Tag: letting go

A Minor Epiphany: Remembering to Let Go

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You can’t play music well if you’ve never played it poorly. I don’t care what parents of prodigies say, no one picks up an instrument for the first time and plays no wrong notes.

I was discussing my writing problems the other day with two writing friends and had a mild epiphany: this writer’s “block”, or whatever it is, is the same thing I experienced for so many years that I actually gave up on writing fiction. I have folders full of notes and starts of novels, middles of novels, bits of novels that never came to life. I couldn’t make them catch fire and growing discouraged I abandoned them and decided I’d just stick with writing creative non-fiction. I gave up my life-long dream of writing novels because I believed I didn’t have it in me to write them.

All those novels were alive, vibrant, important, cool, fun, charged, and insistent INSIDE MY HEAD. But I couldn’t get them out in the same condition. What came out of my head were dead versions of my stories. Stagnant, poorly written, boring, nowhere versions of the living stories inside of me.

I realized that what I’ve been experiencing ever since finishing Winter; Cricket and Grey is the same thing as before when I told my friend Kele that it’s like the conduit between what’s in my head and my pen/laptop is broken. That’s how it felt before.

In 2009, when I finally fixed that conduit and wrote the first draft of “Jane Doe” it felt incredible! I was finally doing the thing I’ve always supposed to have been doing and I knew it because – well – how do you know you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing? It’s hard to quantify or describe that feeling and I imagine it’s not the same or all people.

I just felt right in my own skin and in my own head.

So how did I fix that conduit and how can I fix it again?

In the most simplistic terms it was all about letting go. Letting go of expectation, doubt, expectation, pressure, interference from others, expectations of others, and letting go of control. The first time it happened resulted in chaos and a manuscript that, five years later, is still in a state of chaos. Maybe it always will be. That’s not as important as I used to think it was. That release of control let the stuff in my head come out and live on the page. I had to release it in raw form. I had to let the stories and characters come out imperfect because that’s how I got the power to change them and edit them into something better. They had to get to the page pure before I could make them better.

Humans are messy beings. Their stories are also messy. If we lived life like a well edited story we’d die of constriction. We don’t live our lives like that. That’s how others may see us and our lives, but the reality is that in the moment we are messy with mixed emotions and motivations and our paths are littered with junk our psyches drop like old skin.

After finishing the first Cricket and Grey book I think I set myself up for failure with a return of expectation. Now that I finally finished a novel and actually printed it and people have read it – I rebuilt the expectation that I should be able to sit down and write with control. But the control of writing is an exercise in multiple steps. First you get the crappy draft down, but you let it be colorful and melodramatic if that’s how it comes out, you let it come out live and imperfect, then you begin to shape it and perfect it through edits.

Everyone’s process is different so I can’t actually say this is how it is for all writers. What I’m saying is that this is how it is for ME.

Part of the power of my blog writing, the stuff people tend to comment about, the stuff that makes people think I’m a good writer, is that I let stuff come out unfiltered. Some of my best blog writing is late at night after several beers because my walls are down,  my instinct to control everything I say is gone. It comes out raw and living and definitely dramatic. Sometimes I wake up and hate what I wrote because it’s embarrassingly earnest and as melodramatic as a teen experiencing their first passions in life. I hate that shit. HATE IT. But that’s the same well from which my poetry comes, my best words, my most creative and inspiring writing comes from that same place.

It’s also the same well from which my nightmares are drawn.

You could say that the best and the worst all comes from the same well. My psyche.

I can’t draw on that unless I let my defenses down, let go of control, let the living moving magma out of the mountain.

Part of it is about trust too. Trust that I can take the raw material, the wildly stupid messy narratives, and shape them into something worthy the way they play themselves out in my head. Trust that the first draft is not an indication of the worth of the story but merely the lump of material from which a great story is chiseled or molded or built.

Pick the metaphor that works best for you.

