Starting Over

Sometimes the struggle to find a voice and to maintain it is too difficult. That it is when I usually decide not to write because I know all the time I spend writing will be one long frustrating mistake. I end up thinking it would be better to do nothing but wait for something to happen.

The result of this waiting period is even worse than writing badly. I fall into a protracted anxiety attack.

In those moments of such high anxiety, I am no fun to be around. Endless hours are spent tearing down everything I worked so hard to build up in terms of personal attention to the details of a good life. For those of you prone to anxiety, you probably know precisely what it is I am talking about here.

In the midst of this latest need to find the voice and get the novel written the way I wanted it to come out, I learned that my cousin had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It took a while for that news to sink in. I couldn’t envision what her life had now become.

It may seem crass to compare the struggle to find one’s voice to someone struggling to overcome cancer, but there are similarities. The similarities don’t interest me as much as the ways in which the differences in how she must struggle versus what I need have begun to take shape.

Years ago, I struggled with a different type of illness; I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Someone else other than I struggled through that illness. Today, living pretty much in a cured state, I don’t recall in vivid detail what it was like to fight for my mind. But over the past few weeks, I have been observing Lynda learning how to fight for her life.

Watching her fight and the effort it takes to keep that fight going made me aware of some pretty basic principles in life whether fighting for one’s life or just fighting for the voice in which to tell a story. You have to want it. You can’t be conflicted about it. The psychological conflict is what causes the anxiety. Not the fight or the lack of certainty about the outcome. It is just simply when you don’t know whether you want to fight that anxiety arises. And that is a killer.

Staying focused is not easy. Staying conflict free is even more difficult. As I watched Lynda learn to marshal her anger and her desire to live, I took notes. I wanted to understand what was causing me to feel that there could be reasons not to write this novel.

Sometimes I think I need permission to write. Part of me learned to write when I should have been doing other things. Stolen time, a transgressive act, when it gains credibility takes on a different aura.

Writing on a regular basis, with my partner’s approval and help has changed significantly my mental relationship to the process. Yet, now that the anxiety is gone and I am more at peace with the focus on Scags, the voice has returned. And my struggle to maintain that connection to Scags is not the same as Lynda’s struggle to stay alive. She needs to galvanize her body to make the fight. I know too that she needs to be pushed to stay in the fight. But pushing her to fight has been helping me too.

When I talk to her and say that I know she can make it even when she can’t fathom another day of the kind of pain and discomfort that her illness causes her, I am brutally honest–she has no choice.

Those are the same words that I use with myself as well. I have no choice any longer. I have made the choice and it is helping me to write and to be calmer.

This kind of inspiration is also of a spiritual nature. I do feel like I am taking in breaths of faith, putting it into action and fulfilling my purpose here. This may seem an immodest statement but this is why I believe I am here.

I hope now to help Lynda discover that purpose in herself too because I want her to be around for a long time.