I’m Struggling

It’s about the book — the memoir I started 5 years ago. I just finished the fourth go at it. I could hardly wait to hear what my writing coach had to say, until she said, This next run I want you to focus on… I can’t even listen. It’s too much. The thought of writing it again makes me want to pack my bags, leave everything familiar behind, and start a new life in some other tiny, podunk town.

I’m so tired of me. The past. She wants me to, take the reader by the hand and pull them into the middle of the scene, as if they are experiencing it with you. But my mind just can’t go there again. Not now. It feels like I’m way off shore and the waves are hitting me square in the face. If I would have realized the mental and physical toll this piece of writing would cost me — can I actually say it? I don’t think I would have started it. I almost, just for a second, considered clicking every blasted word to trash.

I need to remember life is still moving in brilliant color. I want to greet the grocery clerk with a smile and not a scowl. Hear my husband talk, without the buzz of high school numbing my teenage brain.

I’m reading THE ART OF MEMOIR, by Mary Karr. And I quote, I’ve said it’s hard. Here’s how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little. Today…I can’t touch bottom and there’s no land in sight.

I’ve decided I need a vacation. Not from home — from memories. From my thesaurus, from note taking, and from digging for the clams of my former life. If I don’t, I may lose the one I’m currently supposed to be living.

For the month of April I’m working on seeing present day landscapes. The sunlight of a new day. Conversations with people in real-time. I want to laugh and cry at the unwritten now. Hopefully this will bring back the desire to work hard at something worth repeating on paper — a story you’ll want to get in the middle of. A telling that will throw a life-preserver into your own past and carry you over the storms ahead.

Here’s hoping.