The Lie of the Loneliness of the Writer's Life

***note:  this is my first attempt at writing and publishing a blog post through ScribeFire, a blogging tool add-on with my firefox browser. Let's see how it goes. If any of you use ScribeFire let me know what you think about it.


I have begun reading a book by Julia Cameron, famous for her classic book on creativity, The Artist's Way.
This newer book by her is titled, The Right to Write.

Last night I skipped ahead and read part of the chapter about loneliness and the writing life. Her insights were startling as well as inspiring.

So much has been written about the loneliness of the writer's lot that it feels like heresy to report the truth as I know it: in my experience, not writing is a lonely business. The minute I let myself write, everything else falls into balance. If  I get a dose of writing in my day, then I can actually socialize with a clear conscience. I can actually be present for the life I am having rather than living in the never-never land of the nonwriting writer, that twilight place where you always "should" be somewhere else - writing - so that you can never enjoy where you actually are.

I am so busted.

I hide in my writing cave. I hover about words and websites, emails and instant messaging, busy writing yet not writing anything. I keep busy, but unproductive. I flit about like a trapped bat who can't find their way out of the attic. And this, I suspect, thanks to Ms. Cameron, is what creates the river of loneliness that runs through my life. I am not lonely because I am a writer. I am lonely when I'm not.

Cameron further observes:

Not writing is the lonely thing. Not writing creates self-obsession. Self-obsession blocks connection with the self. Writing is like looking at an inner compass. We check and get our bearings. Ah-ha! I am feeling, thinking, remembering....When we know accurately what it is that we are doing, we tend to be more open, accurate, and affectionate in our dealings....For this reason, I would argue that the writing life is a proof against loneliness. It is a balm for loneliness. It is an act of connection first to ourselves and then to others.

This truth, her truth, is also my truth. I can see that now. To write is to soar above and beyond the safe place of my lonely cave. It is to come out into the light, the warm sun blueing the sky of my dreariness. The words are the tracks that lead me outward. My railway of freedom is a paragraph away.

I cannot moan about the loneliness of my writer life anymore. Cameron has diagnosed me and with that diagnoses comes responsibility to take care of myself. If gray clouds are swirling around me, then combat them I will with the sharp edge of my pen.

Writing, after all, is therapy.

The Amazing Swirl of People in my Life

The older I am getting, the more reclusive I seem to becoming. In both my online world as well as my flesh and blood world. There are all kinds of reasons for this. One of them is that I am a writer and writers by occupation must spend a lot of time in solitude. It is an occupational hazard. I'm either holed up in my writer cave studying or writing, revising, or thinking, or I'm absorbing life like a mute, silently taking in whatever moment I find myself in.

I tend to live a lot in my head these days.

But from time to time I duck out of my monastic-like existence and find the good company of men and women and children and teens. The swirl of amazing people in and around my life helps me not lose complete touch with the vitality of relationships that I need to keep my core self centered.

This is one reason I love church. Not the system of church. Nope. But the dynamic of a faith community, like The Bridge, the rowdy little church my family and I are a part of here in Portland. Each Sunday when we go hang out for a couple of hours with our Bridge family I get totally recharged. Even with the smattering of quick hellos and goodbyes. It still warms my tired soul.

Yesterday I had an invigorating time with Jason and the Bridge Kids. Jason is one of my very favorite people in the world. He has spent a fair amount of time in my home with my family. He is that rare single man who connects to both Jerry and I as well as our kids. And he is a gifted writer and poet. Jason and I are two of the founding members of the Bridge Writers Group which has been meeting twice a month since 2007. (email me if you are in Portland and would like to join us!)

Over the weekend I had a great phone conversation with an old friend of mine in Vegas, my hometown. I've known her longer than any other friendship. I'll be in Vegas in March to help my mom out with some household projects. I'm looking very forward to that, and to also seeing Michele, my old friend. She and her husband are planning to come vacation (again!) to Portland this summer. It's always a hoot to see them.

My high school best friend, Clarita, called me last week. We talk a few times over the year. We don't solve any major life situations, but we catch up. We chat. And somehow those uncomplicated conversations become points of renewal for me.

Neighbors. Online friends, old high school buddies, church friendships, the friendly clerk at the supermarket and the chatty homeless man who walks through my alley...this is the swirl, the amazing swirl of humanity I find myself in.

The zoloft I've been on for over a year now kind of keeps me numb. It masks my emotions a little more than I care for. The firespark of enthusiasm that once kept me revved up has fizzled out. At times I seem a bit zombie'ish about everything. A good friend made me a heartfelt painting in tribute to Janene and Abigail as a Christmas gift. She watched me carefully as I opened it. "It's gonna make you cry," she warned. But it didn't. I could feel her scrutinizing me, interpreting my emotion, or lack thereof. I finally said to her, "I am crying on the inside, but zoloft keeps me from crying on the outside."

It's a trade-off I have to make these days to keep me stable as a mom and wife in my family. And also with my friends. Without zoloft, I am in danger of my thinking becoming so cloudy so as to distort simple words and gestures from even the most caring people in my life.

So in my reclusive rhythms and state of drug-induced numbness, it is the amazing company of friends and neighbors who color my world.

I thank you...

It's the End of the World as We Know It

( art by Lorax)

The History Channel has just wrapped up a fascinating run of programs examining the end of earth with their doomsday-laden Armageddon Week. I t'voed about ten hours worth of television. My head has been spinning from being crammed with a primer on End of the World predictions from the likes of Nostradamus, the Book of Revelation, so called Bible codes, the Mayan Calendar, and Native American lore.

