She is

She is writing. 

SHE is writing. 

She IS writing. 

She is WRITING. 

She's writing. 

Process

Last year, I reconnected with my creative process. At the time, it was a reaction to unusual and challenging life circumstances, and it was a deliberate attempt to step back and gain the sense of perspective and insight that I needed. 

Apart from providing immediate mental first aid, this creative renaissance has had longer term benefits. It might look to an outsider like I have an odd assortment of strange interests, but it's a collection of reflective and meaning-making activities that allow me to take the chunkier and less cooperative elements of life and reshape them into something I can live with. I am less stressed now, happier in myself, calmer. It is also helping me to come to acceptance of my disability. The process of reflection and integration afforded by a practice like writing, for example, helps me to lodge important understandings in a deeper place in my memory - even when I can't recall the more superficial details. The creative output provides reference points in my emotional map and on my personal timeline, revealing the way some of my bigger questions, challenges, growth have unfolded, even when I don't remember the sequence or timing of significant events. This is a valuable tool for memory and insight, but more importantly, it helps me to feel whole when I have lost so much, so so much, of what once defined me. 

A creative process does not need to be something artistic, or even skilled. I remember one time, turning to the medium of colouring in. (You read that right: line drawing + pencils = colouring in). There is a page that I coloured while contemplating in a very focused way all of the elements of a particular situation I was in. Not an exercise in mindfulness exactly, as that would require calm sensory presence without thinking thoughts, but nonetheless a very powerful activity. The picture is of a patterned sun, rising in flames, mandala-like, over a turbulent sea. Coloured with all the energy and intent of my process, it is beautiful. Beautiful.  But one corner remains uncoloured. As I filled the page with swirls and vortices of colour, I became unbearably weary of thinking about this issue that had stymied me for so long, until I couldn't bear to give it any more effort, not even one more stroke of my pencil. So I stopped colouring, and went out and took very specific (and effective) measures to transform that situation. I was very clear about doing this without handing over any more of my colour, without giving away any more of my emotional resources, without ceding any more of my personal power.  That picture, unfinished, is a magical thing to me - not because it represents any level of artistic skill, but because creating it took me from the stuck and powerless place I was in, to a mindset where I was ready to act to transform it. 

The same is true every time we bring the quality of mindful intent to a creative activity. It provides a way to process our experience, either present or past, to make sense of it, to renegotiate our relationship with what is or what was. In the big things in life, it allows us to reclaim our power in the face of otherwise overwhelming, unfathomable circumstances by creating meaning and connection. In the small things, it affords us a breathing space, a valuable pause, fresh energy to continue on with. 

Quotalicious - 40th birthday

It’s never too late to be what you could have been. ~ George Eliot

So, it's my 40th birthday today and it brings with it a swirl of emotions.  Mostly I'm feeling grateful for the hope that I might even make it to 50, 60, 70 or beyond.  Which is not something that those of us who have danced with the crab-footed fiend take lightly.

To celebrate this most expected and surprising of days, I've decided to gift myself the very most awesomest gift I can:  the gift of owning my writer-ness.  Publicly.  This means a blog with my actual real name on it (stay tuned).  And formalising my potentially-writing-for-publication-and-payment status with my employer.  And getting myself a copy of the Australian Writer's Marketplace.  And allowing that it's perfectly ok to meander down that path in a sedate fashion, balancing all the other elements of my life for the greatest possible JOY combination.

This is going to be a sweet, sweet year.

Quotalicious ~ Anne Lamott

In this dark and wounding society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.”  And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing.  After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you've been avoiding all along - your wounds. ~ Anne Lamott

Overshare?

So it was Thursday (AGAIN), and therefore writer’s group day. 

Theme for the month:  When I was young…

Shortly after the theme was set, my mother (who I maintain a degree of contact with) made a comment about all the reading she did with us when we were little.

I don’t remember it.  Neither does my sister.

