The Stories You Tell Yourself

Since my father died in early March, my writing has gone from a fairly steady stream to mostly drought with an an occasional faucet drip. I’ve told myself this is okay. It’s hard to write when your mind is fogged in by grief–hard to focus on anything. And when my attention wasn’t focused on my own personal loss, the onslaught of news–particularly the kidnapping and forced disappearance of people off our city streets and reports of humanitarian aid being blocked for the sick and starving in Gaza–has generated a lot of tears, but not too many new words.

Still, like the trouper I am, I’ve kept at it, sitting down at the prescribed moments in my schedule to write, but mostly using the time to send things to journals, which involves some occasional tweaking, but mostly feels like dropping in on my work for a brief visit, rather than living with it.

However, yesterday I received a gift that might have shifted things.

If you subscribe to Lori Snyder’s Substack, Splendid Mola, you, too, can receive a 5-minute Writers Happiness Exercise delivered to your inbox every Tuesday. This one invited people to “Set the Thermostat for your Heart” by reframing negative stories into positive ones. We were asked to take 30 seconds to focus on one thing that was important in our lives–which could be writing or could be something else, whatever resonated most at the moment. The next step was to take 3 minutes to brainstorm success stories about what was working well, or–in my case, and perhaps many other people’s cases–what had worked well in the past, even if it wasn’t working well now.

So I chose writing, and this is what I wrote for my brainstorm:

• Regular times with my words

• Lots of publications

• Having the drive to finish and keep going

• Belief that it mattered

• Spiritual uplift and “oomph”

• Wow moments

The final step in the process (1.5 minutes) was to whittle these moments into a one-sentence success story that you can keep telling yourself. Mine was: People care about my message. Lori suggested setting reminders to tell yourself this success story at least once a day, if not more.

But before I even needed to do that, I immediately got the inspiration to pick up with a YA manuscript I’d abandoned after 10,000 words about a neurodiverse middle school girl whose only friend, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, suddenly disappears. Interestingly enough, about an hour after the euphoric high of squeezing out two more pages and the thrill of congratulating myself for inserting new life into what I felt had been a dead project, I started to feel like crap–teary, angry, unfocused. I knew that part of the reason I hadn’t gone back to the book was that I hadn’t yet formulated exactly what had happened to the disappeared girl and her family, and consistently reading real accounts on what happened to similar people for research had become too paralyzing to dive into. But even though I wasn’t writing that part of the book in the smidgeon I drafted yesterday, I realized that being that deep into my words again had brought me to the spiky edge of feelings I might prefer to sidestep. No wonder I’d been playing the avoidance game.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

What I hope will keep me going this time is that little success story sentence–People care about my message–instead of the story I’ve told myself for the last three months, which is, I’m not writing because I’m grieving. Of course I’m still grieving, but the major fog has cleared. And while I still want to honor the truth of the “not writing/grieving story,” it can’t be the final chapter in the book of my life. There’s never been a more important time to believe in happy endings.