I’m seeing more and more comments come across the wires from folks who are running into severe difficulties in their stories. Not technical difficulties – emotional ones. Messages from several authors on Twitter, for example, saying they’d hit very difficult parts of their books and weren’t sure if they were going to go on. I don’t know their specific stories, but I do understand what they are dealing with.
Years ago before the kids when my wife and I lived in an apartment, I was sitting on our small balcony, drinking coffee and writing my memoir on an old Windows 3.11 desktop system I’d plopped on a microwave cart and hauled out with me. As I plowed through a chapter I’d called Ward 10a while listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, I suddenly burst into tears and thought maybe I’d pulled off more scab than I should have.
Yet the words kept flowing, as did the tears. So distraught was I that I called my wife at her work to tell her I was okay just in case one of the neighbors called her to tell her I wasn’t. Then I returned to finish the chapter by convincing myself some good would come from it in the end, that I must be writing something spectacular for my story to be affecting me the way that it was. Yet for the longest time since I felt something wasn’t quite right. No matter how hard I tried to stay focused on what my memoir was about, there’d still be instances where I broke down and couldn’t understand why.
If not for my wife’s persistence in asking me, “What’s your memoir about?” I don’t know if I’d ever have found the reason – the memoir wasn’t about what I thought. I probably knew that all along but just didn’t want to admit it, and the tears were my subconscious kicking me in the ass over it. Now that I know that, though, I see things much more clearly. The past no longer haunts me from the shadows because there are no shadows, and when I feel the sting of how things got forever fucked up, I ignore it. There is no conscious “how” – I just do. I might draw blood biting my lip, but I have to stick with the choice I made, and I know the pain will either get better, or it will get worse before it gets better. Either way it will get better.
It may seem flippant to say, “just hang in there,” especially when from experience I know bad vibes seem to conspire to act together all at once. It may seem overwhelming, leaving you wondering what the hell you’re doing or questioning if you’ll be able to get through it, and if you’ve never experienced it before it can be very scary. The good news it that it’s likely a temporary mood swing caused by a quirky chemical reaction and will go away. That’s not to say things will suddenly be all bright and beautiful again – just that they will be different, and sometimes that’s enough for us to get back on our feet and find the way to improve our situation.
