Monday, April 25, 2011

...lighted fools the way...

I get to write today! I must write today!

The weird part is, it feels like work. Not hard labor, I will not be sweating or toiling. I have no deadlines or requirements. I don't have to publish it, inspire anyone, or even make it public. What it is though, is the part of me that MUST write is being a little rebellious.

Must write you ask? Yep, I must. I wrote before that I wrote for years, stopped for years, and wrote when I wanted to. I have journals sitting around. Some are pretty and wordless. Some filled on every line. And some I realized, as I cracked open two boxes I have been hauling around for years, are gone. Evaporated by the years of packing and unpacking. I had hoped there would be some magic in the boxes. Magic I had buried, some secret lost in the dusty and yellowing paper. Something so deeply powerful that I would be able conquer the world and be done by bedtime.

What I got instead was a couple of regular boxes, (that must have been wet at sometime since they were a bit moldy), and a really tired butt from sitting on the floor in my garage. I sat there for quite a while, sorting, cleaning, figuring out what everything was. When all was done, and the piles were figuratively labeled as "notebooks", "photos", "school-reports", "keepsakes" and "this-smells-too-bad-to-look-at", the stack I had opened the boxes for was smaller than I had imagined. The notebook pile, those secret journals I had no desire to look at, that held my inner thoughts and reasons for being, was really just a handful, totalling 10 or 12 half-filled lined paper spirals and pee-chees.


There is the story of how I met a guy at the library when I was in 8th grade. We went out a total of one time. I never saw him again. I wrote his name down, and my name next to it, about 400 times, over about 25 pages in a diary, in the course of the one week I knew him. I never said anything else about him. Just his name, and my name, over and over and over. I don't remember what he looks like. I do remember he had a car that smelled like mold and cigarettes.

There is the story about going to Great America and not being allowed on one of the rollercoasters because they could not close the safety restraint over my belly. I don't remember the name of the coaster. I did draw a sketch of it, with me flying out and landing on the operator, crushing him. It is a pretty funny sketch, but I am sure at the time I was angry. I can still feel the hurt (30+ years later) of being rejected already because of my size.

There are my Music Appreciation class notes. It was the most boring class. Ever. It was, however, the first time I drew the castle that I doodle all the time. I have used that castle drawing on personal cards and birth announcements. I will find it on the edges of staff meeting notes and credit card receipts. I have taught my kids to draw it, too. I have been asked recently to paint it on my daughter's wall.

I was surprised to find that I had not written much about my life that seems coherent and complete. In the margins I find single sentences like "Why does my mom have to be such a bitch!" and "My brother is stoned! Again!". I guess those words in the margins is how I took care of the immediate needs, and released it.

I did find some pages about what I was feeling, but mostly what I found was stories. Delicious fantasy stories. Stories about friendships. Stories about relationships. Stories about space travel and working in giftshops and being a servant in a medieval castle. All of them unfinished. Some of them very badly written. Some in the third person, some in the first. Some with complex characters. Many just the settings. All of them an insight into who I was, right then. There are napkins, and back pages of math papers. There are notebooks and loose binder paper. There are corrections, and colored pens, and scribbles that I can't read in the edges.

I was shocked a bit to find that this is what I have been afraid to open for so long. Carting these boxes around, like they needed protection and preservation. If you had asked me before I opened the boxes, how much I was writing about my self, I would have said "Tons, it is all I write about". Truth not so much. I didn't write about myself in the traditional sense, I wrote about where I wanted to be.

So how does this relate to my rebellious self, and why I MUST write today? I realized that writing was always taking me somewhere, but I left it unfinished. And when I stopped writing, I lost something that says I could go anywhere, be anyone, do anything. It is not really my rebellious self at all, it is my fearful self. The one that gave up. So today, I write. I will re-read this post, and probably think it is not the best I have ever done. I will want to re-write it, knowing that I can't. I will learn from it that once you have a moment in time, you don't get it back, but lucky me, I get to write again tomorrow. It is my lesson in letting go, and claiming my space, all at the same time. I have to write, because if I don't, all the stuff I am working on now, for myself, gets stuffed back into a moldy box. I run the risk of ignoring it again for years, building it up into something it is not. I just don't want to go there again. This time around, it is too important to think I can just get back to it later.

I just re-read it (ugh!), and will put it out there anyway. Tomorrow I will do it again.

Oh, and so I don't forget (or if somehow I lose all my ability to use a calendar) today is my 45th birthday. Happy Birthday to me, on a bunch of different levels.