A great deal has been stirring in my life in recent weeks. Not all easy, but things are happening that feel profound and momentous, and like they are moving me towards who I will become in the second part of my life. The sense of change after so many years of relative stasis, of having intense feelings after knowing I've been somewhat numb for quite a while, the feeling of wanting and realizing that I could in fact have some things in life I want, if I choose to move towards them, and not necessarily ten years from now -- all of this is overwhelming. And, well, bewildering, in a positive if scary way. I feel very grateful to be working with a therapist who is able to understand, honor, and support such a journey.
I undertook something big and risky and deep since returning from Mexico, involving contacting someone who has been at the center of my emotional world for thirty years, but with whom I have had no contact for twenty-five. I don't feel comfortable saying any more than that here. I did get a caring and considered response, but one that was quite painful to receive -- let us say this person was not able to receive my story in the way that I had intended it to be read or meet me in the way I longed to be met. Which means, ultimately, that to honor my own life I have to let go, to take the love and longing I placed there and find something else to do with it -- something worthy of the sacredness with which I invested it. I have done some intense work to process that, writing and writing in journal form, but it seems like the jarring disappointment is moving towards freeing up some key emotional energy that has been bound to the past and to a place of impossibility. Late one night it struck me: What had I been truly yearning for all these years, within my yearning for the idealized image of this person? What if part of it was for my own lost self?
One quite dismaying thing that has happened -- it would be more dismaying if the reasons didn't feel so compelling and positive -- is that my plan for the book as I was writing it has pretty much fallen apart. I don't know how well I can explain this, except to say that the structure I imagined examined my life in dialogue with the trajectory of Mary Dyer's. But as I am seeing new things about my life, and realizing my own story is not what I was thinking it was only a few weeks ago, I don't think I can follow that trajectory. Mary Dyer's story moves towards the courage of witness, self-sacrifice and death. It is the story that called to me when I was in a very dark place. I still admire courage and witness, but now I realize that what I desperately want is more life, richer life. And I cannot, in any case, move through the latter sections of the book I had planned until I know where my own story goes, can speak with understanding about my own experience. I cannot write what I have not yet lived. That was always an issue; when I conceived the project, I hoped I would be clearer by now, at least about what was happening in the world and what my role in it would be.
So what to write now? I was cranking along pretty well. But now I don't have a book that will be drafted by this summer. I have not been able to focus on writing during some of these very intense recent weeks of "life work" as my therapist calls it (and she reassures me that's okay). I still want to explore the same material, but it is going to look different. More fragmented, I think. And it's going to take longer to do. Which may be inevitable; more and more I realize I truly need to learn how to write, or how to write this material; having an idea does not mean I possess the craft. I do think the aesthetic vision I have for this work involves lyric fragmentation; the parts where I am telling narratively have always felt heavy, saggy, and the most lyric parts have felt the most vital. Evidently I really am a poet still, even if I am writing in prose for now.
One step I took in the past week is to sign up for a week-long writing workshop in May that might capture where I am right now, and something of what I want to write: "Memoir as Bewilderment," taught at the Omega Institute, a holistic learning and retreat center in the beautiful Hudson Valley, home of my heart, an area I have begun imagining what it might be like to return to to live. The description:
When first approaching the idea of writing our memoir, says acclaimed poet, memoirist, and playwright Nick Flynn, we often write what we believe is our unique autobiography—but as we press on, we discover that our story is connected to everyone’s story, and only then can we access the deeper mysteries of life.
Under Flynn’s guidance, we look for those moments when we begin to stutter and stumble when talking about our projects, and push more deeply into the shadows, into the unknown of our misremembered past. We wrestle with these deeper mysteries as well as the concept of bewilderment, and how we can embody both in our memoirs—through syntax, our access to the duende, leaps into the unconscious, or simply circling around what is unsaid, unknown, and unrealized.
Come with a willingness to push deeper into this shadow world, and an openness to question why you tell the particular stories about your life that you do.I had not heard of Nick Flynn but his work sounds quite compelling, and along the lines of what I aspire to; I just received one of his books from Amazon. So we'll see. I think there will be mostly more developed writers there and I'm somewhat terrified; the workshop is also very risky and experiential from what I've read (I found a former participant's account here). And it makes me deeply uncomfortable to think of opening up in front of a male leader and mixed-gender participants; it's been many years since I can remember choosing to do that. But I think it is what I need.
So, bewilderment. I am trying to hold all the openness and strangeness and unknowing of that as I try to find what and how to write now, and move towards whatever new thing my life is becoming. And in a few days I will arrive in New York state to begin the process of selling my family's home, the absolute ending of everything past and known for me.
