- Stephen Chbosky, The
Perks of Being a Wallflower
I've been meaning to sit down and write something about how it's good to be able to laugh at yourself, and I'm glad that I have that ability (as evidenced by the fact that my current profile picture on Facebook is a REALLY unflattering picture of me laughing HYSTERICALLY, which makes me snicker every time I see it).
I've been meaning to write about how I discovered Douglas Coupland by reading on Wikipedia how Panic! at the Disco named the song "I Write Sins Not Tragedies"* in reference to part of Shampoo Planet when Tyler writes each of his friends' fatal flaws on a dollar bill and says, "What I write are not sins; I write tragedies." (Shampoo Planet is a pretty awesome book, by the way. As are The Gum Thief and Hey, Nostradamus!) I wanted to write about how if anyone was going to write my fatal flaw on a dollar bill, they'd need a whole stack. One for fear and one for the way I hold myself back and one for how I miss the obvious and one for how I have to have the last word. (And then that was going to segue into having the last word in an argument with someone who would never read the post anyway, necessitated by the fact that I missed the obvious over the course of many months.)
But I'm not going to write either of those posts.
Because the post I need to write is the one I don't want to write. The one I don't want to think about....
I have worked on my novel for 61 consecutive days. Each day, I have written at least a few sentences, sometimes whole scenes, once an entire chapter. I have never written for so many days in a row before. I don't know how long I will keep the streak up, just that I feel compelled to do it, especially as I add more days to the count.
It's awesome in about nine hundred different ways (and it's gotten me more psyched about reading -- just finished book # 45 of 2012 last night -- and about writing in general, about this book specifically). But the thing is, I'm writing a fictionalized account of my mother's death. And the huge downside, the part I haven't mentioned to anyone who has said, "Good job!" when I've mentioned the streak, is that it means I have to hang out in this very painful little corner inside myself while I'm doing all this writing. Some days, I feel absolutely eviscerated by it. It puts thoughts of my mother front and center, every day. (Of course I thought of her, missed her, every day anyway. But some days those thoughts weren't quite at the center of everything, weren't hogging the focus of both my conscious and subconscious. Like they are now.)
Twenty-three years ago yesterday, something horrible happened. Something that broke part of me in ways that can never be unbroken. Something that makes missing my mom a much more complicated and painful thing. Something that made me think, for a good chunk of my life, that I was unlovable and unloved. (Sometimes, this time of year, I still wonder about that. I guess it's part of the brokenness. I am thankful that there are people in my life who remind me -- often -- that I am loved, even at my most broken.)
I don't want to begrudge anyone a happy new year, a chance at a new beginning. It's just that, for me, it never feels that way. I'm not sure it ever will.
For me, right now, I have to take my narrator's advice and just focus on this moment, this breath, this instant. ...Which means it's time to eat the frozen hors d'oeuvres, per Mom's annual tradition.
* Oddly, I discovered my favorite book -- Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold -- thanks to a post by Kevin Griffin of Better Than Ezra on his tour blog years ago. Years later, he made another recommendation via Twitter (City of Thieves by David Benioff) which was also really awesome. Lesson: Musicians make good book recommendations. (Or, Kevin Griffin and Brendon Urie do.)
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