I Know, But I Don't So I Wish You Well

While I did have a good relaxing weekend--got to spend time with one of my best friends, Emily--it was also a pretty bad week for an alarming number of my friends that lost pets.

When Frodo, my toy poodle/fox terrier mix, died, the two months after that, I wasn't sane. I was hearing his bark and running outside as if Dad left him out there again. I'd wake up thinking he was cold and needed a blanket when I knew damn well he was buried in our backyard under fresh snow. It wasn't pretty but I'd just lost a dear human friend the year before and I didn't have a gauge for the grief of losing a pet that was a huge part of my day to day life.

As if there is one, but I'll get to that.

My cat died six months later. Both my cat and dog weren't euthanized but if I could go back, I would have taken that route. Watching my dog die of congestive heart failure over a few days and then watching a tumor growing on my cat, lonely in the basement because it kept bursting, were traumatic. I can't imagine they were happy to suffer through it as well. Yet it was because I saw their suffering that I was able to gracefully let my mother go. I don't find in mercy in the kind of hope that makes people dangle those they love on the miserable edges of a finished life. It's not even selfish to say that those who go on living need to let go rather than prolong the grief. I still feel the guilt of how my cat and dog died, but I am at peace with my mom's passing.

As I was saying, there is no gauge, no way to prepare, but I have a hard time bringing people close. I think of the misery of what it would be to lose the family I already have. I even think of their misery if I go first. And then I don't think about it because those thoughts can never prepare me for the reality. 

So while I know grief takes on many forms, I also can't tell you I was ever more or less despondent with any incident. There's not a ranking and I despise when people try to compare grief. It's always a black hole with no edges. Whether you lose a child or a baby squirrel you were trying to nurse back to health, if you ever got the warm fuzzies from that life, then your grief swallowed you. 

Time does factor in. Even though I feel the clench of loss and shed tears for all of them still, my grief is beyond the hole without edges. I can somewhat recall the floating nothingness but I can't tell you I know how you feel. Pain is not something we tend to remember vividly, no matter how much we think so.

Because it's funny like that. At one of my lowest points, I went mentally numb and cut myself but didn't feel it. A sense of wonder crept in and I kept dragging the scissors over the cut and the nerves were dead. It's not the sadness that is most dangerous, but that numbness beyond it. When we're crying and sulking, we are feeling and processing, but when it stops, when someone seems serene, you best believe that is where you have to keep an eye on someone. Pain can reach a point where it simply becomes ineffective in warning us of what is wrong. While severe pain may resurface and feel familiar, it is not ever the same. We do not remember; fresh pain will always just feel like the worst pain. We can even empathize to the point of physical pain, but...

I'll never tell you I know how you feel or pretend I'm an expert on what you're going through. Those places are lonely and the people around us will feel helpless. They'll try to empathize or cheer you up and it will probably piss you off or add a layer of guilt for pushing them away. Let people annoy you and hover on the edges. They're there because they want to be, so the guilt is one-sided. They want to make sure you're feeling, that you're not going numb, that you're not suddenly euphoric and generous as so many people on the edge of suicide sometimes are. Your anger probably makes them relieved that you're exhibiting any emotion at all.

You might push people out of your life. That happens. Sometimes your grief is making them depressed or frustrated and they need to move on. Sometimes you'll also bring people in who understand you better. You will never be the same and you don't want to be. Your life from then on is without the one that died and learning to find the edges and see around it means you can't focus on making everyone else okay with how you adapt. It doesn't make you or them good or bad--it means you're incompatible and you move on.

So all I can do for my friends in their time of loss is say that I hope I can be there on the edges. I hope our paths, even if they separate, will cross again. I want you to find your new life on the other side of the chaos, whether you bring anyone with you or have to leave your old life behind.

I know your pain, but not really, so I just wish you well.

More Writing Therapy

The real wobble of a day like this one is that I can't really anticipate how it will land on my shoulders. UnNamed's release last year on this day was therapeutic all by itself. I'd jumped from NaNo into a frenzied but focused edit and the date coinciding with my mom's death/birthday felt right.

