why I keep writing.

Two years after my divorce was finalized by the court, I found myself embroiled in constant battles with my children’s father. Time had not yet healed the wounds our marriage had created, and we were stuck in a pattern of negative communication despite how badly both of us wished for a less adversarial–I would even venture to say friendly–relationship. During one particularly tense meeting with a coparenting counselor who seemed at a loss for how to help us, my children’s father revealed one of the reasons why he was so angry with me: he had found my blog, or one of our mutual friends shared it with him, and he had read it, and I had said some things that he felt were untrue or unfair. As defensive as I wanted to be, I tried putting myself into his shoes: if the roles were reversed, could I honestly say I wouldn’t feel the same? I went home that night and reread some of my entries. Though I had asked a trustworthy editor to vet my writing to ensure I wasn’t vomiting emotion all over the internet before I published it, I saw that some of the ways in which I characterized him, whether they were true for me or not, were hurtful. More importantly, if and when our children are old enough to read what I have written, intentionally or accidentally, some of the things I had said were not things I would want them to read about their father.

In a fit of rage and shame, I took down the blog. After all, I rationalized with myself, I hadn’t written anything worth publishing in over a year. Was it that big of a deal? I didn’t even know if I had more than a dozen readers in the webosphere. It’s not like my blog would be missed, and anyway, if I ever started writing again, I could just start over. For several months, I forgot I’d even had a blog. Yet as the stretches of time between blowups between me and my children’s father grew, as my need to complain about the challenges of co-parenting after divorce became less urgent, I began to feel a profound sense of longing. Instead of becoming less anxious, I found myself becoming increasingly and confusingly so. Where was this all coming from? When I finally stopped doing things to distract myself from my feelings, when I really paused and asked myself, What’s right about what I’m feeling right now?, the answer was simple: I needed to be writing.

I tried picking up journaling again, believing briefly my mother’s reasoning that some things should be kept private. If anyone was reading my blog, did they need to be? What was the purpose of making such public proclamations? Why did I need to “put it all out there for anyone to read?” my mother had asked. The answer to this was more challenging to articulate. Because it held me accountable. (This, for her, was a ridiculous reason–the only person I needed to be accountable to was myself–and my partner and my children.) Because people enjoy my writing. (This, for her, who had only ever encountered my writing during my teenage years, when everything terrible I ever said about anyone was directed at and about her, was impossible to believe.) Because I believe sharing is important. (That’s what your friends are for, she would say.) Because I want to. (This, for my mother, who so rarely did anything because she wanted to but almost always out of a hyperbolic sense of obligation to do for others, was the most unacceptable answer of all–or at least, it might have been, in my skewed perception of her.) In reality, my mother never did anything she didn’t want to do–but she had never asked herself what she would want to do for herself, if she gave herself that freedom.

I had asked myself what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do was write. For as long as I can remember, all I ever wanted to do was be a Writer. In elementary school, I won an award for a story I had written. I peered up in awe at every author I met and I thought–that is what I’m going to be when I grow up. A Published Author. I wrote prolifically from 4th grade through college, filling a storage trunk full of notebooks of personal rants and poems, fictional and autobiographical stories, musings, questions, quotes, and souvenirs from my experiences that I was sure would come in handy one day when I wrote my first novel. I moved the storage trunk from my parent’s home to college, into my first off-campus apartment, back home, then to the East coast and back to the Midwest and back to the East coast before upgrading the storage trunk to a weatherproof Plano tackle box after an unfortunate mildew situation that threatened to destroy my posterity.

That Plano box now sits in the attic, collecting dust the same way the storage trunk collected the clothes I had shed at the end of each day. Time and again, I open it and attempt to read what I’d written in the hopes that it would provide some source material for a story, usually giving up after an hour or two, bored by the repetitiveness and uselessness of anything I’d found so compelling at the time I wrote it. I didn’t become the Writer I’d always thought I would be, shying away from any real attempt to do so after a college professor, a Published Author himself, shamelessly complained one day in class that the royalties he’d made from his book barely paid his electric bill, much less provided the Lavish Lifestyle he’d thought he would have as a Published Author. Instead, he was a non-tenure track professor at a small Jesuit university with a mostly unremarkable English department.

I could go on about all the other ways I chickened out: I changed my mind last minute about attending Boston College for a Masters in English when I failed to be accepted into any PhD programs; instead, opting for a high school teaching degree; I stopped writing after college when my first attempt at self-publishing brought criticism from my family; I stopped writing after my divorce when I feared (illogically) it might land me in contempt of court.

Thanks to the Connecticut Writing Project – Fairfield and Dr. Bryan Ripley Crandall himself–and several colleagues and new friends who spent a summer fellowship on the campus of Fairfield University, as well as my loving and supportive partner, my beautiful friends who I helped to create We Rise Storytelling Collective, and my own tenacious desire to create, I’m making yet another comeback. I hope you benefit from it, and I’m trying not to give a fuck if you don’t.