MISSING THE TRAIN A WRITER LAMENTS

I tend to overshare on Facebook. I sometimes post about, AUTHENTIC feelings of insecurity, uncertainty, irritation, even envy. I find the manic posting of how great people's lives are, irksome in the extreme because it's a lie.  At least sometimes it has to be because no one's life is quite that fabulous all the time.

What is irksome as well is how many people encourage that kind of disingenuous sharing of fabulosity. By liking and commenting on someone's umpteenth status update about how happy and successful they are, they are only feeding a vain glorious monster.  

What to me is incredible is the self righteous lectures I get when I honestly share I am feeling angry about say a lame review of my book and want to punch the critic's lights out or give them a wedgie (at the very least).  I will let you in on a secret, about 90 percent of the time I am being ironic. What rational human being thinks that everyone is going to love everything about them or everything they do without exception?  None.  When I put myself or my work out there, I know I will attract a certain amount of derision.  But self righteousness makes me want to take up kravmaga and put smug types in a crippling headlock.

In a recent posting about a reader who gave my book a bad review I shared I wanted to smack him.  I got a number of lectures on my wall about how I should be more mature and not let it get to me and LEARN from it.  None of these people were writers mind you.  Most of my writer friends liked the posting, and one just gently advised not to read too many reviews good or bad.  

Let me describe what it is like being a writer—who is trying to make a living from their writing—not a hobby-- but approaching this as an actual calling.  It hurts. It hurts in my bones. I just finished my novel—350 pages—and now cannot seem to write anything else. But the ideas are abounding, but the idea of having to actually refine the ideas makes me want to take a nap.  

It took me eight years to finish this novel.  I am not quite sure how I did it.  I sent it off to my agent and immediately fell into a melancholy.  My friend, the author Chaiti Sen explained I was experiencing post partum depression.  She advised I don't fight it.  It is true that the novel in progress becomes like an appendage to a writer, and then when it's sent off for its first scrutiny it becomes a phantom limb.  You carry it around with you at parties and on the train and while you squeeze avocados in the grocery store to see if they are ripe. You constantly work on it in some way or another.  Everything you see, taste, smell, feel on your skin may somehow work its way into your daily pages.  Or it may not, but the very act of being alive while intensely working on a novel is somehow in its service.  You exist only to write this story.  It is easy to get lost this way but truly getting lost for some time is the only way to finish it and make it sing.  I am not allowed to get lost for too long and am learning to embrace that.

I have a teenager in my house who occasionally demands food and water and transportation to places of learning and gatherings.  He, more often than not has made these demands whilst I am in the middle (in my delusional estimation) of crafting the most perfect paragraph ever written in literary history.  To stop what I am doing at that moment to the novel hurts in ways I cannot even describe, but I am going to attempt to.  It's like when you just miss the last train out by mere seconds and now you will be stuck overnight in Grand Central, dozing and shivering on the cold marble floor watching a drunk couple sloppily make out for three hours (true story). The next day will be a wash because you have not slept and everything is thrown out of whack.  

Then I have an actual job to pay bills because the publishing world has been delinquent in sending me those fat checks I clearly deserve.  I teach English Lit and Composition at a local college.  Luckily I love my job—though adjuncts are never paid enough—and it is spiritually and intellectually stimulating, namely because my student body is so diverse and actually represents American society in all its variety.  Teaching—effectively teaching—requires preparedness and presence and patience.  It takes a great deal out of one as rewarding as it can be.
 I also love my kid (though he would disagree) but at first I lamented these interruptions. I kept telling myself, if only I could just run away and hide for a bit and just write and shut out the rest of the world. I would get done faster and I could just surrender to the story.  Only then will it be any good.  

But this is not my lot.  I have a full life, filled with obligations and intimacies that I have prioritised.  This means trade offs and the constant search for balance.  I am just praying that the story I wrote has been enriched by both the realities and vagaries of my life, not hindered by them.