Anemones

Dear Writer,

I am writing to you from the road. A family emergency meant that I had to travel to Colorado for a week, which meant a lot of time on the road (yeah, we drove, I love road trips) and in all that thinking time, something unexpected happened: I reconnected with that old book.

You know that one I told the anonymous writer about when she asked about trying to find her way back to a project that an older version of herself wrote, and I told her that sometimes, we’re just too different from who we were when we started those old books, and we need to let them go? And I talked about how I had a book like that?

Yeah. That one.

I have been ready to give up that book as gone for a really long time, but I keep coming back to it. It’s not that I’m not willing to let it go; I’m beyond willing. I’ve let books go before, and I’m good with moving on. But it seems like this book is not done with me yet.

I guess, sometimes, that also happens.

Earlier this week, I talked about how writing is the act of creating meaning from soul stuff. My soul stuff, in my head, is like an ocean full of anemones, those colorful sea plants with those little fingers that float in the water and catch things.

Photo by Antonio Gravante. Licensed through Envato Elements.

Some of my anemones have caught and held onto some dark stuff in recent years, creating an area of my soul-stuff ocean that is just dark. I’ve spent the last few years cleaning these anemones and bringing back their color and light, like the ones that held onto darkness from my childhood, and from my second marriage.

I’ve cleared out some. A lot, actually. But not all. There has been a very dark region of my ocean that I haven’t been prepared to clear out. I would just think about it and instantly panic, then swim away thinking, Not today, Satan.

But for some reason, on this trip, while I’ve been driving as my boyfriend snores in the seat next to me, I’ve been diving into that big, dark region of my soul-stuff ocean and bringing in light. As I watched some of that darkness float by, I caught pieces of it in my fingers and thought, “This goes in that book.”

I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve known for a long time that my books are made from stuff I didn't know I knew.

Before I had even acknowledged that my childhood was not great, I wrote books that repeatedly featured complicated mother relationships.

And absolutely no brothers.

While I was married to a man I didn’t know was a sociopath, I wrote a story featuring a villain whose missing empathy was returned to him via magic, making him whole again.

The soul stuff knows everything, and it puts everything into the book. Me realizing what I’m writing is apparently no part of that deal.

And now, as I look back into the abyss of this book, I’m seeing that the blocks that made me unable to finish it were not about the time that had passed, or how much I had changed, but the fact that I was writing about things that were held deeply within a dark place I wasn’t prepared to clear out. Now that I’m prepared to deal with that darkness, I may be able to finish that book.

So, this is a long answer for you, anonymous writer, but apparently, while you can’t write some books because you waited too long, some books you can’t write until you’ve waited long enough.

Or, maybe that’s just how it works for me.

Everything,

L

Note; when I originally posted this, I used the anonymous writer’s first name, and I’m so sorry. I screwed up. I’ve edited to remove it.