December 4th, already.
In September, I contemplated whether to participate in National Novel Writing Month in November. I skipped it last year, mostly because I was swamped with teaching work, but also because I felt tapped, and wasn’t at all sure what to write. With 200,000+ words written towards a memoir, and 50,000 words of random short stories and ramblings, I felt as if NaNoWriMo had, perhaps, lost its usefulness for me.
I decided to participate as a NaNoRebel and focus on setting a dedicated time to write throughout the week, with a specific goal to expand, cut, and rewrite as needed.
As often happens, I began strong and then things sort of fell apart. I buried myself in memoirs to get a sense of the different ways I could organize, ways I could weave personal experience with research and issues bigger than my personal story. Reading other memoirs wasn’t a bad thing to do, but it filled my head up with the words and experiences of others, and my own voice got stuck somewhere between my brain and the screen. It reminded me of grad school: researching for weeks and scrambling to write something, anything, to turn in by finals.
I naively thought my processing of my past experiences was done. I wrote 200,000 words. I’ve been to therapy, done EMDR. I have effective coping skills for dealing with triggers and activation. Yet, as I reread those 200,000 words that I wrote, I realized that the writing was distanced from the actual experience, and here I was rewriting it in scenes, trying to put my reader in the moment with me. This required tapping back into those memories, remembering how I felt, summoning the emotions back into my body.
I found myself crying, easily and frequently. Hypervigilance switched back on. Insomnia hit with a vengeance. I wanted to be around people, to feel connected, and yet needed to be alone so I could feel safe enough to let my vigilance relax.
And the ever-present question: what makes you think your story is so important?
I have a lot of thoughts on all of this, but I’m not able to sort them out at the moment.
The TL:DR version of all this is: writing is an embodied practice, not just an intellectual one. I know this, I believe this, yet I failed to account for it in my plans.
I’m a work-in-progress, just like my writing.
Here’s to carving out more time for writing in December, and to caring for my whole self while I do so.
Ink and Vein 