The thing I can’t account for, the thing I miss and want and need is that energy that pulls me back into the process every day. The energy that makes everything else in my life feel less urgent than getting back to the page. That sense of excitement, discovery, and purpose is like a drug, I suppose. I have heard nearly every successful writer say that becoming successful is about showing up to the page even when that excitement is on the wane. I believe this, I do. I believe it because a person, no matter what they’re doing, can’t be UP all the time, can’t be EXCITED all the time, can’t be PASSIONATE all the time.

If a person IS up all the time, excited all the time, and passionate all the time, then they are living a life out of balance. Or they’re on recreational drugs.

Everyone needs times of reflection, of inwardness, of aloneness, of quiet.  I’ve known people who are exquisitely uncomfortable being alone with themselves, with down time, with quiet days, with slow work, and with reflection. I’ve known people who think their relationships with others are over the minute passion quiets down or the sex isn’t as exciting or as frequent.

Everyone needs refueling from time to time. That is a fact. Creativity needs refueling. Love needs refueling. Bodies need refueling.

So I know that part of writing is accepting that it’s not going to be exciting every single time you sit down in front of your page. But a year and a half of feeling the words die on the page? This is the kind of thing that makes a writer quit, that made ME quit before.

I won’t quit this time. I just need to get out of my own way and let this first draft be messy and dramatic, rich and overstuffed with adjectives. I just need to let it come out without trying to control every sentence as it gets to the page where it dies from suffocation.

Time to let the magma out.

The Final Accounting for 2013

winter trees

This must be done.  Every year.

What I’m letting go of:

  • People who I have given the benefit of the doubt to repeatedly against all evidence that suggested I shouldn’t.  People who have consistently behaved like selfish assholes to those they should care for or at the very least show some respect to but never do.
  • My mom almost dying twice.  Her whole hospitalization.  All the fears that this experience brought up for me.
  • The last 7 years of trauma and misfortune and mistakes and pain and shame and fear and trying to fly while simultaneously cutting my own wings off.
  • The plants I left behind and wish were in my garden here because they are part of people I miss and love and left behind in Oregon and other places.
  • Things I can’t force or fit in the spaces I have allotted them.
  • The rotten self loathing I have been swimming in since I broke my hip.  That I have allowed to grow into a dangerous gangrenous shadow.
  • The network of routines and habits that are holding me hostage to that same spirit-swallowing rotting shadow.
  • The Shoulds, the would’ves, and the can’ts.

What I’m celebrating:

  • All the incredible people who, beyond any reasonable expectation that they should, have stood up with me and my loved ones to help us through the toughest times.  All my friends and family who have held my hand and loved me even when I hated myself.  All the people in my life who shine their light for me in the dark when my own light has run out of batteries.  I’m celebrating this great network of people who have made me laugh and hope and joined me in so many adventures.  More than that – I am recharging my batteries so that when it’s dark for you I can be your light the way you’ve done for me.
  • I’m celebrating that my mom is not just alive but continuing to regain her strength and her confidence and her sense of fun.  No amount of pain or fear I can feel around her trauma can equal what she has felt going through it.  I am also celebrating that this awful even came with unforeseen blessings in the shape of my sister who had to abandon her summer plans to be with us and who did it with such love and support and without hesitation.  I think my mom could not have come through this ordeal as well without Tara.  It gave me a chance to spend a lot of intense time with my sister and as a consequence I have never felt so close to her.  That is a true gift that I treasure.
  • So many wonderful and important things have happened in the past 7 years that outweigh the narrative of our misfortune.  It doesn’t matter, really, how we get to where we are right this minute, it’s a gift to have this minute at all and all the things we have experienced have led us here.  I have often said that I was living the perfect life for me right before it went completely off the rails but the truth is that one of the things I’ve always known I was supposed to be doing (writing novels) was something I wasn’t doing in that “perfect” life.  I hadn’t broken through the fiction barrier yet and what it took was to have my perfect life shaken up and turned upside down.  Eight years later and once again I’m starting to live the life I want to be living and there’s nothing perfect about it.  So the narrative of our misfortune also happens to be the narrative of our success.

