Medicine

I get in these moods. There’s one story I’ve written recently that I really really like, that means a lot to me, and I realized that this is the first time it’s happened for a story I’ve written for school. There are stories that you write because they’re interesting to you, and they sort of bug you like, when are you going to write me? you should write me. Then there are other stories that just sort of rocket around in your heart for a while, growing bigger and accumulating over time; at some point, whatever point, the point they need to be born, their voice is quieter, but it hurts more: you need to write me. You need me. 

Stories I’ve written for school so far have been ideas I’ve had—curiosities I’ve humored. What about this: a character who’s so shy that when a boy talks to her for the first time she cries about it later? What about this: a talkative student getting obsessed with a quiet one and trying to figure out the secret to quietness? What about this: a couple on their first marriage anniversary trip to London? What about this: a pothead who bounces through addictions, marijuana to love to Scrabble? 

But the fifth one—I can’t even talk about why I wrote it because the subject is so tender to me. I’ve just written this paragraph and deleted it several times. In the end, I find I can’t write it at all, so I’ll just move on…. 

What I’ve got now as my fifth story, the title story of my honors thesis project, is thirty pages of prose in which I expose my own preoccupation with a language and culture I’ve never actually encountered, my self-consciousness over it, the story of a girl and her childhood friend who bring home an international student from their college across the country for spring break. They drive down PCH to see the sunrise over the ocean on a morning in late March. That’s it. That’s the story, intercut with flashback and rumination. But writing it was embarrassing. I had to acknowledge several things about myself and my interest in this particular language and culture that I wouldn’t want to, normally, put into words, nonetheless into characters, to whom a writer owes the highest duty and care…. 

So I get in these moods. I write something that’s deeply, desperately important to me, and then I want to keep it where nobody can see it. I want to keep everything I write in which I bare my heart secret. But then I think about all the things I’ve read that have moved me even just a little bit, or that have totally changed my life, that have helped me decide that I need to keep writing when it’s seemed hopeless, when I’ve looked back and just hated everything I’d done, when my faults assume preeminence over the things I manage to do well…. And I think about what my life might be like without those things in them, and wonder if I could possibly serve that role in somebody else’s life. 

I went through this tumultuous period of not caring whether or not I’d end up as a good person after I’d realized some things about myself that I’d been ignoring before—but I’m over that. I want to be good; I’d like to live well, to be useful. What use are the gifts God’s given to me—if I can say that of myself, that writing is a God-given gift?—if I can’t work up the courage to share them? Maybe this is difficult to understand. People at work I talk to about my writing don’t understand why I’d go through the process of writing a book and then not try to put it out into the world. I guess if you don’t write, if you’re looking at it from that angle, to publish a book seems to be the reason people write books. But I like this explanation:

“Writing a book is horrible,” George Orwell said, “an exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” 

I love to write. I like what language can do, what I can ask language to do, how I can push every sentence to the limit of my ability to express a certain idea in the exact way I want to express it. Language is like this, mutable to personality and improbably capable. I believe in language more than I believe in anything else—that gets me into trouble more often than not. For example—people say “actions speak louder than words” so often that growing up I took it for granted and, thinking of myself as a person of above-average capability in this world, I didn’t ever think that, when faced with opportunities in which I had to make a thought or an intention into action, it would be so hard. 

I’m shy; I’ve never asked myself seriously not to be, so I continue to be. It’s really difficult for me to do things, though I intend things all the time. So I’m just saying all this because I love to write, but the best writing, the kind that arises out of some need on the part of the writer, the story that emerges because the writer absolutely needs it to exist…to write that story, it’s incredibly painful. I think that maybe to other people, by the evidence of how much I persist in making mistakes and bypassing correct decisions, it looks like maybe I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I do know; and I know that apathy concerning reforming myself is just another of my multitudinous faults. 

So what writing does for me is it allows me a very small outlet through which to make good out of my mistakes. Stories need to exist in the world—if I can write them despite being a subpar human—in fact, if I can write them off the energy that arises when I encounter and engage with my own failures and insecurities—then maybe my stories can help me learn how to be better. 

But I’m still in a mood about it. I still have second thoughts about completing the thesis because if I do it means other people get to read it. Are going to read it. Can I do that? Put my heart on the page that way and invite others in? That is not something I am accustomed to doing; so my heart’s a little rocky sometimes, despite being emotion liquefaction mostly. 

“He oft finds med’cine, who his griefe imparts” (Spenser)