Unremarkable, except that I have very vivid memories of my young life, and they are perfectly carbon dated by the details of the house we moved out of when I was four.  I remember being a baby on my tummy, and being able to see the underside of the couch. That was when the floor was still sea-grass matting, and a long time before my mother went wild with the funky wallpaper and a can of lime green paint. 

I remember the morning of my 2^nd birthday, and my 3rd, and the desolate footage of Cyclone Tracy on our black and white telly on Christmas morning when I was three.  I remember the arrival and mysterious departure of various furred and feathered family members, and a million small details like the cupboard where Dad kept his liquorice, the pattern on the floor in the kitchen, the smell of the flowers along the side of the newly poured concrete driveway.  But I don’t remember her reading to me. 

I remember our books, and I remember sitting by myself trying to read them.  The day I started school, the teacher explained that you sound out the letters and run them together, and I remember my astonishment that it was so easy, and the anger that no one had explained the single crucial detail that meant I could now read.  But I don’t recall any moments of closeness, snuggled up, listening to my mother’s voice.

Interesting disconnect, don’t you think?

So I thought I would explore this more, by letting the books in my life tell a story.  I was interested in the device of writing about one thing (the books) to talk about something else (the real story).  I got to the point where, at age 10, I decided I was a writer.  Short of time, I finished it, gave it a quick edit, printed it off and headed out straightaway for the meeting. 

I prefaced my reading with a request for people to comment on the effectiveness of the device.  I thought I had achieved a fairly dispassionate telling of the details, without straying into the emotive.  I was wrong.

I read aloud ok right up until I got to this:

Then one day she buys me and my sister new zip-up cardigans and packs a pair of jeans that are too small into a Jetset overnight bag, and puts us on a plane.  I’m nine years old and clutching a soft toy dog.

The sobs rose up in me.  Someone offered to read on for me, but in that moment there was nothing more important than speaking the words myself.  I pulled out a tissue, took a deep breath, and continued reading with my voice and face contorted with emotion.  

 Without warning or even shoes, we are going to live at Nanna’s.  Mum doesn’t look sick at the airport, but it must be very bad because she doesn’t ring us or write any letters, except once, when she sends us a bookmark. Mine is a kitten sitting on a stack of books.  It is instantly my most treasured possession. I hold it while I read, and keep it inside its grubby yellow envelope until the edges are so worn they fall apart.  When the colour wears off, I carefully restore its tabby striped tail with coloured pencils.  I read a lot.

So, I guess this counts as a Public Ugly Cry.

Overshare?  Or free therapy?

I have lived with this experience for thirty years now, but never openly grieved it.  I guess it took looking at the stark, unadorned details through the eyes of someone else to realise the depth of the injury to the child who was me.  It’s only one paragraph in a long catalogue of displacement, disregard, and disempowerment.

The group was kind. Afterwards, one person said to me that I should always feel like I can read whatever I want to, and how important a process that was for her.  Another spoke to me of all the 9 year old children she had taught with stories like mine, and how powerful it was for her to hear mine and know something of the ending.  Maybe there are some in the group that resent me serving up another chunk of me-me-me, but there again, this may give them permission to reach a little deeper next time they sit down to write. 

The next meeting will be in a month’s time, and by then we’ll all have moved onto the next thing. 

Cake, Strawberries and a Thing

Warning:  soft underbelly exposed.

I’ve been having a hard time lately.

No surprises there.  The extended radio silence gives it away, doesn’t it?

Not that my life is bad, or even difficult.  I’m fully able to load up on the gratitude when I’m feeling down. (Feeling thankful helps enormously when you’re sitting in some vinyl chair while they prepare the sharp, pointy instruments they’re about to start poking in to you).

No, this distress is more of the lingering, mid-life, existential kind. 

