"The Writer On Her Work"

I am prone to bouts of self loathing. I found out pretty late in the game that it wasn't just a matter of low self esteem, it was also a question of my own brain not getting the right messages from my nervous system and vice versa. So I could pick myself up again and again and it didn't matter, eventually I would just be on the floor all over again wanting to hurt myself for being a thousand kinds of scum. I finally got relief with the help of cognitive behavioral therapy and medication. It's stunning to note that the medication seems to make the hideous voices in my head go fairly quiet.

Sometimes, however, I get back in the loop of awful sticky dark mind paper that used to cover the walls of my head. Last week's experience has left me vulnerable to old voices, old places. I'm having a hard time moving on from it or forgiving myself for having betrayed a kind of unspoken code for my vocation. I don't quite know how to navigate myself away from what feels like a deep pool of self loathing.

I spent some time looking at some fresh (to me) blogs and as is often the case, I found a site that had something I needed to find. At SparkleLife I read about a book called "The Writer On Her Work" edited by Janet Sternburg. I read some quotes from the book and everything I read seemed to be so on point. So I got a copy of it from Powell's books (because my local bookstore couldn't order it) and I've been reading it. The book is a collection of essays by women writers about their experiences as women writers. Some of them write about finding time for their work while also being wives and mothers, others write about the process of their work, and still others about how they came to know that they needed to write. All of it what I needed to listen to right now. To be brought back into the fold of my brethren, is what I want to say. Though it sounds ridiculous.

It has filled me with a certain glee...like a long cool drink from an unpolluted forest stream, which I actually remember having experienced in my own lifetime. Reading these essays was like entering into a room full of people that I totally get, whom I understand from a gut place. Maybe I don't know what the details of their lives are, but as I hear them talking about their work I recognize them. And myself. This is a room where I feel comfortable, where I know I belong. I don't just tentatively think I do, I KNOW IT. I've never experienced that outside of this book. I am many things, but first a writer. They are all many things, but first writers. I think even before being women, we are writers. And if you are too, you'll know it. Even if you aren't brave enough to say it in company or out loud to yourself.

If you read this book you will want to say it.

I think these essays are valuable to all women pursuing a creative life. Women who are many things but are first something completely separate that requires of them a certain level of quiet. A quiet difficult to achieve when living a full and boisterous life as wife, mother, career woman, daughter, sister, and nourisher. This book offers itself as a buttress to the creative spirit. When you're wading into the dark and trying hard not to lose sight of who you truly are, you need to hear that you are not alone. You need to know that your creativity is worth fighting for.

It bothers me that I can't write well today. Especially because I am retreating from the pool of self loathing and back onto the firm territory that I know so well. I have a renewed faith in this endeavor that I have been working on earnestly since I was ten years old. Though I was mentally writing long before that. Ah well, Leonard Cohen points out that if you're going to do this whole writing thing, you've got to approach it like any other job and do it every single day. Even though most days you will write complete crap.

Another benefit of reading these essays is that it's introduced me to some new women authors I'd now like to read. I've already read Alice Walker, but only "The Color Purple". I am hungry for more of her work. Her essay was so alive and so much of what she was saying about being a writing mother made me almost jump out of my chair shouting "THAT IS SO FLIPPIN TRUE!" She tells what I consider to be the truth about bearing children and her reasons for having only one child made me wish and wish I could sit down with her and talk. She is so alive on the page.

Reading "The Writer On Her Work" has been a little bit like renewing my commitment to myself and the truth I have already acknowledged but sometimes feel is a heavier mantle of responsibility than I wish to wear. That I have a responsibility to come back to this desk every single day and write. Whether I feel like it or not. Because something needs to form, something has been trying to grow out of this ritual for twenty seven years.

Being a writer is a lot like being crazy. (I would be willing to bet that a huge percentage of writers are actually crazy; that being crazy lends itself wonderfully to this vocation.) It's not a smooth path to travel, it has so little promise, only possibilities. Endless possibilities but no certainty. Both set you at an uncomfortable distance from a lot of people. Both repeatedly land you on the dangerous precipice of social voyeurism, forcing you to back slowly away from the edge, bringing back with you that courage it took not to leap. Bringing back with you wisdom rather than fear. Bringing back stories that bridge the gap between you and the room you belong in.