my writing
then I gave myself a break
I booked a flight to Arizona and went to stay with my snowbird parents for a week. With me, I brought Joan Didion’s book A Year of Magical Thinking and a journal. I had signed up for an online writing workshop, and, well, I started to write.
The blank pages started to call to me, as though they were a sleeping infant in need of comfort. I wrote and wrote and wrote.
I started to heal.
I was still in grief I couldn’t possibly explain, but I was healing.
That writing became Grief: A Love Story.
I wrote about it here but the TL;DR is that I still haven’t completed it. I have a 90,000 word draft, and it’s told me a few times, who it wants to be, and I’ve long forgiven myself for letting in languish, although I have named the most recent draft in my hard drive as “Last F#cking Draft” but that seems fair.
I continue to let the burning words out of the building.
I have declared, in many a job interview,
that I think of writing like it’s a food group.
it ‘s not a lie
I find words intoxicating. I have loved to read since I was surrounded by alcoholism and felt invisible as a child, and reading has always called me to write.
It’s what I do to feel grounded and me, it’s the thing I turn to when I need to make sense of chaos. It’s my comfort.
I always had words, and when I careened through a year of loss in 2015, I couldn’t find them. I dropped it. There was just too many words scrambling to the fire exit in my brain to have them emerge safely. I couldn’t be trusted as their steward.
