Staying in the room

Earlier this year I booked into a writing retreat in the hope it would get me writing again, a wonderful tool to give me incentive to finish my story. 

I also joined a writing group to get me out of the house and my head. I hoped interacting with other writers would motivate me to stay in the room/game/arena. Side note: It works. I have played around the edges of writing my story on and off and I use writing prompts and workshops to try and get the juices flowing. I still haven’t been able to get back to my regular daily writing routine all year. 

This week I had an email from the writing retreat leader. I was asked for an elevator pitch and five hundred words to share with ‘THE OTHERS.’

I may have stopped breathing. Then like a demented Monty Python skit my brain ran off screaming, ‘RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!’ 

Cancelling immediately sounded like a great idea. 

The next day, when I finally stopped bargaining with myself, I wrote an email, to the retreat leader, confessing my freaked out response and to say I had paid the deposit. 

I didn’t cancel.

I know I need to ‘stay in the room’ whatever it looks like. My writing mentor, Jen Storer, talks about the importance of staying in the room and I feel it deep in my bones.

 It has been a difficult year. Honestly, it’s been a difficult few years. Since Covid really.

It seems like a lot of people used the isolation to write heaps of books and produce amazing artwork. People started online businesses and made millions of dollars. Taylor Swift wrote and recorded an entire album with friends, remotely, on line. Good on ya.

I did less than usual. I felt like I was sitting on my hands during all the lockdowns. I didn’t, not really, it just felt that way because I wasn’t writing. 

I taught myself to crochet and made a huge blanket. I had to use my hands. Apparently I knit or crochet or sew stuff by hand when my brain wants to run away. It grounds me and keeps me present. This is not a conscious decision and it’s taken me a very long time to recognise the pattern. (see what I did there? 😉)

Writing seems to be the area that suffers when I am hit with too many emotions. When my son was diagnosed with cancer, and all throughout his treatment, I knitted. I could have written a novel with all the waiting we did. Instead, I knitted scarves and hats.  

I’d love to be a person who can absorb it all and express it through their writing. It seems, when my emotions take a hit, I function differently. My flight response hits ‘freeze’ and I shut down. Thinking about ‘it’ is overwhelming so my brain protects me by shutting down. Then my hands take over to keep me busy and to calm my racing mind. It sounds like a choice, it looks like a choice; it’s not a choice. 

My mum died recently and although death is to be expected when someone is ninety-one, I didn’t expect to feel the way I do. I knew I’d be sad, who wouldn’t be? I was surprised by the feelings that have been coming up. It was like the last few difficult years were wiped away and I now remembered all the good stuff. Like snippets, not just her life, my father’s too. It’s like he came back after being dead for over twenty years. 

Grief is strange. It’s not just feeling sad, although there are often tears. Sometimes it’s the opposite. It’s remembering mum laughing at some of the silly stuff we did as a family. Mum and dad were a lot of fun and we laughed a lot of the time.

The writer in me would like to capture it all, to write it down as it occurs to me, to somehow distance myself and observe.

Instinctively I know distancing myself, from the feelings, would be stepping away from the reality of life without my mum and dad. This week I’ve missed them both. Father’s Day is tomorrow and I’ve had a horrible virus for the last ten days and you always miss your mum more when you’re sick don’t you?

C.S. Lewis wrote a book about his grief when his wife died. ‘A grief observed’ one of the most helpful books I’ve ever read in my life. I wish I could be like him and stand apart and record the feelings. Unfortunately I’m not C.S.Lewis. If I was, my story would be finished and it would be on a best seller list. In my dreams.

I know, from experience, grief is not something that goes away after a while and then we get back to our ‘normal’ lives. It’s more like our hearts slowly enlarge and grow big enough to hold it all. 

Thank you for reading.