Transfiguration

I’m not sure what this space is anymore, or who I will be in a month, a year, a season. My creativity is dead. Missing. On a long hiatus. I blame death, the vagaries of aging, the imminent departure of the boy, who will not be in this house by this time next week.

I’ve followed the rule of threes for 18 years now. We’re whittling it down to two, then one, then none. The fall will be confusing and chaotic. Rebirth, reinvention, is mandatory. On optimistic days, I see the changes ahead as an opportunity to reconnect with the parts of myself I have allowed to atrophy. Who am I at my core? More than a mother. More than a partner. I am an uneasy friend. An absent artist. A professional drone.

It’s not just the pulls of home responsibilities that have worn me down. It’s the job, all grays and softness, where my only viewpoint is one of support and compassion, a supposed expert in the ways of the mind and heart. In addition to ruining me for anything but silence and depth (I barely have the energy or patience to maintain most friendships and family relationships outside of an increasingly shrinking circle), it has made it difficult for me to adopt the necessary clarity of a writer. How can anyone be fairly summed up in a few pithy sentences? How could I dare speculate about the complexities of another human’s psyche? We are large and contain multitudes. Words are powerful. They illuminate my experience. But my words can box others in, remove their subjectivity.

To survive, I have to shake this mindset off, fling it out of my system. I have to have faith that there is something left in me worth sharing. On the positive side, I’ve been inhaling books of all kinds. That has to count for something, the ingestion of other peoples’ metaphors, their worlds, their beautiful, complex simplicity.

The word artist

Back in my early twenties, when I was teetering into adulthood on not-quite stable legs, a film-making coworker approached me with a proposal. It involved smoldering and smoking, silence and tension, a bottled-up version of me filmed in black and white, riding scooters, taking deep drags off cigarettes, and enigmatically letting the smoke obscure me further.

We never made the movie. The point of it all escapes me, though in retrospect he clearly had a smoking fetish. But I do remember this idea of my containment, how I kept parts of myself under wraps. I carried tension just below the surface, ready to blow.

Thirteen years ago, I exploded. Words thrummed from my fingertips. I was compelled to create. In the process, I worked through some trauma, put a lot of my past to rest, went back to grad school, and became a therapist. The turmoil I created in my personal life during this intense time eventually died down–as did the writing.

I recently reread some early entries from this blog, writing from those gritty days of lava and ash, long since deleted from the online repository. Intensity and longing vibrate off the page. I no longer identify with that version of me, caught up in words and feelings. Or perhaps parts of that person feel too messy and unpredictable. To give in to her intensity would shake up my current equilibrium. Stability trumps emotional and artistic expression.

I grew up with an idea about what it meant to be a writer, about what went into being a word artist. Real writers were cruel and chauvinistic. They relied on the support of those whose self-sacrifice they both expected and insulted. Writers dealt in instability. Unprocessed trauma was their bread and butter, and they fed off anger and lust. My early writing didn’t totally spring from this dysfunctional well, though I was angry and desperate to be seen, bruises, scars and all. Through my writing, I did not ignore my trauma. Instead I processed it, worked through its antecedents, and fully entered adulthood. Writing had done its job. My life was in order. I boxed away my aching need for expression and exposure.

Muffling creativity and emotion, however, does not eliminate them. I continue to struggle with the tension between the creative, emotional life I crave and the comfort and solidity of being a stable, reliable person. Though this is a false dichotomy, the model of writer as a self-centered blunderer still operates in the shadows.

What happens when parts of you remain disavowed? They creep out at night. They laden your dreams with bizarre symbolism, cars that sink into waterfalls, men you once knew stalking your sleep. Traces remain in your waking hours, tingles of limbs gone fast asleep and trying to return to life. A heavy numbness weighs down your mind and traps your fingers. Weekends pass in a stupor of work and static.

I must approach this life one word at a time, one mundane, but important task at a time, one alive thought followed up by action at a time. I hold these disparate pieces of myself, the melodramatic, the calm, the wounded, the creative, the egotist, the self-sacrificer while I continue to create a whole life. A writer’s life. A mother’s life. A partner’s life. A psychotherapist’s life. To live fully, I have no choice but to create some sort of balance, to make space to write and be myself authentically.

The Brontës and me

Jane Eyre was one of my favorite books as a kid, the memorable Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles movie version providing the visuals for its gothic intensity. In the taffy slow early days of the pandemic, I reread Charlotte Brontë’s classic, as well as her sister Emily’s harder-to-stomach Wuthering Heights. I went on a Brontë binge, reading biographies and articles about the family, their quirks and talents. The Brontës lived hard lives in hard times, none of the siblings making it to 40. Lately I’ve gotten caught up in the topic again, my 1:30am (or earlier!) insomnia bouts spent reading Claire Harman’s biography of Charlotte, A Fiery Heart.

