Hmmmm, What to Write...A Book?

Sometimes the morning pages come hard.   Sometimes, I search Instagram, getting distracted for way too long and still come up with nothing I feel moved to write about.

I get asked a lot how the fuck I do this every day.  And honestly I don’t know.  It is like I woke up seven years ago and I just started, not daily at first but weekly.  Then it became daily when I tried to stop dating for a year which was a joke in and of itself.  I was not to that place in my healing quite yet that men would be removed from my front and center.  I tried but I failed.  But I also succeeded.  I did not stay away from men for an entire year.  I think I made it like seven months and I will tell you that I still thought about them every single day and was quite desperately hoping that with all my pushing away I would attract not just one, but the right one. 

That didn’t happen.  I just found more of the same shit I always found.  So total failure on the “leave men alone front” but total success on the write and publish daily front.  Win/win actually.

I needed to hit a bottom with men and while I didn’t know that I was setting myself up for that back then, I was.  And it got me committed to writing daily and here we are all this time later.

Not everything I write is good.  But as Hemingway said, “you cannot edit a blank page...”

Now, writing is just part of my life, every single day.  I write something every day.  Sometimes it is shit, sometimes it is insightful, it is always intimate, authentic and vulnerable.  Those were the only tenants of my writing commitment back on January 12, 2019.  That I be real, not the me I wanted you to see but the real me.  Broken, afraid, lost, hurting, wounded, childish, petty, happy, buoyant, exuberant, healing, happy, sober, joyful and full of hope that by sharing my real life, I might in some way help you in yours.  That is all I have ever wished for, that my life, that some thing I have lived through and survived, some thing I have worked through and thrived might be of benefit to you...

My other writing project has been a lot harder...I started a book like 30 years ago.  I have rewritten that fucker at least four times.  The first one I wrote for me, it was important that I write it all down and get it out of me.  But that version was, as it turns out, just for me.  I needed that version to heal.  Then I wrote the other three versions because I was terrified to own the life that was in fact mine.  I kept trying to write about it in third person, then I wrote it as fiction.  Finally, I began again and wrote it as mine.

Well that book will finally be published this fall.  And it is excitingly terrifying.  The fact that it will be out there for all of you to know the backstory of how I got here makes me want to vomit, honestly.  But I know there is value in the telling.  For me and hopefully for at least one of you.  That is what I tell myself, if my memoir helps one other person, it was worth all the handwringing I did for 30 years.  It was worth the rewrites and the editing (I hate editing and this blog is a clear demonstration of that - I read it once and then out it goes).  

My sincere and real desire is that someone else is helped by my willingness to own the life that I have lived and survived and ultimately came to thrive in.  If I can, perhaps maybe, my sharing what happened and what it is like now, someone else might be encouraged to do the hard work that is healing.

So the book comes out this fall.  And I am in editing now, making progress and it goes to my editor next Tuesday...and when I push send on that email, I am releasing it all out there into the world and giving up the tight control I have had over my life and story for the entirety of my life.  You may not like the book, or you may love it.  I hope if nothing else you can acknowledge the courage it took to own it, heal it and survive it. And I hope you think of someone in your own life, perhaps you, perhaps a friend, perhaps a sister, mother or aunt that might benefit from reading it.

I know I have lived the whole of my life out there in the public eye, we all do.  But now, the time has come to fill you in on the backstory, and all that has happened because of that particular backstory.  It is a story of abuse, addiction, survival and ultimately healing and redemption.  I denied it for a long time because I was not able to assimilate that particular backstory into the image I carried of myself.  But that is the thing about backstories, even though they live in the distant past...it is never too late to have a different backstory, or at least the way you view it.  I have the power to change the past into something useful and helpful.  Me, I possess that power.  And so, coming soon to a bookstore near you, my backstory will become available to you.

I release it all unto you...and pray that all I have walked through in this life and my willingness to write it all down helps someone else.  I pray that it helps lots of people, but it is already worth all the effort I have put into it because I survived, I have thrived, I have this amazing life because of the work I have been willing to do, the hard truths I have been willing to accept and the arduous task I have undertaken to heal that which was inflicted upon me.

Stay tuned...more will be revealed...

Again, still...