Fear and Loathing in Suburban Virginia: A Writer's War with Words

We negotiated at first. The talks were peaceful if also one-sided. The ideas and words came, but I refused them audience, ignored their demands for freedom until they became too loud, mocking me every time I started reading another piece of bad fiction or went to a bizarre open mic night. “You can do that Cinder.” “Why aren’t you published Cinder?” “Why aren’t you even attempting Cinder?” “Why don’t you get up there and read; you’ve got the poem in your purse?” As a gesture of good will, I would compose a few paragraphs or lines of verse here and there. I even started a novel after a failed love affair—I had six chapters.

They were appeased at first and left me alone for a bit. Then things went back to normal. We engaged in quite the struggle as I’ve been developing and honing a talent for resisting writing for some time. How, as an English teacher, a composition instructor, can I deny the power of writing and not engage in it as often as I can? How can I tell my students to just “do it” when I cannot follow my own advice? “Carve out time for you and your thoughts” I’d preach. “Write a little bit each day,” I’d encourage. “By living, experiencing, and observing life you create content” I’d say at the beginning of each semester. “Tell your stories,” I demanded sincerely and with conviction; “They are worthy.” About literature and daily or monthly publications, I’d advise “Read critically but also with an open mind to broaden your horizon and add depth to your perspective. The more you read the better your writing will become.” I chanted these words to every group of students like mantras. Yet, I wouldn’t do that which I knew would work. Why, you ask? Fear, I believe, and ambivalence. It is not fear of success as some would suggest, you know, those who say that we are more afraid of success than failure. That is not where I live. I live in fear of failure, of being proven a fraud. I need validation of my “good-ness” or at least “okay-ness” as a writer. If I do not do this well, then how can I even teach? How can I still so enthusiastically extol the merit of learning to write beautifully, with heart, with passion when I, gatekeeper of this discipline, cannot bear to open a new Word document?

I wish I didn’t have this ambivalence toward the craft of writing; but I do. I am so in love with words, and I want to be loved by them too. I want them to come into me and move through me, baptizing me in its power. I want to want to write. I want to feel good about this process; I feel I must. Yet I don’t, and in the don’t “ness” of it all, I am still miserable, and my love turns to hate, not apathy though. I cannot give up reading, I cannot not light up when I talk about literature and words and meaning. I feel the calling of the words and am compelled to do that which isn’t happening, to tell some truths. I lie away awake at night knowing that I’ve managed to get through another day without telling a truth, a story, without a cathartic release. On some level in some deep place I believe that writing is who I am, and by not doing what I am, I am living life in denial, a purgatory of ordinary. And everyday of not writing adds more time to my sentence in limbo. Time that I swore I didn’t have.

The truth is I do have time to write even though for years that was my fall back excuse. I had a litany of them: I’m a single mom with no support system. I’m going to school full time and working full time. Then it was I am working full time and have parental responsibilities. Then as a teacher I have too much grading and committee work and parental responsibilities, and what about church? Though the reasons were real, I had the time. I had about two to three hours a day that I spent vegetating in front of Law and Order (Criminal Intent, Special Victims Unite, and the original), CSI (Miami, Las Vegas, and New York), Primetime specials about all sundry types of predators and criminals. I had and still do have time, despite the other responsibilities in my life. Writing takes a back seat.

This seven years’ war has had its reprieves and ceasefires. There have been times when I’ve written consistently for a few weeks at a time, when the muses won, when I surrendered to the process because the bombardment of ideas were deafening. Those moments felt like life, like being a writer and writing was what I was meant to be and do. Rejections, though, leave wounds that are slow to heal. So I’ve been gun shy, hiding in the brushes launching stealthy gorilla attacks: sleeping until noon on the days I do not teach early morning classes, digitally recording episodes of the most inane shows to fill up weekends, going to the worst movies just to distract myself. In this battle against writing—a freedom fighter, so to speak, a rebel against my own deepest desire—I self sabotaged. Because it isn’t about publishing it is about release; it is about my own sanity.

To be good at not only teaching writing but living writing, to be heard, to liberate the stories in my head, where they so painfully exist, refugees from a higher plane is what I aim to do. They, the wonderfully satirical anecdotes, the longer pieces of prose and fiction (but not novels of course—a short story will do), and the thought provoking treatises; they live so actively, yet confined, in my brain matter. I cannot and refuse to let another die there, plunked in the mass grave on the periphery of my conscious mind, undiscovered by the world and forgotten by me, their reticent liberator. So I sit today after teaching my students about literary comparisons and causal analysis, and I do what I have them do every week: write consciously and with a purpose—for me that purpose is to survive.