Write This Down

Last September, I started feeling a tug to write again. Like, really write. The One Conference lit a little flame, and small things kept popping up pointing me in that direction. I was in the throes of sleeplessness, but willing to hold space for this passion without feeling obligated to dive in. Then in January, life turned upside down and a big little voice in my heart told me unequivocally that this is the story you need to write. I know writing doesn't have to equal publishing, so with little to no pushback, I said yes to the "Big Magic" as Elizabeth Gilbert calls it.

Which also means that 6 months ago, I dove headfirst into some of the really good memoirs out there (a genre I'd previous been ambivalent about). I've been inhaling books on writing. I went on a reflective writing retreat in March, and I started thinking seriously about what it meant to be A Writer. And of course, I've been sitting down at my laptop to write. So far, I only know this: every effort I've made to sit down and write-- something that happens once every few weeks at best-- has been rewarded with a simple overtone of clarity. The art of holding my attention span to an uninterrupted task until I've wrestled the subtext out of a certain situation or emotion is a reward in itself. I strongly feel that if no one else ever reads my words, that's okay.

However, I wasn't holding so loosely to my words that I wasn't devastated when my toddler dropped my laptop, breaking the hard-drive, rendering the first 10,000 words of what I'd come to think of as MY BOOK un-recoverable. You'll ask if I had backed it up, and I'll tell you, of course I didn't. For the past 6 months, staying alive has been my mantra. Making it through one day at a time. Short-term memory and critical thinking have been reserved for life-threatening situations, mostly involving my children. The rest is just details (as those t-shirts from the 90s used to say).

So here I sit, mourning those words I poured out when the trauma was fresh, grasping in vain at the wisps of ideas that I know passed out of my head and through my fingers a few short months ago, but had been released from the forefront my brain because I felt they were secure on paper. Which is, interestingly, one of the most therapeutic things about writing! It's a fascinating sort of amnesia to read something I wrote any length of time ago. The words, their rawness and confusion, whether coherent or jumbled in nature, take me right back to the space I was in when I wrote them, but I never fail to see the situation more clearly re-reading my words later than I did in the moment.

But now, some of the most crucial words of my life have disappeared into the ether. This both reminds me that they must not have been the most crucial words, and also that words and ideas can be frangible but enduring. They are worth writing again, and worth protecting, even if no one reads them but myself.