So I thought it would do much the same. However, UnSung was three times the work and full of its own unique problems and solutions, January was a mountain of unpredictability while I healed and made changes and February was not a month I went into on full steam. Reaching today, while the book release is still a buffer and exciting on its own, is also a day where I'm not cushioned by any shock-laden steps of grief. I felt today, two years since I lost my mom, too keenly.

Days don't often have that power. I don't build up a frenzy for holidays, although I do anticipate the days when I get to give someone a gift. I certainly observe those death anniversaries with an acknowledgement but the day of mourning has never been my deal. Yet, at two years, I can't deny the stages of grief rub raw. The anger, the sadness, a reluctance to let any of it burst into a mess, but knowing that bottling is a big no-no.

For better or worse, this woman fuels my writing. I look for resolutions in our one-way relationship by talking to her through my stories. She isn't any one of my characters but I feel her traits coming through. There's a female cardinal outside the kitchen window that teases my cats so spiritually, it's definitely not unlike her.

I'm probably romanticizing this day more than I typically might. But I want the lump in my throat to go away so I can celebrate again. Nothing fills where people are gone, but nothing feels better than honoring them through bettering the self. So if I must concede this day to pain, then let it flow through and give me more days of triumph ahead.

How's that for a mantra?

It Could Be Worse

Sometimes I do delve into the lower sides of emotions and states of mind like bitterness, distrust, and so on, but at the same time, I feel like I should make this clear: in most areas of my life, I am actually pretty content now.

Healthier than I've been in a decade. Amazing friends and supportive family. Published author and diligent artist. Finding work when I need it and able to be resourceful enough to acquire what I need (without selling my body or soul).

All in all, what bothers me at any given time is little more than a past that tends to rise like bile and sometimes people tend to pick at some annoying scabs (as only people who have known you for years can do well).

As a writer, I channel those things to my advantage. When the wounds were fresh, I wrote about those things privately and ended up burning or shredding them. That writing was never about crafting a coherent masterpiece. It was what it took to turn internal screams into therapeutic dialogue. I would not be able to write about them with any success if they were fresh. I don't find raw wounds to be more honest. I find them to be messy and sometimes just childish rambling. In my favorite books, it wasn't the rawness of fresh wounds that made me admire the work; it was always the careful presence of the years they took to understand it after. In truth, even though our bodies and minds are eager to forget raw pain, we can actually conjure up those raw wounds more potently when we look, not just at the actions, but the motives, the aftermath and the way it changed us. We are better able to see it like a doctor might see a wound; rather than panicking with the emotion, we train ourselves to really look at the wound and what it takes to heal it.

So when I seem particularly morose or depressed, sometimes it really has little to do with how things are going. Sometimes it's even the aftermath of a rather potent tapping into a deeply painful writing session. In order to write powerful scenes sometimes I have to get uncomfortably deep while staying afloat. Emotions are messy so getting too deep can be detrimental to the writing. Yet the pull is irresistible so it takes immense mental fortitude to keep drawing the boundaries.

Oh, but you WANT to get deep. Blood on the paper and all! I'll have to disagree. Once more, what comes from spiraling into a mental breakdown or letting a character's pain drag me down, that shit is not even that usable or even great when I read it again. It paralyzes me sometimes, which isn't at all useful to my work. What is useful is how I can recall it fully yet know my place as the writer. To get pulled in deep enough to look at it clinically. To see everything that my characters are blind to. Because even if I'm writing for their perspective, my POV is often ultimately omniscient and I need to not just lock myself into one character's drama alone.

The closest I came to being in one of my series was the presence of a being only called She. It was a feminine presence that watched, but had no form, and couldn't interact with the world. In a sense, I was using her to create the sense of what a higher power would be that couldn't affect free will nor had anything to do with the creation of the world. Although unlike She, I was still more omnipotent in duty to the story and didn't favor her in particular. I really just used her to anchor in the theme of the unknown.

The UnQuadrilogy uses some similar themes, but I do use them to tackle once-painful topics. Doubt, faith, religion, belief, imbalance, the unknown sometimes remaining that way, but not outside of logic all the same.

