The last time I wrote on this blog was when I started it, announcing that more articles were forthcoming, but in a year I haven’t put a single moment’s thought into where it should take me. The problem was I didn’t know what to write about specifically. If I think something I say it out loud and if I have an idea I jot it down, so it seemed of medial importance to actually polish my own little commentary and put it where others could see it. Rarely (just kidding, NEVER) have I committed the creative energy to actually finishing something I’ve started. My “writing” has been more like a collection of miscellaneous memoranda that some nutty hoarder stashed underneath a Kilimanjaro-sized pile of old Vogue magazines and six years of dust. I have since realized the important thing isn’t so much what you’re writing, but that you are. I mistakenly operated under the assumption that you are only “a writer” if others will like what you’ve written. Can you imagine living the rest of life that way, doing only what you think the critics will applaud and hiding the rest? Eff that.
The truth is something happened in the last year that I suspect is not too foreign from what others have experienced before. Oblivious that life was suddenly about to change while simultaneously being afraid that it never would, I panicked at the thought that how life had begun to look was how it would remain. I feared that happy events would follow sad ones and not far behind them both a dull sense of contentment would settle in. If so, I would never know or be able to explore my capacity to feel everything and nothing at all, and the rhythm of life would always reside within what I could picture, plan for, and subsequently bear. It wasn’t grief or regret I was afraid of, it was monotony, that there would be no extreme ups or downs, and like a failing heartbeat I would cease to feel them both.
In retrospect I see how foolish it was to envy experiences for the mere sake of having had them. Like a child tracing the outlines of someone's scar and thinking how "cool" battle wounds are without the faintest notion of what it meant for the person who had to bear them. Heartbreak is romanticized only by those who haven’t had to feel the sickening ache inertly fade to a dull throb at the back of your chest. Perhaps that’s why poets are seen as such a pinnacle of emotional and creative achievement, because they’ve reasoned with otherwise paralyzing angst by channeling it into something constructive. Not that I envy depressive, poetic types; I’d rather not die of consumption in a crumbling attic with soot-ridden windows and flaky wallpaper. But of course things always seem more enchanting when you’re not in the throws of them; chucking yourself off a parapet and thinking you can fly is a relatively romantic notion if it weren’t for the mess at the bottom. Maybe it is healthier to put everything down on the page after all.
This blog will be my soliloquy, the heartache, fear, and ugly mistakes that left me with no other choice than to start writing these things down lest they bounce around inside my skull for another torturous season before exploding into a fit of steam and really poor haiku. Not that anyone will read, let alone like, what I’ve written; the point isn’t the reception, it’s the voice, and you have to use yours. Like Diane Keaton’s character in “Something’s Gotta Give” when she gets over her breakup with Jack Nicholson by turning their story into a play that audiences will adore despite the fact that she kills him by the end of it. Hey, all’s fair…
So there you have it, my pièce de résistance. I’ve been that girl in shambles on the bathroom tile, tears searing the sides of her cheeks and staring into the desolate past like a broken, bitter child, wordless and whiplashed and left in the dark. I wish I’d had my own future-self audibly present like Julia Roberts did, Eat Pray Love style, whispering back to me across the uncertain future to pick my ragged self off the floor and go back to bed because it all gets better. Alas, I am not Elizabeth Gilbert, but I’m hopeful it will not take three countries, ceaseless yoga, and another man in life to just get on with it. Of course I can’t claim to understand what Elizabeth went through; I’m not a thirty-something divorcée with a book deal and some really good fettuccini on the horizon. I can only speak for myself, and that self is a twenty-two year old emotional wreck of a mess that has no one to blame but herself. And that is how I wake to the world-shattering realization that I am a walking cliché. I am that girl. The girl who is trying to figure out what the hell life is supposed to be about, working on turning her dreams into a graspable future, and navigating this dizzyingly uncertain time alone because the only healthy and happy relationship she ever had imploded like Julia Child’s first soufflé at the Cordon Bleu.So I have to ask myself, is this really what it took for me to show something I wrote to someone? To finally admit, I’m a writer dammit and I don’t even care if I’m decent because a previously white page is now littered with something tangible, if only for me. The unfortunate answer is staring me in the face as I’m surrounded by little gemlike books on my desk like an old quotationary and "How to Write Like Chekhov" - - yes, Rachel, yes. You are that gal who is so freaking prideful and self-involved that it took life knocking you to your knees to admit it was worth writing about. Touché, life, touché.
Now, where’s my pen…
© 2013 Rachel Elizabeth Diehm