Paging through the book feels strangely familiar. I already know the facts. Is this a re-read, my first go-round wiped out by pandemic stress? Did I crack open some similar biography between then and now? Everything new is old again. What strikes me this time around is the determination of the three spinster sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Stuck at home with a dissipated brother and uninvolved curate father (their mother and two other sisters long dead), these women knew they had to take care of business. Money was tight. Remaining governesses or schoolteachers was unappealing. So the sisters decided to become published authors. Their first step was to have a collection of their poetry printed pseudonymously. From there they worked together (and sometimes separately) to write and shop their subsequent manuscripts out to publishers.

As the siblings were working on their publishing plan, their brother died of tuberculosis. Not long after their books were published, Emily and Anne succumbed to the disease.. About six years after later Charlotte passed away at 38, likely due to severe morning sickness.

The Brontës were a peculiar, self-contained set of siblings, from childhood onward caught up in writing elaborate and fantastical stories. Creation was part of how they navigated and tolerated the world. But why am I so taken their determination and penurious circumstances? Perhaps I need inspiration, a reminder to stay the course (or to at least get on the boat).

 I, dear reader, am also about to become a published author. What I have written has little in common with Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. Because it is in the self-help and self-development genre, it does not tell a melodramatic story or dazzle the mind with its extended and deep metaphors. But I worked hard at it, tried my best to make it useful and well-written, and got paid to do it. Having a deadline and a writing structure kept me going. It got me published by an actual publisher in a way that this blog, something I’ve been writing in for almost fourteen years, did not. 

Over the years, I’ve grappled with how I could do the sort of writing I enjoy, the stuff that shows up on writing survive, in a more public way, to allow the personal to exist within the professional. This brings up internal conflicts and questions. What does it mean to share my inner thoughts as a psychotherapist? What if this is terribly unprofessional? What happens if a client or a colleague reads this blog? Will anyone, outside of the perhaps three people who are longtime readers, care about what I write? What is the point of writing—here, or anywhere else? How do I make this authentic and yet appealing to others? What if my authenticity is unappealing to others?

Perhaps I think too much. Ultimately, I’d like to write here more often, and not completely anonymously. I don’t want to make a big deal out of this tentative plan or spend too much time crafting my posts. But I hope to slowly meld the personal and professional into something that has a shape and form, has a life of its own, and is authentically mine.

(Oh – and my book is called 52-Week Grief Journal:  Prompts and Reflections for Navigating Loss. For more information, take a look at amazon.)

Out of and into the blue

A few weeks ago, in my professional context, I was contacted by a publishing company for a “paid writing opportunity.” The contact was random, the email imprecise, though a little digging indicated they were likely approaching me for a self-help style book. When I talked to the acquisitions editor, it was clear that the person did not know my psychotherapy specialties and likely had not looked at my website or professional blog, though someone from the company had done some sleuthing to find me in the first place. I rejected a few topics that were out of my scope of competence, finally choosing something of relative interest from an extensive list. One signed nondisclosure agreement later, I approved a very detailed outline. I just about had the writing sample in the bag when I heard back from the acquisitions editor. Someone had beaten me to the completed sample and had been chosen to write the book. They would contact me (perhaps) in the future for another topic.

This was a disappointment. It was also a relief, given the time to complete the ~200 page book was sixty days from the signing of the contract, two months that would overlap with the boy’s summer vacation and free time in perhaps one of the last summers he’ll be just hanging out. Even the process of completing the writing sample got in the way of family time, coming with my mother’s first visit in a year and a half. The topic didn’t set me on fire and the publishing company churns out material, so this offer was mixed. High art, or even low art, it was not. And I would have to enlist the support of my professional and personal community to generate some sort of buzz.

However, it would have been the first time I have really been paid for writing. It would have given me the experience of writing a book and the impetus to do so. Based on what I did for the writing sample, I have the capacity to write such a book. However, I have no idea what people are interested in reading and lack the confidence and internal motivation to complete a large-scale project. Meanwhile, I’m left with a fairly specific sample that includes multiple sections. Perhaps I can adapt it for my professional blog, but I’m not interested enough at this point to do the crafting. I’d much rather write about anxiety and it ties to our families or something that feels personal and universal all at once.

Anyway. I write it out here because I can’t share it elsewhere. And maybe they will be in touch again and I’ll get the contract and have something out there published under my name, circulating in the world. But the experience was so random and over so quickly that I wonder if it will be repeated—and whether there are other ways to incorporate serious writing into my life. After all, they found me after I revamped my professional blog. What would it be like to really focus on writing what I am interested in and finding an audience that way?