waking up

What is it that drives me? What is it that slows me down? 

This is a question I ask myself. Knowing the answer to it doesn’t make the struggle between  these parts of me any easier, though.

It’s a complex thing, all colorful and textured, with layers and layers of things like history and pain. The things that drive me stem from exactly what slows me, so to pick it apart, analyze and make sense of it all, seems daunting and stupid. 

I have spent almost my whole life severely creatively blocked. I look back on journal entries from the last few years and see pages and pages that look like dead trees, all bare and thirsty. I think about the years before that, the years I was a teenage mother, and then a wife. I was so far away from what I wanted for myself. I made my home my only creative outlet because it was acceptable and didn’t require honesty. 

It has only been months. It’s even scary to say it here because it feels so fragile. 

It is easy to blame it on the fact that I’m a mother. I wake up in the morning and the house rumbles until the kids are in bed. There is always someone to attend to, something to be done. But my kids are not what slows me down. 

If writing happens in the hours between eight a.m. and nine p.m. it rushes to me in this sort of wild, focused race to get it all out on the paper. This happens when I am not blocked. When this happens, everything looks bright. 

On the days that I can see things clearly, it’s all beautiful. Even the struggle. I spent my childhood always in books, writing and directing plays in my best friend’s front yard, filling up journals with stories and poems. It has been with me all this time, hiding out, taking the back seat so that I, a sensitive human, could survive some particularly painful years. 

The clarity isn’t always present, though. I have to tell myself almost every day that it’s here, in my mind,  and that it’s not going to just leave me forever, frozen--hand holding a pencil over a blank sheet of paper. 

nocturnal creatures (I wrote this last night)

Here I am. Another night writing at one in the morning. I am up late, warmed by the glow of my laptop in a black room, silent for the first time since morning. I’ve been doing this a lot, keeping my eyes wide, long past bedtime, getting glimpses of old ghosts, ghosts I used to avoid in any way possible. 

Stay in brightly lit rooms. 

Surround myself with people. 

Always have music playing or a book in my hand, go to bed early and never ever be silent with myself.

They are less likely to show their faces if I keep myself busy, but on nights like this, they peek around corners. I see them and say, “Hey you. Why don’t you come out? I think that maybe we should  have a conversation.”

I decided to stop avoiding them, and these are the hours that all this can happen. My nights feel like islands. I sit alone. It’s something I have to do in order to be myself. 

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There is a mouse in the house that I live in. He stays rolled up in his little mouse den carved somewhere into a wall by day, but at night he runs from bookcase to pile of paper to kitchen while I type. I like his silent company.

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Everything I have read about the creative life seems to say the same thing. I want to know the answer to these questions: How do I make the time to write? How do I find the energy it takes to search for it? And how do I distinguish the real from all the noise?  

The answer is always very clear: There is no answer, or, maybe, there is. The answer is: You just do it. 

I think, the key is to believe. Art, in any form, is a matter of intention. That’s all I can do. Live with that in mind.