(I was purposely matching up the things I’m letting go of with the things I’m celebrating as a reflection of how everything I’m letting go of is also something I’m celebrating, but I’m going off point for a second.  It bothers my OCD to have my points out of synch but this is me embracing how things don’t synch up comfortably that often in real life…)

  1. I fucking published my own novel and people are reading it and enjoying it!!!  I’m just going to sit here for a moment and enjoy this wild point I’ve been reaching for since I was a kid.  So far I think only 20 people have read it but it’s a beautiful 20.  It’s just the starting point and I’m allowed to be excited about it.
  • I have a new small garden to start over with and I wasn’t sure I would for half of this year.  Now I can gather seeds and cuttings from my friends all over again and start fresh.
  • I’m celebrating that those things that don’t fit in the spaces I have allotted them in my life don’t belong in it and letting them go makes room for the things that naturally fit into it.  Life is constantly shape-shifting and what fits into it changes too.  It never works to force things.  Let it all come together organically and it won’t break so easily.
  • The hip-breaking was a real watershed but self loathing isn’t all I grew from it.  I also became a lot more raw and connected to myself in a physical way – I have done a lot to destroy my body but I also have spent a lot more time IN IT, truly feeling it in a way I never did before.  There is room now for a deeper level of self respect than I was capable of before.  It’s going to be a long road back out from under that gangrenous shadow of self loathing – but I recognize in this the same opportunity for rebirth that I seized just before I turned 18 and told my self-harming spirit to choose either life or death, that I couldn’t live forever in the purgatory of neither being alive nor being dead.  I chose life.  For the second time in my life I recognize this same opportunity to choose to live or to die.  I’m choosing to live again.
  • I’m celebrating that the same aspect of my personality that allows routines to become dangerous and self-harming also allows me to change them into habits of health and greater mental stability.  Making the changes is hard but they are also self-perpetuating.  I CAN do this because I’m good at latching onto routines.  I did it 26 years ago.  And then refined my routine changes 24 years ago the first time I quit smoking and quit hanging out with toxic people and lived completely on my own and recreated my whole narrative and learned to laugh by myself and nurture myself as I had not previously known how to do.  I CAN do this.
  • I never dwell in the shoulds which are about other people forming expectations of you or making you believe that their yardstick for success is better than your own.  I let this go as a daily practice.  The minute I feel a should coming on I shatter it.

So many people I love are consumed by the sense of what they should want, what they should strive for, how they should behave, who they should love, what they should be doing, what they should be capable of, how they should look, what their lives should be like, and who they should be.  It’s all crap.  I’m asking all of you to shove the shoulds in the trash where they belong.  You’re the only one who gets to measure your success and happiness and if it looks totally different from everyone else’s – it’s okay.  Let go of how other people are seeing you or how they might be judging you.  Live the life YOU want to live.

It is not my practice to hang onto regrets but I have to admit that I have spent too much time in the last 7 years dwelling on the woulds and would’ves.  I have a lot of friends who spend way too much time dwelling on them too.  It doesn’t get us even a milimeter closer to our goals and dreams or happiness.  Regret is not a good tool for growth.  Everyone feels it, but we have to let it go quickly or it takes root and drives us into walls.  It doesn’t matter what would’ve happened if only we’d made a different choices than the ones we made.  Don’t dwell in that space.  It’s not important how things would’ve been different if…  The only thing that’s important when we make mistakes is to ask ourselves what we WILL do the next time we’re faced with a similar situation.  So let’s crush those would’ves in our bare hands and refuse to let them become the anthem of our lives.

The can’ts are something I work hard at not indulging in.  I have a habit of dreaming big.  The blessing in this is that there isn’t much I tell myself I can’t do.  I CAN become a career novelist.  I CAN become a better mother.  I CAN become a better friend.  I CAN listen to people.  I CAN move beyond my pain.  I CAN make most things I set my mind to.  But sometimes I come across a barrier so big I feel defeated before I have even raised a hammer to try to break it down.  I have learned to ask for help.  I have learned to chip away at barriers even when it seems to make no dent or change.  I fall down, I get up, I fall down, I get up again.  Sometimes my friends help me get back up again because they believe I CAN even when I don’t.  So, my friends who are staring down the great wall of can’ts – listen to those people around you who are telling you that you CAN.  They aren’t lying to you.  They aren’t making empty promises.  They aren’t blowing wind out their asses for a lark.  They see things in you that you don’t always see in yourself.  Let’s celebrate all that we CAN do together.

