minimally) and my tender heart hurts. Who am I to have something to say? Who am I to hold your attention, completely or incompletely? (How many tabs do you have open?) Who am I to take up this space? Any space?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

But I do have a longing to offer a different perspective (I doubt we have the same one). On life. On death. On grief. On dying. On parenting. On leading. On healing. On depression. On catastrophe. These nuanced, unknowable experiences that we dance around (and dance with) now whisper to me. And my friend told me to listen to the whispers.

I’ve been listening to the whispers for years. The whispers are what allowed me to think about the possibility of graduate school, the possibility to read theory of psychoanalysis, the theory that saved me from myself. The whispers are what called me to send an email to Molly in the fall of 2018 — almost 5 years ago — while I was pregnant with my second child and barely clinging to life. The whispers are what called me to sit in an office with a psychoanalyst 6 weeks after my parents and my sister died in a car accident (car catastrophe? I haven’t found the language to encompass the event).

But the whispers around sharing my experience of the world through my writing, sharing my depression, my desires for death, my longing, my broken heart? Those whispers seem far fetched.

In 2018, I took Anne Lamott’s infamous advice to just write a sentence a day. Brick by brick. Bird by bird. The notes section of my phone, aptly titled “One Sentence a Day” (I’m nothing if not pragmatic), is filled with one off thoughts from the daily life of a griever, a mother, a trying-to-be-er. They make no sense.

Until I read them and viscerally remember the moment I wrote them. The first sentence I wrote was on what would have been Dad’s 62nd birthday, about 18 months after he (they) died. I wrote one (long) sentence: I sat, legs zig-zagged on the dark wood floors in the hallway foyer of my Dumbo apartment, ceilings rising 14 feet above my head, tears streaming down my cheeks, silently praying for Rolos and revenge.

I remember the threadbare gray v-neck I was wearing (Mom’s). It was just beginning to tear. I remember I had just gotten my first baby to sleep. I remember he was challenging to get to sleep. I remember the 8 months of baby inside me, his movement rolling and stretching my skin. I remember I was tired in a way I didn’t know existed. I was sad in a way that no one could follow. Dad loved Rolos. I wonder if he loved revenge. I remember feeling so small in the bigness of the world, so lost. I remember feeling alone.

Another fragmented thought, written just before my first sons second birthday, just over two years after the accident (they are blended for me): I’m fragile. I’m not fragile in a ‘don’t touch me, I’ll break’ way. I’m fragile in a ‘I have already been shattered to pieces’ kind of way. This moment less acute in a scene. In fact, it is not a moment. It is a grappling that still grips me. I don’t present as fragile. I am sustaining the unbearable so I mostly present as having-my-shit-together-you’re-so-strong kind of way. I navigate daily the internal dissonance of keeping it together and falling apart. Tension.

This steady rhythm of noticing myself — in environments, in moments, in feelings — became a cornerstone. A tiny ritual. A nod to the creativity that was still there inside me, buried, only able to come out one thought at a time. Perhaps a nod to life itself, one that I wanted to resist. One I wanted to exist.

In a life where everything I thought I knew was shattered, was it words that could…

Pick up my pieces?

Rebuild my life?

Create something new?

Begin again?

Heal me?

Save me?

No ending to the sentence feels right.

Those endings invoke a feeling of resilience. (And I have a strong distaste for such things. I’ll be sure to revisit.)

So what do I do with all the words? They keep spilling out of me. In poetry. In essays. In simple thoughts that could become.

Ah… there is it.

In a life where everything I thought I knew was shattered, was it words that could allow me to become?

(Sometimes you just have to keep writing to get there.)

Become. Begin to be.

I was lifeless. (And still am lifeless in many ways.) When I write though, I am full, embodied, limitless, expansive. I can actually be in a way that real life inhibits me. And perhaps that’s why it’s scary to share the writing. I don’t want to get what life writing gives me taken away — be it through rejection, humiliation, condemnation. I’m tired. I’ve been through hell. I must presume that many writers (or those who share creative work) have felt this way.

How do we have the courage to be here? How can I have the courage to be here? Like I show up in my “One Sentence a Day” space?

I’ll continue to wrestle with it. Kick that can down the road, as my Dad says. Keep talking about it, as a psychoanalyst I know says.

Keep writing about it.

In the meantime, keep being.