This post over at The Rumpus came to me less than a year ago
at a time when I had almost given up on a dream, no, THE dream, and since then
I have constantly returned to it to anchor me through the massive waves of
doubts and indecision that almost always
seem to accompany any ambitious pursuit. It is thanks to this piece that I have
come to name that, which has troubled me on so many sleepless nights. That
relentless, almost maddening, internal plea to create, to fashion something out
of the tangled mess that my thoughts always seem to be in, that, which Cheryl
Strayed (the person behind the Dear Sugar columns) refers to here as the second
heart.
I sat like that too.
Thinking of only one thing. One thing that was actually two things pressed
together, like the back-to-back quotes on my chalkboard: how much I missed my
mother and how the only way I could bear to live without her was to write a
book. My book. The one that I’d known was in me
since way before I knew people like me could have books inside of them. The one
I felt pulsing in my chest like a second heart, formless and unimaginable until
my mother died, and there it was, the plot revealed, the story I couldn’t live
without telling. My debut.
Sure it was several months in the making, but just recently,
after much time spent traipsing between being overwhelmed with zeal and being
paralyzed with fear, I finally got myself to sit still, pen touching paper, in
what I can only hope to be the first steps in a dance that will be carried on
to great length, with deep thought and candidness of feeling. My every stroke keeping in time with the
second heart and its beating.
The fear still persists though, presenting itself in short
bouts of doubt and writer’s envy, things that can, and had in the past, all too
easily stopped me on my tracks. But
there is no escaping the second heart, as Ms. Strayed clearly points out –
there is no other way but to meet its call with courage, willingness to put in
work, and complete surrender.
But I was wrong. The second heart
inside me beat ever stronger, but nothing miraculously became a book. As my 30th
birthday approached, I realized that if I truly wanted to write the story I had
to tell, I would have to gather everything within me to make it happen. I would
have to sit and think of only one thing longer and harder than I thought
possible. I would have to suffer. By which I mean work.
At the time, I believed that I’d
wasted my twenties by not having come out of them with a finished book and I
bitterly lambasted myself for that. I thought a lot of the same things about
myself that you do, Elissa Bassist. That I was lazy and lame. That even though
I had the story in me, I didn’t have it in me to see it to fruition, to
actually get it out of my body and onto the page, to write, as you say, with
“intelligence and heart and lengthiness.” But I’d finally reached a point where
the prospect of not writing a book was more awful than the one of writing a
book that sucked. And so at last, I got to serious work on the book.
I’d finally been able
to give it because I’d let go of all the grandiose ideas I’d once had about
myself and my writing—so talented! so young!
I’d stopped being grandiose. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute
only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest.
Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very
possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely no-where-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences
book. It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the
work I needed to do.
My work is far from complete, and I know that for as long as it takes to finish my book I may also have to keep on returning to this post, if only to soothe me, shake me, remind me. In that same vein, I share this with everyone, regardless of whether it is writing he/she seeks to do or something else, but who like me also happens to be plagued by the urgings of a second heart.
