Poetic License

What am I? Who am I? I’m floating in a sea of all those questions lately, and I don’t have any answers.

There is something about coming face-to-face with your demons that teaches you that you have no control over anything at all. Today has not been an easy one. I have been grappling with myself, trying to get my head on straight, trying to work through some frustrations I have. One thing about losing work is that you suddenly have to make decisions and figure out your next move. I can’t simply get up on Monday and go through the. motions at a job until Friday evening, ending up too exhausted for much of anything else in life, and then get up and do it again. Instead of doing that to age 67, my decision was made by someone else who didn’t even have the balls to tell me himself. (To be fair, it wasn’t just me. It was 67 of us.)

So I’m sitting here feeling shocked and shitty about all of that, trying to figure out my next move, but I keep kicking myself, thinking, “Why aren’t you writing?”

Writing, for me, takes focus. I am not one of those people who can crank out absolute crap and be happy with it. I strive for quality in my work. I don’t strive for page count. I will not self-publish. Either my work stands on its own merits or it doesn’t. There is a reason it is so hard to get published by a mainstream house. Everyone thinks they can write a book, but to do so, you have to be willing to work as hard as you can to improve to the point where someone reads past the first page of your carefully presented manuscript sitting in a slush pile. You have to be willing to take the criticism and work with an editor and put aside your ego. These are just some of the characteristics you must have as a hopeful writer.

You can’t dance on the same tropes over and over, trying to breathe life into the people you create. That is one of the reasons I won’t participate in a writers’ group. I don’t want someone who hasn’t done it telling me what they think I want to hear. Rip it apart. Tell me what you think is wrong. Don’t sugarcoat it. If you have told me your character’s skin is green, once is enough! Don’t tell me every few paragraphs. Certainly don’t start every chapter by reiterating that their skin is green.

But I have no focus today to do the work. I’ve been struggling with focus ever since I lost my job. Because my son was also out of work, it felt as though we were in a petri dish of really bad shit, stirring it over and over but just increasing the funk content. He finally has something. Now he just has to pass the drug test (please God) and complete the paperwork. I don’t have anything. There were a couple of promising things cooking, but I don’t know if they’ll work out.

And honestly, I’d rather be writing. I would like to turn my focus only to my work and forget everything else. I need to figure out a way to do that. It should be my singular focus. I’ve made an excellent start to my memoir about Stephanie. I had to twist it and turn it and flip it over to get the strategy right, which is really hard when you consider how intimate the story is for me. I can’t throw out all the uncomfortable parts, because most of it is uncomfortable. Rather I have to make it into a story that won’t be uncomfortable for others but will maybe make them feel seen. There is little in this world more lonely than trying to love your own flesh and blood through mental illness and addiction, only to have them die anyway.

So if I seem distant, or if I seem absent, be patient with me, as I’m trying to be patient with myself. I’m still a work in progress.

Namaste,
Jude