On writing a book…
In early 2013 I began to, what at the time felt like, fall apart. Looking back, I can now say that an unconscious journey had begun inside me to heal. The journey was triggered by an obsession, a sudden switch and change in my state of mind that took me to places inside not, for a long time, well understood.
It also sparked the beginning of an enormous amount of writing.
In the first two years I wrote over five thousand pages. And over the next four after that, another five thousand. I have felt both giddy with a relatively new found amount of creative juice. As well as buried and overwhelmed by it.
The overwhelm and confusion, unrelenting and painful, was accompanied by an elusive urge, a tug that kept pushing me. It came in the form of feeling that I had to write a book. It wasn’t a casual desire, the opposite of a bucket list wish or whim. It was more like a matter of life and death.
It took years for me to be able to understand that I was seeking something beyond a book, something much harder and heart breaking. I was climbing a summit without perspective or knowledge, exhausted, devastated and not knowing much of anything other than I needed to keep going.
Looking back I finally know what I was seeking. If trauma separates us from our narratives, if it smashes our world into a thousand bits, narrative is the glue that puts us back together again. It is what helps us heal from trauma—recent and long standing. I was seeking narrative—the most critical part of putting our Humpty Dumpty selves back together again.
It is my experience that trauma initially freezes you (dissociation.) It’s a protective mechanism. Think of casting an arm that’s broken. Or laying still for a few days after a concussion. Or an ankle that swells to protect the joint from moving. The mind does the same thing. Over time, if we are to heal, we must begin to move again. Frozen for however long, the mind starts to thaw. The thaw can be confusing, chaotic, producing (at least for me) so much activity, so much “content” that we cannot make heads nor tails of it.
I have experienced both the freeze and the melt. First a near black out of childhood, a “freeze.” And then, as things began to “thaw” complete chaos and overwhelm. As I began my thaw—fifty years post trauma (believe it or not) I was not given context nor was I guided properly. I was in therapy but the therapy served to accelerate and broaden the confusion. It created its own trauma and confusion, also requiring, eventually, narrative to heal.
This is what my book is about. Trauma and narrative.
I wrote this somewhere along the way…
As a young child I’d had the notion I would someday be a writer—a special writer with an important life. But it didn’t happen. Writing yes. But not special. I am not the person I had a hunch I could be. I am a fraction of what I suspected. At some point I must have thrown my hands up. There must have been a moment where I told myself I would never amount to much of anything. A moment where I concluded that my hunch—that I could be more—was wrong.
But when I look at my pages, so many of them, there is a glimmer of hope that maybe I am bigger and more than I thought.
Have I been buried alive? Are these pages me being exhumed, digging myself out?
I was beginning to see, get a flicker, that these pages were me finding myself, unburying myself, finding my truths and telling them.
My ETA for completing this book continues to move out. I must respect my story as it unfolds and as the telling of it evolves into what I, as a child, thought was possible. And now, as an adult, finally see as possible too.
9/6/22: UPDATE. Hard to even write the words but I finished a draft I am pleased with! At least enough to send to the next step which will be editing. Stay tuned! :)