Adventures du jour!
Either the election is stressing me out or the tropical storm is lowering the air pressure (or both) but I feel like someone took a grapefruit spoon to my sinuses.
Yesterday a friend gave me a “run this against your subconscious” query and it took over. She didn’t intend it that way, but UFF DA, the brain latched onto it. I didn’t actually realize that the brain was running it quite THAT hard until I sat down to write the rest of Goth Girl’s scene and it went nuts.
I still have to go back through it and make sure it’s part of the story and not just my subconscious waiting for the next time I opened channels after getting the query. I think it should probably stay, which freaks me out, but (given the other things I’ve been wrapped around the axle about in this story) it’s probably fine.
The query ended up dragging up some deep trauma, but the writing didn’t *feel* like a trauma barf. I was actually feeling pretty merry when I got done last night! But also deeply exhausted.
I tried to go to bed but couldn’t sleep and ended up tossing and turning for a while. I wasn’t even thinking about the trauma, per se, or even what I wrote. I just couldn’t settle. Woke up deeply dehydrated, head hurting, feverish. Couldn’t go back to sleep. Finally got up, skipped yoga, and walked with Ray down to the bus stop at 7. Only after I turned the other direction (toward my lovely big tree in the park) did I realize that the on and off pain in my hip muscles was just completely gone.–The rest of the hip area was doing fine, too.
I think I realized yesterday that I don’t just carry my own pain in my muscles, but sometimes others’, too. The realization really settled in this morning while I was out for the walk.–It’s empathy but not empathy. It felt like I was taking on the friend’s pain, which also happened to be like mine and like Goth Girl’s, which somehow hurt but gave me the strength to spit out the beginning of an answer in that scene. I feel like it’s something I’ve been working on for a while but that was going to take a lot of work to bring up to the surface. I’m going to write the actual answer out separately from the scene and send it to the friend. It feels nutty to do so; I definitely walked over into what feels like taboo territory. BUT. The things a lot of us have been through are in taboo territory, and I’m too tired right now to fight the idea, so I’ll just write what I write and apologize later if it turned out to be the wrong thing. At the very least I’ll have my thoughts clear.
About that point I stopped at my lovely tree and hung out for a while, taking pics and just leaning against the bark. The tree is very companionable and a little bit mischievous. A lot of the trees that are “my” trees are lovely and friendly feeling, but don’t necessarily have much of a sense of humor. This tree has a *very* sly, yet ridiculous and even bawdy sense of humor. I quite like it.
On the walk back I thought about what I call “decision space,” or this kind of temporary mental space that I call up when I need to make a complex decision. It’s a powerful tool, but too complex for things like “what brand of ketchup should I get,” which is why I’ll often take too long to make decisions about things I don’t have mental rules for. (The time-saving rule for ketchup is “generic is fine.”)
Something I’ve noticed is that there are a LOT of decisions that aren’t simple, not just because the situation is complex, but because ones doesn’t currently have the mental resources to be able to make the decision or achieve the goal.
Writing fiction is very much this type of situation. Someone who isn’t already a writer simply cannot have the mental resources needed to make competent decisions about writing, marketing, publishing, etc. The act of learning how to write is a transformative one; you have to literally change your mind over and over again in order to do it.
Anyone who has mastered a subject, I suspect, will say something similar: doing the work of mastering the thing is what makes you able to master the thing. It’s an incredible experience that’s easy to take for granted: “If you want to learn how to write, you can’t just study writing! You have to write.” “If you want to learn how to ski, you can’t just watch skiing videos! You have to ski.” And so on.
At any rate, on a basic level, now that I know how to do this–trusting that the process of trying to master the thing will make me capable of mastering it–I can extrapolate to other things than writing. I go, “I want X to happen. I have no idea how it will work out, but I will focus my energy in that direction, trusting that I’ll come to a solution eventually, even if it’s weird and I’m not the same person I was before.–If I *could* be the same person and come to that solution, I would have already. I have to be willing to be changed in order to answer the question.”
When I enter decision space, something fundamental is always at risk: am I willing to change in order to grow? Not like in some kind of hypothetical down the road way, but over the course of writing a scene for my story today way?
And then I remember a scene out of the movie O Brother Where Art Thou:
Ulysses: What’d the devil give you for your soul, Tommy?
Tommy Johnson: Well, he taught me to play this here guitar real good.
Delmar: Oh son, for that you sold your everlasting soul?
Tommy Johnson: Well, I wasn’t usin’ it.
–I don’t know about you, but apparently when I’m doing what I’m really supposed to be doing with my life, my everlasting soul gets rewritten on a near-continuous basis, which is pretty darn close.