Writing from the Deeper Self--compassion for your story

Two and a half hours later, and finally I understand why I was procrastinating writing the chapter synopses for The Blessings Ledger (see previous entry). For I have done a few more since then, and they are of some of the darkest times in my life. In order to even synopsize a chapter I haven't written but have indeed lived, I have to go back into that time and the feeling sense of the experience. I have to catch some details by the fast-disappearing tail. I have to find the story line...

And, I have to do all this while remembering that I already lived it. I survived it, I grew out of it; perhaps I even grew from it. In short, it's the same old challenge of being deeply compassionate for another's suffering, while not becoming so immersed in it that you begin to lose yourself. This is an ongoing practice for me--to not harden my heart but be willing to feel with another person's pain; and yet to remain in my own being, present to my own light, remembering that we all have our trials and our infinite being to bring us through.

What is different about this way of writing (and it comes up for many people) is that the one for whom I need to be both compassionate and distinct from is myself.

Here are two such synopses, below:


Chapter Five: Desperate for Home (Synopsis)
Nevertheless, I do not want another roommate. I don’t feel safe around other people, much less myself; and I’m still struggling within myself about my marriage ending. To seek someone I don’t know as a roommate just to help pay the rent would mean having to accept no longer being in a family, even a semblance of a family. I decide I’d rather run in place to try to make it work.
Still, I’m living in a large house I can’t afford, without furniture. It feels greatly like living in my parents’ home, trying to hold up what is clearly out to self-destruct. I seek out want ads for furniture, drive way downtown to buy a blue-and-white convertible couch for $25. When it’s set up in the living room, I sit on it as if trying to believe it’s a new beginning. A couch that can also be a bed can house company. Company makes a house a home. I begin to feel that my parents’ isolation is happening to me. My loneliness makes me ashamed.
After much delay, I finally fill out a do-it-yourself divorce form, staying up late at night finding the requisite information, having to account for the long stretch of my failed life as numbers, dates, and so on. I do it myself both to save money and so I don’t have to hire a lawyer and face my husband in a courtroom, with all that unsaid marital anger around money and possessions.
Finally I file the forms downtown, "divorced" is stamped on them before they are filed, and I walk out onto the street weeping. A kindly woman asks, "Are you okay?" Startled, I say, "I just got divorced." "Honey," she laughs, "we all get divorced. You’ll be fine." But I feel like the orphan I am.


Chapter Six: A Couch on the Street [Synopsis]
The time comes when I cannot run in place fast enough to make the rent. I have no choice but to give the landlord notice; but I have nowhere to go. I feel like I’m going to fall through the cracks in the culture, as my parents did. And the day comes when, having no idea where I will go, having lost everything, I put my lovingly gathered furniture out on the street to be picked up by Goodwill, even the blue-and-white-flowered convertible couch. But before the Goodwill truck can arrive, while I am still indoors, scavengers come and when I walk out on the street all the furniture is gone. There is no record of my life, here, or my attempts to live differently than my parents. I can sense the fall, ahead.

Granted that a synopsis is not the writing itself--what's missing are the subtle details, the movement towards something that is born from something else. But after writing the above synopses, I noticed that although my breathing was getting shallow as I reconnected with the image of my couch out on the street, there was also a voice inside me saying, "You aren't like that now." And there was also a realization that I could now see my own part in things during that time, which I could not at all see then. I felt at the mercy of my circumstances then, and had no awareness of how certain family patterns were repeating. Realizing this brings back into my current life, into the current moment, and all the changes that have taken place since that dark time from which I then believed I would never rise up again.

There is a saying, "Writers get to live twice--once during the experience itself, and again when they write about it." I have found that when I write deeply, with an insider's heart and the desire to see the truth, I do get to live twice. The second time, in reflection, I may not always see things I love about myself or that I loved living through; but I can see that looking, itself, brings blessings. It brings perspective, and hope, and compassion for the very humanness of the journey--a humanness that, in our own lives, we often try to hide, but that we look to writers and other artists to reveal to us, so we don't feel so alone.

Being a human being is both an amazing challenge and an amazing blessing. It's said that the chance of having a lifetime as yourself is so infinitesimal, and that if we but realized it we would be giving thanks every single moment. As I recomb my past in service of my book and book proposal, knowing that it all comes out in light at the end, I have to give thanks for having had this life this far--for trusting the human process enough to let shame go and give the whole of my story as a gift to my readers as well as myself. For it is out of this kind of unarticulated darkness that the light finds its reflective surface. We are given the power to transform our experiences into gold, through our writing. We are given the power to speak light.