The Emergence
Dear Writer,
As you read this, I’m setting up my oldest in her new apartment, back on campus. She came home for spring break about a year and a half ago and couldn’t go back until now.
Life is fucking weird.
A lot is changing in my life now. I’m in a relationship, which I swore I would never, ever do again. I'm about have both kids in year-round apartments, so they don’t have to come home anymore when the dorms close, which makes me an official empty nester? I guess? I’m selling my house. I’m fucking 50.
Everything is changing, and all of it at once. I was stuck for so long, and now I’m suddenly… not. It’s good, but it’s a little alarming.
As the world opens up again, I think many of us are feeling like life is beginning to move again, and what the hell do we do with that? Are we supposed to just… pick up? Move on? Pretend like it never happened?
And by “it,” you know I’m not referring to just one thing. The last handful of years have been full of frightening things that, for some of us, have rudely pulled us from a false world we thought we knew into a reality that feels unreal, even though we know it’s true. Others of us who have lived in that reality for quite some time have used incredible resources being kind to those of us still in shock.
Thank you for that, by the way.
All of us have faced down a terrifying killer in our towns, homes, and families. You don’t emerge from that kind of experience without being fundamentally changed by it. As my therapist likes to say, “This experience will always be a part of you, but that doesn’t mean it will always have power over you.”
We’re in the emergence right now. We’re coming out from our shelters and shielding our eyes from the sun, and moving forward, because what the hell else are you gonna do?
But still. It’s fucking weird.
I’m trying not to be too afraid of what this all means for my writing. I used to write these light, fun romps. Even when they were deeply emotional, they were mostly light and often silly. Which was fine; we need stories like that. But I’m not sure I’m up for telling those stories anymore. I’m pretty sure that transition started in the Lucy March books, during which time my experience of being married to a sociopath found its way into the books, even when I hadn’t consciously acknowledged it. They were funny books, but they were slowly darkening as the landscape of my soul darkened.
What will I write now, as I emerge from this fallow period, as I start to create again?
I’m not sure. But I’m excited to find out.
Everything,
L