What I Believe

             I didn’t get a chance to write my journal pages this morning.  I woke up thinking about a scene that I had trouble with yesterday and figured I’d better get down on paper what came from my subconscious before it evaporated.  Usually in the mornings, I will get a cup of coffee and sit with a spiral notebook and just start writing.  I’ve done this morning journaling since I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way.  “Morning pages” she calls them. 

            The things I write in those pages are monotonous but sometimes enlightening.  One thing I try to do is to jot down my feelings at the moment, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual feelings.  That’s what I am, you know, a person with all those feelings.  The trouble with me is that a lot of times I can’t identify them.  I don’t have a lot of trouble understand what is going on with me physically; if my head hurts or my feet are cold, I know it.  But if my emotional feelings are hurt, I have the habit of denying them.  Sometimes, I hide from the idea that I feel disconnected from God.  Sometimes I hide from everything, isolate and zone out so much that I don’t know what’s going on.  It takes a lot of work to become self-aware.

            Lately, I’d say for nearly a month now, I have been writing daily planned to-do lists in my journals.  Over the weekend, I read about three weeks worth of posts and realized that my plans and intentions are being written, yet, I’m not acting on them.  I have been getting lost in the day, filling my time with writing on my novel, eating, and watching TV.  After reading those posts, I realized something. I have been adjusting to a new way of life and I’m not so sure of the way.

            Over the course of the month, I have had too many headaches, and a childish need for approval from too many people.  I have worried what people think of me.  I have isolated.  I have sat in front of my TV and munched on unhealthy snacks.  I have made plans to go to the library to write so I could be around people, to go to the recreation center to workout, to call friends and just have a long conversation, yet those things haven’t happened as much as I would like.  I believe this is called a codependent slip, indulging in unhealthy patterns as a way of coping with my present unknown.

            So yesterday in my journal, I decided to stop planning on things that I don’t seem to be doing anyway.  I decided to write some of my beliefs as I really know them.  Here’s what I wrote: I am a spiritual as well as a physical being. I believe in God, and I have doubts that Jesus is the only way to get to God.  I know that I can write and that it is a wonderful gift.  I believe that words are holy and powerful things.  I believe that I will be ok.

            Have a great day!

            Love,

            Karen

Danger Zones

“If you avoid what is dangerous, you avoid life.  If you throw yourself into a dangerous place without preparation, you devalue life.  Writing is one the crossroads where what is most disturbing can be explored and investigated without destroying yourself or others.  This is one of the highest purposes of the arts.” ~Bonnie Goldberg

            The above quote comes from the author of a writing companion book, Room to Write.  The page that I read today is something that a friend of mine and I spoke about a couple weeks ago—avoidance of imagination because I might fall off an emotional cliff in my imaginings.  I am afraid of what I might write.  

            I am working toward a Creative Writing certificate thought the MTSU Writers’ Loft.  Each trimester, I have a mentor whom I send three packets of original work, a book essay, and a letter specifying what I am having trouble with or want to know more about.  Charlotte is a wonderfully supportive mentor.  Sometimes, honestly, I think she meaningfully sandwiches her critiques between two good strong reinforcing statements so that I read you are a good writer/you need to ramp up the conflict/you are a good writer.  My last letter to Charlotte was after the conversation I had with one of my writing friends, so I asked my mentor to speak about overcoming fear.  She offered that writing feelings and images is a good way to get something of myself and into another “container.”

            I know where this fear of writing my feelings and images comes from.  After my father’s suicide, I wanted to write a story about a devil in a septic tank and how it enticed my dad to kill himself.  That was really how my mind reacted to his death.  I couldn’t believe that he would have made such a choice, even in the sickness of his depression.  So I invented the idea that a devil made him do it.  Then as I rubbed that story idea over the folds of my mind, imagining the whisperings and fear that my father must have heard and felt, I grew to think that the devil must have followed me home and had started whispering ungodly things to me. I thought I was going crazy.  So if I could scare myself with those thoughts, which even now makes my spine shiver, my stomach tighten-up, and my lips quiver, how will I ever not scare myself insane writing a book of fiction where my imagination is free to make up anything?

            This book suggests preparing myself with “some deep breathing or other centering activity [and] when [I’ve] finished draw a box or circle around the words to contain them.”  The above paragraph is my sincere but contained fear that I might go crazy writing.   So there! The next time I am afraid of writing conflict and tension, I will put it in a box.  I will contain it.

Karen Phillips

Loneliness

I quit my (sometimes part-time, sometimes full-time) part-time job last May after I had endured the indignity of pay cuts, the best boss I’d ever worked for fired, and finally my route being cut in half by the new supervisor.  For the last seven years, I had traveled all over Middle TN, parts of Kentucky, and North Alabama and worked among people that I liked and people that I didn’t like.  It was a good job while it lasted and I had a hard time making the decision to quit.  But I wanted to write. 

I had wanted to go to a creative writing certificate program I had found at Middle Tennessee State University for years.  I had put it off for so long because I thought I couldn’t afford it, or because my husband was out of work, or because I didn’t believe I had it in me to really do it.  Now, I took the plunge and signed up for a Fall trimester starting in September.  Over the summer, I worked around the house in the mornings and spent the afternoons developing character profiles and writing up note cards of ideas about the story I had in mind.  I enjoyed a sweet visit from a cousin.  I slept late and reveled in the idea that I could wake to my own internal clock.  I hired a tree surgeon to prune trees. I hired someone to build a retaining wall around my front massive flowerbed and filled it in with gravel.  I painted.  I cleaned.  And I found a writer’s group to go to right here in my home town.  I was in heaven. 

When September came, I learned that I needed to set a writing schedule for myself, so I started writing in the mornings as soon as I woke up.  I would write by hand on a legal pad and then input the scenes into the computer, stopping only to get a cup of coffee ever-so-often.  When I would look up, it would be late in the afternoon and I’d be starved.  I sustained that schedule for at least three months.  And you know what I found out?  Writing friction was damned hard on my mind.

Writing good fiction, I found, meant working with conflict and tension.  My husband would come home from work to find me either ecstatic that I had finished a scene or solemn and grumpy that I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say.  He would ask “are you sure you are happy writing?”  No, I wasn’t happy.  I was irritable.  I had sat all day writing or typing.  I had obsessed over describing how someone could enter a room or open a door.  I hadn’t talked to a soul in a week except him.  I was lonely.

Loneliness had always been my enemy.  Years ago after my first marriage ended, I was scared to death to be lonely.  Somehow, though, I endured that emotion until I made friends with it.  Hell, after a while, I loved being alone.  I lived in Rosenberg, TX at that time and would spend the summer nights in a hot little house with the window up listening to frogs and crickets outside while I wrote poems. 

Today, I decided to take a break and go outside.  There’s a little girl inside of me that needed to be listened to.  I had tried calling some friends, but they were busy.  I think they have paying jobs.  

It's February and the sun has been shinning all day.  I’ve been listening to my inner child.  It is a miracle.