Writing Less: A 2,500-Word Retrospect

It occurs to me that I write less, or differently, than I used to. Once upon a time, I filled notebooks end to end faster almost than I could find them. I wrote voraciously, and daily.

The first time someone violated the sanctity of these innermost safe spaces was when I was ten years old: my mother found the current journal at the time and in her drunken shame spiral stupor called everyone I had named to share the contents. My antics in alcohol and cigarettes with my older cousins were exposed; the much-too-young sexual activities I engaged in, the way I hated how my mother ignored and neglected us, my thoughts of despair . . . all of this was thrown at me with a mixture of disgust, disbelief, and dishonor. If I remember correctly, I buried that notebook in the dirt behind our apartment complex.

After, I learned to edit as I wrote. This habit would start out as a self-preservation tool, and it would vary in intensity as the years passed, because truth be told there comes a point when I must write the truth, or die from the weight of it in my head. But I did learn to edit. And to turn honesty into prose into poetry. Where there was darkness, there was metaphor.

The second time my written hallowed ground was desecrated was perhaps the worst. Eighth grade, months before my mother died but years after I’d stopped living with her, my step-sister raided my journals. I don’t know how many she read or how much of each, but I do know that she turned them over to my step-dad and stepmother, and that they turned my words on me like weapons. It was already a psychological war zone in that home, aside from the physical and verbal abuse, but this moment turned the tide against me in an unforgettable way. They would never forgive me for my honesty in those pages, the way I wrote about the seething hatred so palpable it bled off the walls like liquid rage – the words they spoke to each other and about every one of us. My thoughts of escape, how I desperately needed to get out of that hell and the dreams and aspirations I had about one day being free. Much was written about my love affair with God, the Biblical One, at the time, and how the Church had embraced me and the things I was free to say in the privacy of my peers in faith.

I remember the things I chose not to write afterward, more than those I did. As I was winning national awards and flying south to accept them – for outstanding journalism, for writing truth – I was lying to the pages of my own notebooks, leaving out the parts about how so-and-so assaulted me on the eve of my mother’s funeral or how the pot I sometimes smoked eased the aching in my brain. I wrote about my nonsense crushes and the stress of Ivy League applications but left out the warning signs that I would soon collapse, left out the thoughts that led me toward my own destruction.

Time would pass without filling up any notebooks at all. I took as many as I could carry when I left that step-house, hell-house, with not much else but the clothing on my back, halfway through my senior year of high school. But I lost them, left at some waypoint couch I slept on, and many years later an old friend-of-a-friend would return them to me in a ripped up, musty bag alongside photo albums from my trips to Arizona and a cassette tape of my real father’s voice, playing the guitar and singing with my mom and friends somewhere in the valley, before he died. It would become my most prized possession – that ripped up bag with the tiny pink flowers so full of musty memories.

I didn’t write when I lived with the woman who would steal my inheritance and my college education in a single year, didn’t document the way she drugged me, the way we stayed overlong at casinos while she played at counting cards and I hid hundreds in my boots so we could eat when we got home, so long after dawn. I never wrote the things she said to me to make me stay, or how scared I was to run away. I didn’t even write the day after I woke up at that party with that guy inside me, the way I crashed my car and threw up on the side of the road trying to get out of there, the way the conwoman convinced me it was my own dirty secret and fault to carry.

Gradually, eventually, I did begin to write again. I remember sitting at a computer, composing poetry while my boyfriend nodded off to over-loud music on the couch, lines of white powder like ghosts on the coffee table. I remember the poetry I wrote in the Time Before Him, in the dark with tears steadily streaming down my face as my First Love stayed up all night anywhere but in bed next to me, playing video games and smoking pot, texting some other girl and hardly telling me goodnight. These would go on to be some of my best works, the inspiration for a very bad tattoo I later covered up, and the intro to the first book I finally wrote, many years later.

Notebooks began to fill again when I moved to the island, like somehow the veil of self-protective editing had thinned, bleached maybe by the intensity of sunshine and the way it glittered twice over the water. I wrote and wrote and filled pages with salt – tears, sea spray, sandy bits. I have notebooks full of scribbled rantings only rum can conjure, poems about the way the surf feels under the rising moon, memories of dancing barefoot beneath the palms. I wrote then like it would save me and in many ways I am certain that it did. These would become, later, bits of “Finding Starlight” that give the reader hope, that balance out the tragic, that shine like a sun really ought. I took these notebooks, heavy as they were, with me when we left for Babylon, not trusting the mold to leave them be while I was gone. A bit of foreshadowing, maybe, sensing rather than knowing I might never come back, not really, anyway, to that island-healed-and-bright version of myself.

Lately, I’ve wished that I had written more during those crucial years, the falling-in-love-and-getting-married years. I wish I had written in real time how I felt and what I thought, wish I had felt the freedom to express without the burden of future-editing necessity . . . but I did not. I’ve often wondered if this was another form of self-preservation, a way to force an intentional belief rather than inadvertently ruin such a safe, strong, secure thing with accidental honesty. I wrote some, though. A love poem here or there, a tragic one between.

