On The Use Of Pain

To hell with zen and wandering around. Time still flies and nothing gets accomplished and here it is, nearly two weeks since vacation came to an end and I haven't even picked up the writing yet. Not to mention other, extremely important mundane tasks that we won't mention here.

And speaking of wandering around... since I gave myself the perfect seque away from what I wanted to write about, I guess I better take it. What do you do when LIFE pokes into your happy, sleepwalky routine and throws a lot of anguish and anxiety around? For instance, like now.

I should explain. I have a long history with an abusive parent who seesaws between repeated emotional stabbings and blithely muttering platitudes he thinks are glowing compliments but exist only to bolster his own sense as a good, long-suffering father. I have medicine that helps me survive the emotional stabbings, or at least limits my depths of rock-bottom despair and suicidal thoughts to 15-20 minutes of excruciating insanity followed by a long, albeit slow upswing back to rational thought. And, as life would have it...sorry, as LIFE would have it, this happens to be a period of prolonged nastiness wherein I'm feeling, most days, about as worthy and competent as those damn invisible leaf chewing caterpillars that destroy vegetable plants. In other words, not good. Really, really, not good. What to do, what to do...

I wish I was one of those people that could channel heartache into something useful. Like cleaning. Or any kind of work, really. Especially writing. If intrepid wizard Harry Dresden can use anger and sorrow as fuel for his magic, good grief, why can't I? If for no other reason than there will come a day I need to remember this emotion and use it in a story and I won't be able to! Memory's like that when it comes to trauma. It's hard to wring something of its essence when your mind has taken great pains to lock away, bury, and wipe clean the things that caused so much pain once upon a time.

I shy away from writing my feelings down, inking for posterity the hurt and terrible anger, the gnawing fear that skulks beneath, the helplessness and general vulnerability of a ridiculously flailing emotion wreckage that I so dearly want to deny I have ever sunk into becoming, for a time. Or that I can always see a ghost of that wreckage, lingering, waiting for the inevitable sequel.

Maybe, though, maybe pouring out what I don't want to be into someone else...

Part of my problem as a writer is that I don't want to do evil, terrible things to my characters. My life sucks and so I want their lives to work out, to at least have solutions that are only a tiny bit rocky and not rollercoaster-like draining. Lives that go somewhere, that aren't hopeless, that aren't victims of something bigger and larger. God, but it *hurts* to be a writer. And if it were only me that were hurting, it wouldn't be so bad...

But I *am* a writer. I can't write like I read or run to writing to be soothed or entertained. Writing is about truth and truth, though breathtaking, has sharp-sharp edges.

There's a famous adage for the writing life: kill your darlings. I would add, truth your roses with thorns. If you bleed, so will your readers. And if you have to bleed--for life is too often about bleeding--catching it upon a page is just as much an exorcism as crying can be a balm.

I know I'm off to take my own advice.