Hangovers and Second Chances

I’m back in Durham, back at the school where I teach, and determined to continue writing every day this year, even if it’s just a five-minute poem or journal entry before bed. I am also determined to keep up my blog. My mind is filled foremost with how to teach children in the classroom, and translate my Montessori training to the program Seesaw. That my thoughts won't always be as clear as I'd like is a given. Part of what I am here to do, though, is to show up imperfectly and be proud of that. So here is some of what I’ve been thinking about since my last post.

Apartment gardening: planting lavender

(glove to keep soil out of an injury)(fork for lack of gardening tools)

There’s a certain empty feeling that carves my heart out every time I finish writing something, and the intensity of this sensation deepens in relation to the length of the work and duration of time I spent on it. I recently learned that this phenomenon is called book hangover. The same bittersweet ache drops in whether I come to the end of a book I wrote, or one someone else did. When I finished my novel back at the end of June, there were so many other intensely emotional experiences I was working through that the hangover feeling bled into the others. Perhaps that is why book hangover wasn't as jarring as usual: everything was jarring. As June made way for July, individual emotions became indistinguishable, until the dam of my storage capacities broke and flooded over all the land for about a week or so. It was terrifying, and necessary. Book hangover was there in the mix. I could taste it: heady floral notes, skimming just below the surface.

Top-secret sanctuary near my apartment (the reason I'm still here?)

How do book hangovers and emotional releases relate to going back to my teaching job? I have been thinking about my writing process these past few weeks that I have been back in the classroom. As I cleaned, organized, and occasionally sent for help in the removal of large bugs from corners of closets, I let my mind wander to how writing my most recent novel has been different from the other writing experiences I have had. Could it have also been less painful to finish because I am already writing the sequel, and didn’t have to undergo the true grieving process? Quite possibly. But I think it also has to do with the unshakeable faith I now have in my ability to write.

c. 2008 (last summer road trip before college began)

When I started college, ideas were still awake and flowing in my writer’s mind, but I almost immediately realized that I could not share them, because those stories buried inside of me were not ones anyone would want to hear. It became a non-issue overnight. I could not write from my heart. I would need to censor my words, so of course the writer in me turned her back and went into hibernation. Even if I had noticed this direct cause and effect at the time it was happening, there was nothing I could/would have done differently. I don’t have regrets, but I am grateful that I am now beginning to come out of that sleep.

This blog, this novel, and this life from here on out are second chances. Like Amelie Poulain, for too long I have glimpsed what I desire, and promptly run in the opposite direction, or disguised myself so heavily in an attempt to go unnoticed by whom or what I deeply wish to be acknowledged by. Like the glass man warned: my bones are not brittle, and I will not break.

Stream-of-conciousness though these musings may be, stay tuned for more in the near future. I am now taking an online creative writing course on Fiction and Fairytale, with Redbud Writing Project, and am sure it will lead to many interesting new modes of writing, hopefully each a bit more honest than the next.