Writing to Keep Sane

On my 21 years of writing: When I was 10, my parents gave me a diary. I wrote about my pets, my family, my school. As a teenager I learned that writing was the surest and safest way to heal any hurt. Embarrassing body changes, paranoia about what my peers thought of me, fights with my sister, anger at the world, fascination and obsession over boys - all of it poured into my diaries and helped me think through the bewilderment of being a kid and turning into an adult at the same time. In college I catalogued new hurts and new friends. I was an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major but the classes that captured my mind were David Carrasco's "Religious Dimensions of the Human Experience" and "Mesoamerican Religion," and his words in class inspired pages and pages of prose.

I'm the kind of girl who loves easily and with everything I have. Falling in love, hard, four times, and losing all of them, was an affirmation of my belief that nothing good ever lasts forever. I wrote to comfort myself, to call upon my heart as my only friend at times, to say goodbye to them, to wonder what was wrong with me. I wrote myself into the idea that no matter how sweet the moment or how much two people love each other, it will end. Even now with my husband and son I have this feeling, almost a certainty, that it won't last forever.

Before The Old Man came along, and before The Kid, most of my writing was negative, a necessity to work through grief and pain and loss and loneliness. While much of what I write is still focused on this exercise, I've changed.

On writing as a mother: So, I'm pregnant back in 2005. Completely exhausted. Frazzled over my job. Worried sick over the prospect of putting a tiny baby in daycare one day. Worried about money. My body's changing. And all I want to do is write. Not write about the things I would have in the past, but write fiction, make up stories, write little celebrations of my life. Never before in my diaries had I celebrated anything, or written about my happiness. Now I write about my blessings. I document my blessings.

The Kid arrives in 2006. I don't REM sleep for what seems like eons. My body in a short time gained 50 pounds and lost it again. My joints are like - What the fuck? - I can't run anymore. I go back to work at 3 months and learn to pump breastmilk and get mastitis anyway and feel guilty for every second I'm gone from the baby. I write stories. I write emails. I live on emails from my friend from http://mamasapplecores.blogspot.com/2009/05/nap-versus-garden.html
because she's been through it before. I save the emails and refer to them like a book, and save my own as a future roadmap if I ever have another Kid. I write stories for my son, I make up stories for him, thinking he'll love reading them someday.

I begin to think that I want others to read what I write, no matter how choppy or long-winded. I need the connection. I need to connect with others who write. I find a writing group and I feel like I've been an alien my whole life and suddenly I find my own kind - those who enjoy the way a passage feels on the tongue and who get way too excited about beautiful words and a beautiful story. Those who realize a story that depicts degenerate human emotion and actions is just another way to cope with human nature and not necessarily an endorsement of living your life that way. I explore sex and love and adultery and parenthood and loneliness in words.

I had to get up at 5:00 am this morning to have time to myself because the rest of my day I will not pause nor have time to think. This itch to write is taking me in new directions. I'm taking online writing classes which are perfect - early mornings and late nights spent churning my creativity in taps on the keyboard.

I write to say goodbye - to vanquish poisonous thoughts that keep me in the past.

I write to say thank you for new blessings, for Annie finding her home.

I write to reflect, not to analyze.

I write to analyze.

I write to escape into my head to escape my job and my family and the energy they demand from me.

I write to fantasize, to entertain myself.