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.