I’ve fallen off on writing. so much happening– but I don’t want to spin out of control, out of any semblance of self-knowledge, once again. I need to keep tabs. but I’m *happy* now. I feel so well– in motion and at ease. I’ve let up. keeping expectations small and realistic and entirely achievable seems to help, to work. a low, bright horizon, shining back warmly over me, every day.
sometimes, from time to time, there are dark bits, banks of cloud shadow that drift through and cover me– for a time. momentarily. last night a brief one, reflecting on how my story, and stories like my story, where there are no tidy, all-things-working-out-with-a-hollywood-happy-ending endings, never get told– and I felt frustrated and dark.
but these stories are the ones that go on. this is the story I live. in a world where people’s actions and reasons for acting are questionable and often not fully pardonable, though we must pardon them. maybe the actions even defy ethics we’ve been taught to uphold, to live by.
perhaps we don’t always know ourselves. I would like to see this kind of story told. not cast in the shape of tragic self-destruction, but rather represented as… a version, a view of how we live.
my story, as I interpret it, fails to get told unless I tell it. and I do, sporadically. of course *my* story is surely swathed in self-involvement, quite possibly self-delusion. but what if I’m not entirely deluded? what if mine is a perfectly valid way of seeing, and showing, events and people and choices? complex and difficult, many-dimensioned and often even unconscious. should this story never get told? and why would that be?
well, for me, for fear of harming others by telling a “story” which inevitably involves them though they have no say in what I write and may indeed object to it. how could my story not involve people? otherwise it’s poetry– or something– what I end up writing, mostly. there you go.
nonfiction’s hard. the kind of critique that gets levelled in workshop? “why should I care about this?” I know– lorrie moore has been there before. if I could only spoof it and bypass feeling it. but it taps doubt. self-involvement is the sin by which contemporary memoirs are condemned, in legion. so I hesitate to add to that morass, being most thoroughly self-involved, as you see. quelle dilemme– a writer afraid to write.
then again, it doesn’t really seem to stop me.