Today I was able to spend a day at home, alone, listening to Commonplace podcasts while I watered, weeded, and folded laundry.
I also opened a filing cabinet drawer and started to look at the paperwork inside, to see what I might discard.
It was a revelatory experience.
I can see now, as though reading the biography of someone I used to hear about, or knew by reputation, somewhere in my memory, that for many years, I was a writer. That is to say, I wrote short stories and snippets and scenes and poems and drafts of novellas and novels. I attended classes and workshops and readings. I was apparently serious enough about all of this that I wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages, and kept the drafts and the feedback for decades.
Seeing all that paperwork - much of it printed on still-attached perforated pages recycled from computer-generated reports in the early nineties - has given rise to such a mix of strong emotions, I am compelled to try to articulate them somewhere. And this blog seems as good as place as any. It's quicker than a journal, anyway. Quicker to type than to write something longhand.
Here are some of the things I'm feeling:
- What happened? Where did that earnest (oh, so earnest) writer go? Because although I now have an MFA in poetry and have been writing poetry, to have created so much prose content points to an ambition that seems alien now. So I'm disappointed that I let it all drop so completely. As though I abandoned a dream that had, at one point, been primary.
- What's with my memory? It's not just the ambition I don't remember. I'd forgotten about fifty percent of the stories. A few I don't remember even after skimming them, although clearly they're my creation. Fascinating.
- I wrote a lot of crap. I mean, it was really young, naive, clever but superficial work. Nothing with much staying power, and I can see from my current perspective - thanks to, what? age? lived experience? - that most of what I wrote was tidy but avoided emotional honesty. Or only dealt with the trappings of an emotional sincerity. Perhaps it's a little bit of Jo March pre-Professor. So I'm embarrassed for my past-self, embarrassed and maybe even a little ashamed that she thought what she was doing was good enough to submit to top publications. I was just too young.
- But I was not only young, I was stunted. I'm writing this now with as much self-love as possible, but I can see that I was not available emotionally to myself or, I believe, to other people. I was not living in the moment at all. I was high-strung, intense, even driven. Or I was almost melodramatically dreamy and reflective. Untethered, either way. Broken. It's almost as though I had an early childhood self, who was bright and happy and energetic, judging from family lore and photos and home movies. And then I was a mostly neurotic idealistic stinted and blinkered self for two or three decades. Decades. And then, what? Life, I guess. Life and some major life events, and the blessing of influence from some people, all helped work a transformation that, if continued, represents a completely different self, and perhaps my only opportunity to write anything real. Anything worth keeping. Or, even if I don't write at all, represents a self worth being.
At any rate, those are my current thoughts on the subject. Having spent the rest of the day working on a submission, attending a poetry reading and part of the Library Commission meeting, reading Dan Bellm's Practice, doing yoga and cleaning the house - not necessarily in that order - I'm just about ready to throw in the towel. It will be tomorrow soon!