One episode during Armageddon Week featured a two-hour program that explored various ways that life on planet earth could come to an end. Nuclear war, of course was on the list, as well as taking a direct hit by an asteroid or being sucked up by a galactic black hole. Super volcanos, super earthquakes and super tsunamis gave me a super big dose of trying to imagine how the end of the world as we know it could happen. In our lifetime.

Spurred on by Armageddon Week, I picked up a copy of Wastelands, an anthology of apocalyptic stories. The editor, John Joseph Adams, provides this quote in exploring the question of why we are drawn to apocalyptic imaginings:

We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. Sure it's horrible, sure we weep for all those dead people. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive, to start over. Secretly, we know we'll survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.

So what about you? Do you ever give thought to the end of the world as we know it? Do you secretly hope for it or fear it? What myths or predictions, religious or otherwise, influence your imagination about the end of humankind on earth?

I Don't Matter...or Do I?

A few weeks ago I had a rare emotional crisis. I say rare because my zoloft works effectively to keep me on an even keel in my inner world. Sometimes a little too even. I appreciate that it helps keep me from visiting Traumaville, but sometimes I do feel kind of numb. Detached. Blah. A while back I decided to skip a dose or two in an effort to revitalize my emotional color. I have become so dulled by zoloft that it's like my inner life has become an old black and white tv.

Within a week I was irritible and snapping at Jerry and angry with my kids over slight offenses. Dangit. So back to dosing with zoloft I went, and thus, peace once again reigns in the sanctuary of my home. I am willing to live on mute if it will help me be a stable mom and wife.

So I was surprised when an everyday circumstance reduced me to a sobbing wreck of a woman. My husband was at work, the kids at school. I cried...no, I wept, long and hard as an innocent relational interaction uncovered hidden pain. I sat on the sofa heaving and reeling from the psychic and emotional hurt. It bewildered me. I have not cried like this since, um, well, since Janene's death in the summer of 07.

When composure finally came, I began to pray and reflect on what it was that triggered this avalanche of tears.

Oh.

That again?

I thought that was a done matter, a healed hurt, a resolved issue.

Apparently not.

Many people have likened the life of our souls as have layers like an onion. Another layer was lifted off my invisible self, and like a scab being ripped off, I bled and hurt with all the energy of an unloved woman.

The lie uncovered yet again, the lie that somehow embedded itself in me long ago. That dragon of a lie which I thought was slain and dead. There seems to be more than one dragon that I must contend with.

It was a simple circumstance that I don't want to go into, what set me off in the first place. As the dust settled, I was able to discern that the core message that was wreaking havoc to my inner world, was the lie that my life does not matter. I do not count. I am forgettable. Invisible. Dismissable. Unimportant. Uninvited and unwanted. Un. My life is one great big Un-Fest.

{this is not true, of course it's not true! but the beliefs we consciously or sub-consciously carry within serve as filters and messengers to how we interpret life around us}

The horror of how irrelevant my life is thrusted itself upon me like the jaws of a black serpent. I was helpless in it's grip. I knew I was being barraged with a toxic load of untruths, but it was my toxic load. I had to deal with it. But how?

By the end of the day, having zombied my way through after the crying and heaving ceased, I took the brave step of calling two of my friends, Jane and Donna. Both are mature, wise women of God and are trusted friends of mine. They readily agreed to meet with me the next morning to talk and pray.

We met at Donna's home. I told them everything, the innocent circumstance that uncovered this hidden hurt, and the lie of "I Don't Matter" once again snaking it's way through my identity.

They listened. Then, we prayed. We entered a familiar posture of listening prayer that has long been a favored approach of mine. We took my burden, my heaviness to God, and then asked him, "What now?" The goal of listening prayer is to talk little and listen a lot. It is an action of faith to wait in expectancy for the Holy Spirit to reveal a memory, or a word or sentence or scripture verse or a picture, whatever, that helps the seeking person move forward on the their path of healing.

We waited together for the voice of God. I heard nothing. But Jane had something come to mind. She asked me some questions, and before long she had made a list of words that helped define and clarify the lie of I Don't Matter. We prayed over each word, treating it like a lie, or a part of the big lie of not mattering.

Donna prayed too. She voiced words that indicated that my community, my church, loves me and does not ever mean to inflict suffering upon me. Her prayers, as well as Jane's, ministered comfort to the deep places within.

There was no sudden breakthrough. No glorious epiphany of how loved I am. It was actually rather unremarkable. An ordinary time with friends and prayer. Yet it was this ordinary morning with friends, confiding to them the true condition of my soul, that brought relief.

I no longer feel the oppresive tyranny of the lie of I Don't Matter. I am free from it's grip. Though I must continue to contend with the wounds it has left upon me. Zoloft helps keep me even. I am not crying nor am I in a dark abyss of depression. Zoloft protects me from being swallowed up by that black dog.

There is certainly a new level of paying attention to my thoughts and attitudes about life, and about my life.

I Don't Matter is a lie that would take me from the meaningful path of faith in a benevolent Creator who knows my name, who says my frame {life} is not hidden from him. (Psalm 139)
The truth is that each of us, no matter who we are or how common our lives are, or especially how effed up our life might be...the truth is that We Each Matter. If not to someone else, than most certainly to God our Creator. But most of us most of the time do matter to others. In small ways, and maybe big ways, too.

I matter. And so do you.