Starting to Write

20 August 2019

4:56 am

So. Well. Here we are.

I signed up for a class at my local career tech a year ago – a short little course – on blogging. I was going to learn how to (a) blog, (b) monetize it, (c) retire early, and (d) buy a ski chalet outside Vail and live out my days in the mountains, where my heart sings.

Instead I (a) got freaked out by the instructor’s insistence that every blog had to be seen and proofed by no fewer than five people, and checked and re-checked countless times, (b) hired a total doofus idiot at work who made my life hell and consumed ALL of my attention, (c) enjoyed an internal coup staged by my hormones, neurotransmitters, adrenal glands, and blood sugar, and (d) started questioning the quality of my marriage.

You know…just your standard, normal, Tuesday-morning-musings shit.

So rather than write, I froze. My Brene Brown perfectionist reared it’s ugly, horrible, ancient lizard head and crawled across my keyboard where it lay prone for a year, unmovable. I couldn’t even conjure up a shitty first draft (thank you, Ann Lamott, for teaching me to FINALLY allow myself those).

When I would approach the keyboard with fresh ideas zinging in my head, dying to be born, the lizard would loll on its side across the length of it and try to bite me. When I picked up my favorite fountain pen to scribe in my journal, the pages would betray me, and melt like Dali’s clocks while the thoughts tottered away on fantastical spindly elephant legs. Perfect, the Critic Committee whispered in my head, nudging their chairs ever closer in their semi-circle gathered around my computer, AA-meeting style. It has to be perfect.

And then I just said…after a series of events that shall be discussed later…fuck it. Fuck off, Mr. Keyboard Lizard. And fuck you, Critic Committee. And fuck anyone and everyone (let’s be honest – mostly me) who ever said it had to be perfect, or brilliant, or even readable.

In order to be a writer, I have to write.

<Gasps from the audience. The crowd hunches forward over their laps to write this juicy tidbit of advice down. Crutches are cast aside, the blind can see, peace on earth, etc., etc.>

(Thank you again, Ann Lamott.)

So here I sit, and I write. It is not going to be perfect. I can promise you a big, fresh, steaming pile of hot mess. It’s going to be all over hell and half of Georgia while I try to sort through and process what my forty-eight year old brain and body are doing to me, and what it might mean for how forty-nine looks.

And, frankly, I’m not writing it for you. I’m writing it for me. For the first time in my life, I’m writing without an end goal in mind. Not writing to get picked up by a publisher (do they still exist?). Not writing towards something, or away from something else, or to get over or to or above…hell, pick your preposition.

I’m writing my way through. Because how I feel right now is the absolute pits, and my options are (1) wine and cigarettes, (2) driving my friends insane with my chronic Eeyore-itis, (3) death by self-help podcast, or (4) a garden hose in the tailpipe.

Anyone else feel this way? Anyone else in a 24-year marriage, who woke up halfway through age forty-seven, childless by choice (and still happy about that decision) asking, “Is this as good as it gets?” I look at my sweet, kind husband who sits on the couch with Cops on in the background while he plays Pokémon Go on his phone and think, “Really? This is what I get?”

Not okay.