Dammit.  I totally ruined the whole perfectly sequential points that I thought I cleverly fixed with the addition of the one numbered point by separating the last item into three.  Errrrrrgh!  I’m not changing it.  It will just have to be jacked up because I can’t take any of it back just to keep order.  You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about since my order is generally off-kilter anyway.

I’m halfway through the last day of the year, my favorite day of the year, and I feel peaceful, hopeful, and happy.  I want the same for all of you too!  I wish this feeling was a communicable disease.  I’d infect you all mercilessly!  I’d love to know what you’re letting go of and what you’re celebrating from 2013 before we say goodbye.  But only if you feel like sharing.

XOXOXO

The Final Accounting for 2013

winter trees

This must be done.  Every year.

What I’m letting go of:

  • People who I have given the benefit of the doubt to repeatedly against all evidence that suggested I shouldn’t.  People who have consistently behaved like selfish assholes to those they should care for or at the very least show some respect to but never do.
  • My mom almost dying twice.  Her whole hospitalization.  All the fears that this experience brought up for me.
  • The last 7 years of trauma and misfortune and mistakes and pain and shame and fear and trying to fly while simultaneously cutting my own wings off.
  • The plants I left behind and wish were in my garden here because they are part of people I miss and love and left behind in Oregon and other places.
  • Things I can’t force or fit in the spaces I have allotted them.
  • The rotten self loathing I have been swimming in since I broke my hip.  That I have allowed to grow into a dangerous gangrenous shadow.
  • The network of routines and habits that are holding me hostage to that same spirit-swallowing rotting shadow.
  • The Shoulds, the would’ves, and the can’ts.

What I’m celebrating:

  • All the incredible people who, beyond any reasonable expectation that they should, have stood up with me and my loved ones to help us through the toughest times.  All my friends and family who have held my hand and loved me even when I hated myself.  All the people in my life who shine their light for me in the dark when my own light has run out of batteries.  I’m celebrating this great network of people who have made me laugh and hope and joined me in so many adventures.  More than that – I am recharging my batteries so that when it’s dark for you I can be your light the way you’ve done for me.
  • I’m celebrating that my mom is not just alive but continuing to regain her strength and her confidence and her sense of fun.  No amount of pain or fear I can feel around her trauma can equal what she has felt going through it.  I am also celebrating that this awful even came with unforeseen blessings in the shape of my sister who had to abandon her summer plans to be with us and who did it with such love and support and without hesitation.  I think my mom could not have come through this ordeal as well without Tara.  It gave me a chance to spend a lot of intense time with my sister and as a consequence I have never felt so close to her.  That is a true gift that I treasure.
  • So many wonderful and important things have happened in the past 7 years that outweigh the narrative of our misfortune.  It doesn’t matter, really, how we get to where we are right this minute, it’s a gift to have this minute at all and all the things we have experienced have led us here.  I have often said that I was living the perfect life for me right before it went completely off the rails but the truth is that one of the things I’ve always known I was supposed to be doing (writing novels) was something I wasn’t doing in that “perfect” life.  I hadn’t broken through the fiction barrier yet and what it took was to have my perfect life shaken up and turned upside down.  Eight years later and once again I’m starting to live the life I want to be living and there’s nothing perfect about it.  So the narrative of our misfortune also happens to be the narrative of our success.