Wherever I am as a person and a writer? It could be worse. I count myself as damn lucky that I am doing what makes me happy. That I'm not hurting those I love and as few other people as possible. That I get to pursue writing while surviving being an unfortunate generation that got slammed by a bad economy. I was also a teenager in the 90s with some of the best music of all time. I also grew up both in the technological boom and still played outside and rode bikes all the time. Everything is not perfect, but I am satisfied with how I handle life.

As a creative, you'll take a lot of hard blows. Yet, from one creative to another, it's really all about letting things roll off your shoulders as much as possible. Don't neg other writers/creatives. Don't be discouraged because your first book doesn't mean instant fame. Don't use your identity as a crutch or an excuse to give up. The best thing you can do for yourself is take the blows and be thankful when you can say it could be worse.

But don't belittle the pain either. You are allowed to see it as important or even necessary. Just don't ever let it hold you back.

The Glass Left Behind

I vaguely remember the time I first saw writing referred to as bleeding on paper. I'm fairly sure my swollen bleeding brain was drawn to the possibility of giving the excess blood somewhere to go, even if that's probably not what most people seem to think it means (going by the context around it). When people say it, it always sounds as if they are just using a more violent means of 'going for the gusto'. It sounds like a risk you take when you've already given blood or you're anemic, that you're giving something that may be more than you were initially willing to, perhaps. I do know that the concept didn't make me uncomfortable, but I was certainly on edge. It's not giving my blood that scares me; it's drawing the sharks that want more. Very likely why some writers hoard their precious red gold.

Let's skip context for a second and start by saying that it's very difficult to explain emotional abuse to someone who has no experience with it. Even harder to explain to many people that blood doesn't make you immune and some of the worst offenders can be family (and largely because many societies cannot even perceive of disloyal family or that they could even do anything unforgivable-- this give the offenders a dangerous blind spot to exploit). I've seen some books do it well enough, able to plant sufficient terror and unease into the 'beloved' villain that torments the protagonist. To show what it's like to be the hostage when other people see only the luxury of your life. To have people judge you as ungrateful, jealous, lazy, even childish when you're being overwhelmed by someone who becomes more likable the more they tear you down, like their charisma is fed with your destruction.

To survive, I suppressed a lot of both the strengths and weaknesses of those experiences. I've tapped into the surface of those incidents to write in the past, but it's been a trying week to dig them out in preparation for the third book of my series (yes, UnSung is about 5/6 done, but since each book leads into the next, I have to make the lead-ins more fluid). I'm giving one of the characters more of my blood than I've ever allowed before. There are some differences between her and I, but if we sat down together and talked about family and friends, we'd have a great deal in common. Do I kill her or give her some story of triumph? Part of the reason I'm not making her 'me' like some writers do is that I don't want that to be a certainty, an emotional parallel that determines the story. I don't want to make her a Mary Sue or paint her as some kind of victim. Her importance is still a bit of a mystery to me.

Even though I'm dancing around it, the bleeding in the brain is the central theme. My brain as a youth, and my heart besides, was something I left to open air to absorb everything. I liked running around barefoot too, just to strengthen the idea. I never really saw a need for filtering, in a time before trauma could issue the need for caution. Perhaps why most bravado comes off as the trait of someone who bluffs or hasn't been tested yet and rarely through actual triumph under fire. But, experience; I could pick out what I liked and throw the rest back, right? It would be nice if a contaminated brain could just get tossed out and replaced, but instead, it's more like a wineglass shattering next to it and try as you might, you just can't pick out all the pieces. No matter how whole and neat you thought your mind, the broken things find all the imperfections. You settle it back in place, tilt your head to test it and everything seems like new. You probably pat your back, puff up with pride and start to swagger into the day.

The pain is blinding. Your eye twitches, an impossibly fast shadow just out of focus. Your foot turns and you hold your breath, relieved that you don't wrench your ankle at least. A lingering sense of vertigo remains and you shoot a quick sidelong glance, your ego recovering enough to hope no one saw what looked like forgetting how to walk.

