Forever 21

One of the things that I hoped would come out of this blog was a memoir. I was 150 pages into one about a particular year in my life when Philip died. After that, I couldn’t write for a year. When I finally felt ready to, it was not my memoir that interested me, it was Philip’s death. So I started my blog, and it’s been three years since I did so.

The last few months have been a transition. I didn’t know what was going on. It was getting more difficult to write the blog – I didn’t know what I wanted to say. And I’d been thinking of starting the memoir but really wasn’t motivated. Since what I do is assume everything is my fault, I was sure I was just running out of things to say on the blog and too unskilled to think about starting a memoir.

Some time last year I began getting emails from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. They have an adult writing program that runs year round. And they have classes on Saturdays, which is what I’m looking for because if I have to shlep in my car to Bronxville or take the bus to NY to see what’s offered there, I don’t want to do it after a day at work. When I lived in Brooklyn it was a short subway ride into Manhattan. And if the train you were on didn’t take you exactly where you wanted to go, you got off and took another one that did. And you could do it 24/7.

Here in NJ, not so. First off, for me to even get to the train requires transportation. And since you can’t park anywhere around a train station without an annual parking permit (which, in Montclair, has a five year waiting list), you have to call a car service or get yourself Uber-ed there. The train leaves you at Penn Station, and if you’re not in reasonable walking distance from 34^th street, you have to get on yet another train. Or a bus, or a taxi.

There are also buses to the city, and since they’re in walking distance from where I live, that’s how I get to Manhattan. But unless I’m leaving at some odd hour, that forty minute ride is at least doubled. After 18 years of living here, I still resent the fact that I’m at the mercy of the DeCamp Bus Schedule, which runs buses only hourly after rush hour and stops all service sometime around midnight.

I’ve looked into writing classes at The New School , 92^nd Street Y and Gotham. Their adult education classes are on weeknights or weekday afternoons. Which leaves me with Sarah Lawrence – they’re just over the George Washington Bridge which means that with no traffic (if there ever is such a thing where the George Washington Bridge is concerned)  I could be there in about half an hour. While driving gives me more control over what time I come and go, I balk at going over that menacing truck-filled bridge with its upper level and lower level and exits from either side. And with eight lanes to choose from you’d better know which side the exit is on or you’re screwed, GPS or not.

There must be something deeper than that holding me back. I’ve managed to begin the memoir, but writing’s gotten terribly difficult, like it used to be before Philip died. Much as I wanted to write, I’d drag myself to my computer every time I decided to. And often I stared, or came out with stilted sentences. And I don’t think this is uncommon, not at all. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Samuel Johnson said.

Count me among the blockheads.

I’m suffering writer’s block. After Philip died I was so split open that the words spilled out on their own. There wasn’t anything to stop them and I thought that’s how it would remain. But that same vulnerability is turning on me now – I’m struggling with the memoir, struggling with the blog. But I can’t just throw my hands up in the air and cry “writer’s block!” I can’t just wait for it to pass. Because it’s not an “it,” a separate entity that’s been tossed my way. It’s an internal struggle between my ego, which has decided I’m to write every day and I’m to write in an orderly manner and I’m to sit at my desk until this memoir is finished, no matter how many years it takes, and my unconscious, which in the face of my ego’s dictatorship says fuck you.

What is that, “my unconscious?” What do I mean when I say that? Let’s call it spirit, the wellspring of creativity. This “deeper” me is overwhelmed by the personality I’ve constructed to protect it. The blog has simply been my spirit breaking free, telling my stories, trying to understand this thing called My Life. Trying, one word at a time, to live with Philip’s death. There’s a freedom with the blog – it’s mine. I own it. It gets to be what I want it to be. I work it, but it’s to my satisfaction, no one else’s. No editor cutting sentences, no teacher telling me there’s too many words there and not enough here.

But then I started to write the memoir and I froze. I worry about “setting scenes” and “showing instead of telling.” I worry about how to tell the story to the point that I no longer know how to. I push sentences around instead of having them flow. I feel like what I’m writing isn’t even good enough to be a shitty first draft.

And I’m confused. How do I help myself write? I’ve set my desk up to be where I write. I have a desk calendar where I keep track of my writing time. I count the number of hours I write weekly. I note what I want to write the next day so I don’t have to think about where to start. I’ve tried to make a routine. Write every day, even if it’s for ten minutes. Keep a process log where I write about what I’m going through as I keep working. Read a book about writing every day, read a memoir every day.

If I don’t make rules, how do I get myself to write? If I do make rules, I’m too uptight to write.

The struggle with writing has little to do with writing. It’s about unfinished business, business I thought was done once Philip died. His death so overwhelmed I couldn’t see how anything – as long as Natalie was okay – could matter enough to bother me again. But once I sat down and decided to be “serious” about writing and imposed my routine I split in two. Because “impose” is just that – something to be borne, endured, obeyed, something set by authority. And authority means my wicked witch of a mother whose domineering, sneering, angry voice still runs my life more than I care to admit.

And who I’m not yet ready to write about because I lose my footing when I try to.                                                                                                                                                     

©2016 Denise Smyth