(I was purposely matching up the things I’m letting go of with the things I’m celebrating as a reflection of how everything I’m letting go of is also something I’m celebrating, but I’m going off point for a second.  It bothers my OCD to have my points out of synch but this is me embracing how things don’t synch up comfortably that often in real life…)

  1. I fucking published my own novel and people are reading it and enjoying it!!!  I’m just going to sit here for a moment and enjoy this wild point I’ve been reaching for since I was a kid.  So far I think only 20 people have read it but it’s a beautiful 20.  It’s just the starting point and I’m allowed to be excited about it.
  • I have a new small garden to start over with and I wasn’t sure I would for half of this year.  Now I can gather seeds and cuttings from my friends all over again and start fresh.
  • I’m celebrating that those things that don’t fit in the spaces I have allotted them in my life don’t belong in it and letting them go makes room for the things that naturally fit into it.  Life is constantly shape-shifting and what fits into it changes too.  It never works to force things.  Let it all come together organically and it won’t break so easily.
  • The hip-breaking was a real watershed but self loathing isn’t all I grew from it.  I also became a lot more raw and connected to myself in a physical way – I have done a lot to destroy my body but I also have spent a lot more time IN IT, truly feeling it in a way I never did before.  There is room now for a deeper level of self respect than I was capable of before.  It’s going to be a long road back out from under that gangrenous shadow of self loathing – but I recognize in this the same opportunity for rebirth that I seized just before I turned 18 and told my self-harming spirit to choose either life or death, that I couldn’t live forever in the purgatory of neither being alive nor being dead.  I chose life.  For the second time in my life I recognize this same opportunity to choose to live or to die.  I’m choosing to live again.
  • I’m celebrating that the same aspect of my personality that allows routines to become dangerous and self-harming also allows me to change them into habits of health and greater mental stability.  Making the changes is hard but they are also self-perpetuating.  I CAN do this because I’m good at latching onto routines.  I did it 26 years ago.  And then refined my routine changes 24 years ago the first time I quit smoking and quit hanging out with toxic people and lived completely on my own and recreated my whole narrative and learned to laugh by myself and nurture myself as I had not previously known how to do.  I CAN do this.
  • I never dwell in the shoulds which are about other people forming expectations of you or making you believe that their yardstick for success is better than your own.  I let this go as a daily practice.  The minute I feel a should coming on I shatter it.

So many people I love are consumed by the sense of what they should want, what they should strive for, how they should behave, who they should love, what they should be doing, what they should be capable of, how they should look, what they’re lives should be like, and who they should be.  It’s all crap.  I’m asking all of you to shove the shoulds in the trash where they belong.  You’re the only one who gets to measure your own success and happiness and if it looks totally different from everyone else – it’s okay.  Let go of how other people are seeing you or how they might be judging you.  Live the life YOU want to live.

It is not my practice to hang onto regrets but I have to admit that I have spent too much time in the last 7 years dwelling on the woulds and would’ves.  I have a lot of friends who spend way too much time dwelling on them too.  It doesn’t get us even a milimeter closer to our goals and dreams or happiness.  Regret is not a good tool for growth.  Everyone feels it, but we have to let it go quickly or it takes root and drives us into walls.  It doesn’t matter what would’ve happened if only we’d made a different choices than the ones we made.  Don’t dwell in that space.  It’s not important how things would’ve been different if…  The only thing that’s important when we make mistakes is to ask ourselves what we WILL do the next time we’re faced with a similar situation.  So let’s crush those would’ves in our bare hands and refuse to let them become the anthem of our lives.

The can’ts are something I work hard at not indulging in.  I have a habit of dreaming big.  The blessing in this is that there isn’t much I tell myself I can’t do.  I CAN become a career novelist.  I CAN become a better mother.  I CAN become a better friend.  I CAN listen to people.  I CAN move beyond my pain.  I CAN make most things I set my mind to.  But sometimes I come across a barrier so big I feel defeated before I have even raised a hammer to try to break it down.  I have learned to ask for help.  I have learned to chip away at barriers even when it seems to make no dent or change.  I fall down, I get up, I fall down, I get up again.  Sometimes my friends help me get back up again because they believe I CAN even when I don’t.  So, my friends who are staring down the great wall of can’ts – listen to those people around you who are telling you that you CAN.  They aren’t lying to you.  They aren’t making empty promises.  They aren’t blowing wind out their asses for a lark.  They see things in you that you don’t always see in yourself.  Let’s celebrate all that we CAN do together.