Basically the things I want to do are clashing with the Thing I really want to do.  I have the opportunity to complete a degree in my chosen field, with excellent advanced standing points and tax deductions.  But at the same time I’m on fire with the notion of embracing my writerness, which I have always suspected was my Thing.  And it’s more urgently my Thing, now that I’ve faced off the biological mutiny of cancer and am now staring down (or flinching at) my 40^th birthday.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for having my cake and eating it too.  A healthily functioning person should be able to work part-time, study a single subject, and squeeze in a number of hours pursuing their Thing each week, while still maintaining a small amount of social contact. 

But I struggle. 

Sadly, it’s not about how many hours there are in a day, but when my brain function will give out.  Some days my stupified brain is so tired from my short day at work, I collapse in the early evening.  I make short term goals and then forget what they were.  Hell, sometimes I even forget what day it is. 

This makes time management an ongoing nightmare. Let alone when you can’t decide what your top priority is or even remember what it was you were doing.

Right now in fact, I should be feverishly reading and scribbling notes, in an effort not to fail not one but two uni subjects.  And yet…

And yet, here I am.  Doing this self-indulgent, possibly not-completely-mentally-healthy Thing.  Looking within.  Writing.  Sometimes I believe this is the best possible Thing I can be doing, and other times I fear that maybe it’s a sign of the pathological in me.  Particularly since I haven’t yet organised myself to write fiction.

See, I’m afraid to admit to the world the extent to which I really, really do not have it together.  While I appear to function on the outside, really I’m quite unstable.  I require a lot of shoring up.  For a long time that illusion was easier to create.  But now, with my cracked brain and my tired body, it requires a greater investment of time and energy.  I’m not able to shore myself up quite so flawlessly as I have in the past. I’m afraid of leakage, most especially in my writing.

But if I don’t write, I’m afraid the whole dam will break open.

It’s a risky business.  If I were to wade out past my psychological untidiness and write, I might find out that I’m terrible at it.  Or worse than terrible, mediocre.  And publicly so.

I tried this writing Thing once before.  I got as far as the third semester in a professional writing course, and faltered.  Part of that falter was the pressing need for a more practical income stream.  And part of it was that I caught the first glimpse that maybe I’m not as smart/talented/imaginative as everyone thought I was.  There needs to be a painful stage of being not-very-good but persisting anyway until I’ve clocked up some real skill.  This means sucking up the hideous embarrassment of exposing my soft not-perfectness, and just doing it.

So I didn’t.  I didn’t do it.  I wriggled away and found something else that would earn me money and allow me to shine, in tiny safe amounts.  But writing didn’t stop being my Thing.  It quietly gnawed away at my insides for nearly a decade, and finally clawed its way out again, probably through one of the holes made by surgical steel.

So here I am again.  Tired, and with a brain and body full of holes, wrestling with a Thing that surprises me with deep joy and even deeper struggle, that won’t go away.  And the Thing is competing with that other part of my life, the moving-forward with the tidy plans I made before cancer came along and fucked it all up.  Throw in some semi-menopausal mood swings, and I’m a joy to live with.

So, this is the hard time I’m been having.  Stuck.  Blocked.  Avoidant.  Bleak.  Resentful of the work needed for the choice that I’ve made and the energy that it consumes. 

On Friday, I was having a particularly bad day, vacillating between I’ll never be a real writer and I’ll just have to drop out of Uni, then.  While ruminating on the nature of success and failure, something twigged.  I realised it’s all in your state of mind.  OK, so maybe I don’t have the time and capacity right now to launch my entire psyche into the deep end of a novel while cranking out High Distinctions each semester, but I can – and I have in the past – find that still spot right in the middle where everything balances.

I can chew that particular cake, and still have it.  And the secret?  A willingness to boldly allow my imperfection, to let the cake to sit lopsided on the plate while it makes room for the strawberries.  Suddenly I can see a path through, one that will allow me to plod along and complete what is needed, but still give my Thing room to breathe and sometimes even dance.