You tilt your head like you did the time before, only this time, it's cautious. Before you can meet the same vigor of your first test, the splitting pain strikes again. Damn. You're out now; you can't just go home, root around for the glass again. So you get through the day, recovering from every stab with a sudden smile, every stumble with a silly dance, every whimper with a tuneless hum.

When you can finally get around to it, it's gone too deep. You can't be sure if it had already been too far even before you felt it or not, but you tell yourself that you should have looked harder, been more careful. You frantically look for it anyway, only now it's not just glass, but the dirt under your fingernails, the errant hairs floating around, the dust, the icky sticky bugs...

It's bad enough when you have only yourself to blame. Sometimes your glass was put in by a surgeon and it will take a surgeon to get it back out. Yet you swear you know yourself better than anyone and don't want just anyone rooting around in there.

People suffer in silence for reasons that outnumber the sands on this earth. The problem with something getting in is that it has little to do with a fault of strength. We get sick when we need to eat but sometimes we miss the signs that the food was prepared wrong. We get sick when the invisible germs travel by air when we take a breath or nibble on a nail that touched the contaminated door handle. Sometimes we'd rather show up to work barely able to stand rather than admit we aren't invulnerable. Some fault is seen in our life choices, how we take care of ourselves and we are never allowed to blame anyone because all fault is supposed to begin and end with us. There's often more to lose than gain and it's easier to pretend things are handled.

Sometimes we are only so sick because we just tell ourselves it's glorious to be broken. No life is without struggle, but perhaps it is only so bad because the generic band-aids that are in fashion are only making it worse.

People might think our smiles and show of strength and optimism are signs that we're onto some secret of happiness that they covet. There's almost a societally acceptable amount of misery that must be worn to be invisible to this scrutiny or at least not attract the psychopaths that can't tell the difference (or don't care even if they can).

As you can see (or have even done before), it's not difficult to find the analogies, the physical reactions and defenses behind the psychology but it's a very different beast to dissect the psychology, form the characters and the subtlety of the situations. Experience is still limiting since, like my abusers, they were very much counting on the trauma to make it difficult or even impossible for me to find aid or peace. Even parts of my childhood have been eaten away. Your brain sometimes takes more than it needs to, just in case.

I want this for my story though. I can't bear the thought of what hell a memoir would open so I don't even entertain it as non-fiction. What this woman goes through, I won't even dare to assign the same offenders by relation to her lest the comparison be damning, but I'll Frankenstein my experience into this theme because if I don't, I'll make it too sterile and safe. If this is what they mean by bleed, it comes mixed with pain and relief but also the apprehension that I'll have to let it go before it festers. Which means if I write it, I'll be itching to publish it just as much.

But hasn't that always been the case?

I've said many times before, but there is no need to assume all writers are only coming from a place of damage and depression and torment. Sure, for many of us, it's a fact of life, but one thing that is certain is that that mindset is useless to me when I work. Yes, useless. This is inherently why I go through a vulnerable planning phase, to take notes and tap into the messy parts then fortify myself to be the observer to work, to dive back in with the experience, the plan and the narration ready to make sense. I did this as a musician and I do it as an artist. How well do you think I can play flute when the music sneaks up on me and makes me sob? How well do you think I can draw when I'm trembling with emotion? Those things are a complete nuisance to the actual process so finding the mastery to interpret them will never work when I'm in the mindset to work and end up blubbering on my keyboard (the silicone cover on my keyboard is for possible coffee spillage, not my tears).

I know that many people are emotional writers. It's not that I'm not at all, but I can't say that I actually keep the resulting mess of that. It's just not where my stories work.

If only to defend my method, I can't tell you how many times people are surprised when they find out authors like JK Rowling and Sherilynn Kenyon started their famous books in the thick of depression. It doesn't really show, does it? They weren't looking to be locked in that stagnation but to turn magic on it. How many comedians turn their pain into laughter? This obsession with the idea that creatives are locked into this tunnel of only focusing on their real problems is just myopic.

In a sense, you could romanticize their shards of glass as prisms of transcendent light. Can't say I haven't tried to look at it that way. However, I think the glass still cuts sometimes. Life is what we do with the pain.

... Scratch all that. I think I've found my newest writing method.