Dammit.  I totally ruined the whole perfectly sequential points that I thought I cleverly fixed with the addition of the one numbered point by separating the last item into three.  Errrrrrgh!  I’m not changing it.  It will just have to be jacked up because I can’t take any of it back just to keep order.  You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about since my order is generally off-kilter anyway.

I’m halfway through the last day of the year, my favorite day of the year, and I feel peaceful, hopeful, and happy.  I want the same for all of you too!  I wish this feeling was a communicable disease.  I’d infect you all mercilessly!  I’d love to know what you’re letting go of and what you’re celebrating from 2013 before we say goodbye.  But only if you feel like sharing.

XOXOXO

The Unimportance of Stuff

When I was a baby I didn’t have new stuff and most of the stuff I had was shared with other kids in a hippie commune.

When I was a kid with my own room my stuff became sacrosanct and those who entered my space were all potential pilferers and destroyers of my stuff.

When I was a teen I kept all stuff made of paper.  I had file folders filled with scrap paper and piles of very important notebooks full of scribblings and I had clothes piling out of my closet and books and unused roller skates.  I was a magpie.  I became a pack-rat.

When I had my first room mate I actually yelled at her for touching my stuff.

When I got married I discovered my husband had more stuff than me and I began to let go of all the paper scraps and extraneous things of mine to make room for his stuff.

Soon I had him editing his own stuff because his parents are hoarders and seeing what stuff out of control can do to a house gave me night terrors.

Then we got our own house and I selected stuff much more carefully and started getting nicer stuff and getting rid of crappy stuff and taking  better care of what I had in general (there are those that will disagree with that last statement – you must evaluate relative to before).

Then we had a baby and babies are extra people that come with extra stuff.  Their stuff is cluttery and multiplies under the influence of saliva.

One day our attic caught on fire and a bunch of stuff I considered precious was broken, melted, burnt, and scorched.  I had two choices.  I could be devastated and mourn the loss of my things, or I could let go of those things I lost and enjoy the extra air they left behind them.  I chose not to mourn stuff and save all my sorrow for people.  We were fortunate not to have lost each other.

I was profoundly released from the spell of stuff after that fire.  I like my things.  I enjoy my heirlooms that are left (even the scorched family china I saved from the fire) and I’m glad I have it.  But when things break, I don’t spend more than a moment in distress and regret over them.  I’m much more upset when I cut my thumb nearly in half or when my child sprains his ankle.

There is always more stuff and no one needs most of the stuff they have, myself included.  Stuff can enrich your enjoyment of life but it can also choke you to death with dust and stagnation, paralyzing your ability to create and think and evolve.

The last few months I have begun the most earnest spring cleaning of my life.  I’ve been enjoying setting tons of crap free.  Crap that is cool and interesting and useful to other people but which has ceased to be these things to me.

Then last week my laptop died.  All my files corrupted.  I had no back up and for 24 hours we didn’t know if the tech guys could retrieve my photo and writing files.  Files which constituted years of work and care and time.  I cried for one hour.  I mourned lost pictures and all that writing.  I railed against my own stupidity for not backing up my files.  And then I let them all go.

It was like going through the fire all over again.  As though I needed reminding that stuff is just stuff.

Even the stuff we create.  When things we make are destroyed or lost we have the capacity to make new and better and cooler things.  They won’t be exactly like the old things, but every day  our potential to make better things grows more spectacular.

My files were saved.  I bought a mobile hard drive and backed them up immediately.

Now I’m thinking about the next layer of stuff I can peel from my life.  I won’t become spartan.  I still like having pretty things in my life and I love and depend on all my tools like my sewing machine and my canning equipment and my books.  But I see how I want my life to function going forward, I see what kind of mental space I need to achieve my goals and dreams and I know that it lies still under the weight of a few more layers of stuff.

New thoughts, new narratives, new creative projects and new images will replace the space my unimportant stuff took up.