And, at that very moment of decision, of inner shift, I look up.  A rainbow.  And not just any rainbow. It’s searing against the dusk tinged sky, a wide arc of intense light reaching from one side of the sky all the way to the other.  As I drive home, it continues to dazzle in the north east, in the direction I am travelling.

I know it’s only an accident of light and water vapour.  But it seems like a promise.  A reassurance that there will be illumination along the path, if I let my true colours shine, reach wide for what is beautiful, and steer towards my goals with clarity.

Truth or fiction?

"There is only one type of story in the world---your story." ~ Ray Bradbury

Today was my favourite day of the month: writers’ group day.  Each month we write to a particular topic or theme, and then read and comment around the table.  This month’s assignment was to write something biographical or factual – no fiction.   Ironically, I have only ever shared short nonfiction pieces, and had been thinking I should probably produce some fiction for a change!

After hearing me bemoan yet another heavily autobiographical contribution, one of the ladies said something I found very interesting.  She said you need to keep writing it, get it all out, and only then can you start on the fiction.

I’m not sure that I agree with her assertion.  For starters it implies that autobiography involves some kind of progressive catharsis.  And that this expurgation has some sort of finite quality to it.  And that fiction requires a more sophisticated relationship with one’s inner terrain than autobiography does.  I would argue that all writing involves an interior process, regardless of the writer’s depth of awareness of it.  The deep truths that drive autobiographical pieces are the same truths that give life to good fiction.  If you can connect to that place inside yourself before you start writing, it will breathe that same energy and connection into what you’ve written, regardless of whether it’s fictional or not.  Fiction writers may labour under the illusion that the stories they write are “made up”, but it all spills tellingly from somewhere in their psyche. 

This is just a scratch on the surface of the thinking I’m doing about writing and “being a writer” (yes, two separate concepts).  I am being aided and abetted in my explorations by Dennis Palumbo’s exceptional book, Writing from the Inside Out. While I disagree with my friend’s statement, it is true that I’ve got a transformative process going on.  And it has nothing to do with catharsis, but claiming.

The burning bush (reprise)

Whenever you seem to be receiving an unexpected jolt from the Universe, make every effort to note precisely what it was that you were thinking at the moment you took in the message. ~ Wayne Dyer

When the tree caught fire – heralding, quite possibly, a life shift of biblical proportions – I was fully entranced in one of my favourite documentaries, JK Rowling, a year in the life.  What fascinates me most about this short film is the inner process that leads a person to cross the threshold from an entirely unremarkable (and often unsuccessful or even painful) life into something bigger, something they have felt called to all along, the life that makes their whole being sing so that the world rises up to resonate with them in ways they could never fathom until it happened.

Carolyn Myss calls it crossing the drawbridge, my shaman-teacher-man calls it doing the Nike thing (“just do it”), and my sister and I refer to it as flicking The Switch.  Whatever it is, it’s a process of dropping all the excuses, seeing through the illusory barriers, and just getting on with the thing that’s burning inside. Like committing to such a monumental creative undertaking as writing a book – or in JK’s case, an entire seven-part series.

When my panicked neighbour knocked on the front door to alert me to my flaming conifer, I was engrossed in the bit where JK – Joanne - returns to the flat where she lived when she finally committed to follow her inner urging, no matter how dire her circumstances, to write the story that was burning inside her.  She had no way of knowing, as she wrote longhand in whatever time she could snatch while her baby Jessica slept, the abundance that was unfolding magnificently with every page.  In Joanne’s words, “…I turned my life around, completely.  My life changed so much in this flat.  I feel I really became myself here.”

She was completely unaware that this process would turn her life upside down and inside out, in ways she was unable to imagine. That she would return nearly 10 years later with a film crew and find a set of her published novels sitting on the shelf of the news tenant’s bedroom.  All she knew was the urge that burned inside of her, her indeniable yearning, and the commitment to follow it, no matter what the outcome.

This is what I was thinking about when I received my unexpected jolt from the Universe.  Very burning bush, don’t you think?  Could the Universe speak any clearer?