There’s something desperate about the end of October, a sense of pervasive hopelessness that creeps in with the cold, when we see exposed all the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day, like naked tree branches shivering in the wind. All becomes tenuous and happiness seems such a stretch, you can only brush it with your fingertips and never grasp hold. It doesn’t happen every year, but this year I can feel it coming. That lack of something to look forward to other than day after tiring day after tiring day. There is hope somewhere behind the clouds, but it’s so foggy and distant. My heart aches today. I won’t deny it, not here. In fact, this is my solace. This is my hope. Words. It saved me one year, when the tediousness of life and the long stretch of countless days threatened to overwhelm. I wasn’t happy that year, and I didn’t know how to change things, where to start. In my stubbornness, I left myself nowhere to turn. No one to talk to. I’m still that stubborn person now, that hasn’t changed. Because I got through it before. That was the year I started writing. I lived for November. Literally. It was all I could see to look forward to. http://www.nanowrimo.org/
I wrote a terrible novel that month that I lost several computers ago, and good riddance to it. But it taught me to write frequently, to sit there and produce the absolute crap I needed to produce to figure out how to do it. I’ve lost touch with that, now. My time has grown so short these last couple years. And I have other things to live for, now. Not love, not friends, not family, and all of that is my stupid and stubborn choice. But the words, they’re waiting for when the rest overwhelms. I could see waking up one morning and not being able to do my job anymore, and I fear this complete failure so much I can’t describe it properly. Because I would have to admit, then, that I’m not the person I want(ed) to be. This is the lie that I tell myself, that I am, will be, or even can be that person. My belief is shaken, but if it cracks, the words will be there to catch me.
Thank you, nanowrimo, for that. All a writer’s words couldn’t say it eloquently enough.