It occurred to me that the book – My Book – the one I’d always been destined to write – was emerging from these times, and I began to make notes at first, to research and thumb through pages long past, to piece together the truth of who I’d been versus what I’d written. It took a long time, but I transcribed a past-life journey from filmed and mumbled meditation-speak to written down pages . . . and, in one manic rush fueled by red wine and clove cigarettes and the darkening August days, I wrote the first forty-thousand words like a frantic Hunter S. Thompson on the deck of “the little trailer” back when things were so very, very different.

Things changed after that, and I don’t know what, if anything, I wrote about it. 40,000 words is a lot of words to write about oneself and then — suddenly – to stop. I went from writing my story to living it, or a version of it anyway – to writing grants and board meeting agendas and program plans. Back and forth to Haiti and back again we went, my husband and I, my rock and the airy sparkle hopes of that younger version self I was. Our fights got worse, our situation harder. I never wrote about any of that at all, like if it didn’t exist on paper it wouldn’t be real in life. If I could just – get us forward, I guess I thought, and he did, too, in his own ways “If I could just –”

We had a baby just when we had come to realize something had to give (and it was the dream of Haiti, and so many things we tried to build, that gave), and then we gave again all that we could. I wrote a bit when my belly swelled, but not nearly as much as I wish I had, now. I learned to meditate again, read a thousand books, met myself and a new God, the Divine Feminine, found my way truly and wholly home to a complete spiritual embodiment I had only hoped existed … and though I didn’t write or not write on purpose at the time, I knew that I would not lose touch with these truths. And I never have.

When Jasper came, my little orb child, there was no way I could hold a notebook and pen, because all I could hold was him, then. Presence was palpable, every moment completely awake and alive and fuller than I’d ever been, even while the distance between that and my old self grew and the chasm between us and my husband did, too. More that I never wrote.

Until, one day, I did. Some time went by, and it occurred to me that I could start again, begin at the crossroads of who I wanted to be and where I had sacrificed her. With husband’s support, I became a yoga teacher, a real yogi this time, and opened a most Magical studio, and finished that Book, My Book, “Finding Starlight,” all nearly 200,000 words of it this time. That – now THAT – was a lot of writing.

Notebooks began to fill again, but more slowly now, and with sporadic intention and scattered meaning, literally into different journals and books, some so full I turned them backward to write upside down on blank between-pages, and others with only a jumbled mess of a five- or eleven- page entry and nothing but plank pages on either side at all. Poetry would flow, and then stall.

Eventually, my orb child and I would move out on our own – and this, too, would be a product of my written word. I hosted a chakra-clearing workshop at my Magical studio and participated in it, too. There, I had written a letter or perhaps a piece of prose and I don’t remember if it was to or from my Higher Self but in any case, She was the subject of the thing. When it was done, the workshop, we drove to some errand-chore-place and as we did he asked me what I led that last day. I mentioned the letters and though he had not read my words in many years – did not ever read My Book nor intend to – for some reason on this day, in that car, he asked me to read it aloud to him: the letter to or from my Higher Self, and it said something like “I desperately need to feel free” and later that night he gave me back his ring.

I wish that I had written in notebooks then, and all these five years since. Instead, something strange happened where that fractional reporting took over my brain and my style and it will take me years to untangle the mess of what I have created (or undone). I have written, yes, and almost daily. But now? It looks like 1,094 “notes” in my cell phone, prose attached to some 500-odd Instagram posts and who-knows-how-many Facebook versions both public and in the most sacred shared space of my Goddess Group. I have a blog that really not that many people read (and thank you if you do), with seventy-three posts on it and another much older one where I cut-and-pasted every poem I could find that I stopped using ten years ago but still has 40-some pieces out there for the shadows of the internet to read . . . I have all of this and uncountable word documents on however many (three?) laptops and of course the many little journal-notebooks in various stages of ink stained completeness scattered across my home. This and many grant proposals, the new book I wrote of my Magical Yoga Philosophy, and I don’t know how many other little and big things –

But really, I don’t write like I should anymore. And so tonight, sitting here on yoga things and feeling rather sorry for myself that all these years have passed with lonely Friday- and- Saturday- nights and still nobody who Sees my Soul (because to See me is to read me, after all), I decided it was time to answer for my sins. To name them, anyway. I am a writer always, even more than I am anything else. More than the fire I dance with and the salt water that sings in my blood, more than the stars that I pray to and the child that I love, more than my tragedies and triumphs and all the worlds I will save, more than every thirst trap I post and ecstatic dance that I host and friend that I adore and more and more and more – I have come here to live, and then to write about it, and to share my perspective however bizarre or traumatic, beautiful or big, with you.

I think maybe the first time I realized I was editing as I wrote was when it occurred to me that, really, deep down, more than anything – I did want someone to read it. Even as a tiny child writing my first ever poem, “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke,” about the cigarette plumes filling my house, my nose, and my mouth, I wanted someone to find my notebooks and read them aloud.

I guess I just also always hoped that moment would be one of love and acceptance, rather than scorn and hatred. Even still – I never stopped writing, did I? Maybe no matter how many rejections roll in, from publishers’ generic versions of “no,” from lovers who choose some -one or -thing else other than me, parents who die, funding proposals that get denied – maybe no matter how many times my words are read and met with … not-love … I can’t stop writing them because I can’t stop hoping that they’ll still save me, somehow.

Maybe they already have.