Disclaimer: (as usual) this post is chaotic. I got the ideas out and could have spent hours getting them better organized, but it’s not raining yet and I want to be outdoors.

If you are struggling to write your story, here’s an idea: take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. Scribble on the right hand side. That chaos is your story in embryo form. The problem is you think it’s your story.

Okay. Time to move forward. We’ll get back to your paper and scribble in a bit.

The day before I went into labor, I was short-tempered. My husband at the time suggested I try to enjoy the time we had since it would not be that quiet again for a while. I understood what he was saying, but my body was so uncomfortable I couldn’t settle in and enjoy the day. It was like I was a snow globe that had been shaken up and I couldn’t see myself until the snow settled. How can you relax if you don’t have a clear sense of who are you? I was a woman with a child inside—a child I had not met. A stranger was going to come out of me and be a human being I would lay down my life for if necessary. How could I relax and enjoy the day? I was chaos.

I feel this way in general as a person who needs to organize her thoughts and write in order to see the meaning in things. I often feel off balance, shaken up, irritable, not quite myself as I wait for the metaphorical snow to settle so I can see myself and the world clearly. The snow can settle on a day to day basis, but then there’s also the snow that doesn’t clear for years. Inside of me, generally is a version of the scribble that’s on your paper.

I felt like this for decades as I tried to write something that I could feel was inside of me, but no matter how many pages I wrote of stories and poems and personal narratives, it wasn’t the thing. The snow was still flying around the globe of me. I put pressure on myself to get this thing out of me. I went to graduate school for writing. I took the pressure off. I got a job doing phone work in a Silicon Valley office that was two steps above my idea of hell because I didn’t have the courage to step out into the world as “a writer” and wait tables or do whatever it took to support my “habit”, mostly because when I did briefly try that lifestyle, my mother cried and asked what was she supposed to tell her friends. If I’m really honest, I was the problem. I could have just done it, but I was too afraid the scribble wouldn’t add up to anything.

The me now would clearly fight a little harder. It’s hard to fight for the right to do something you’re not even sure you can do. It’s one reason I get so much joy out of being a writing coach because I 10000000% know I would not have regretted days spent earning little but writing lots, so I can yell at other people and tell them to JUST DO IT BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ANYWAY!

After my daughter left for college, I put the pressure on myself again to make sense of the scribble, and this time I went hardcore. I basically threw myself over a cliff and said I’m going to risk everything on my belief that I have a story that needs to come out. I packed my bags, went to write, and found the throwing myself over a cliff had not fixed that fact that I still didn’t know what my story was. I was in despair. All I wanted was to tell my story, and I could not find it.

That’s when the miracle happened. I said something deeply personally I never would have normally said to a person, and he said, “There’s your voice,” and it was like I’d gone to the chiropractor and had a major spinal adjustment. Holy Toledo! If it was okay for me to say what I’d said to him, I could say everything! Suddenly all the pieces started to line up. The snow had settled and I could see the big picture! I had something I wanted to show, something I wanted to prove!

On the right side of your paper write “One true thing” on the top and then draw a vertical line of bricks (or blank pages!) or vertebra. You can draw arrows leading from one to the other if that feels right. THIS LINE IS YOUR STORY!! Once you find the one true thing, you’ll feel the story align inside of you, if not completely, then at least the hint of a path. Come this way, the path beckons. Trust in the process. Listen to the voice. Write.

This stage makes me both joyful ( I have a purpose!) and irritable (Don’t bother me! I’m trying to balance a full glass of water!). This stage is FUN and sometimes anxiety-provoking. What if I lose the line of the story? What if this is all a waste of time? What if I don’t have anything important to say? My feeling about all that is stop it. Just do the work. You can’t control the outcome, but you can show up and do your work and say you tried.

I’ve been in that irritable, snow-globe stage for a few years now. I know I have a response or sequel to You Don’t Look Adopted in me, something I want to say in conjunction to what I said in that book, but I haven’t been able to find the line. This inability makes me almost frantic at times. It’s like working at Dairy Queen and having someone order a vanilla soft serve and, for the life of you, no matter how hard you pull on the handle, the fucking ice cream won’t come out!

I started attacking myself. This often seems like a good idea when the creative thing inside of you won’t show its face. I decided You Don’t Look Adopted was the problem, and I needed to tear it apart and fix it. I ordered a copy from Amazon, and two days later, I went at it. I posted a picture of two pages I had gone to town marking up on Facebook and Instagram. I wanted to make it official. See? I’m fixing this shit.

After about ten pages, I started to feel as if I was trying to run a race uphill dragging my car behind me. What was I doing?

Oh, no, I thought. Help. What am I going to do? I felt despair. If I couldn’t create anything new, and I couldn’t fix the old, what was I going to do with this wrong feeling inside of me?

Thank goodness for my Thursday night writing class. I told them about the rewrite, and their reactions were perfect. To summarize: Huh? Why tear apart something that had captured an experience? Why go backward? What exactly was wrong with that book, anyway?

This is why we have community. To help stabilize us and to reflect our best selves back to us.

As I listened to the writers talk about my book, I had a realization, and the snow settled and my spine fell into place. I will remember this moment for the rest of my life just as I will remember when my friend said, “That is your voice,” because it felt like the world as I knew it had just split open and I could see a whole new way of thinking, being, living.

What happened was that I had broken through the vertical line—the wall of I don’t/can’t pass this place—on the paper to new insight. As I thought about not being able to rewrite You Don’t Look Adopted, a thought came to me—it wasn’t a new thought, I’d had it before, but this time it felt like a new thought and made sense to me in a the facts line up kind of way. This time the thought was like my call to action or my thesis statement or my reason to go to battle. This time the thought cleared the snow and let me see what felt like the truth.

The line between chaos and insight is something I have to push against. It feels like the limit of reality or of what I am capable of doing. It feels like the physical block in me that had kept a baby from being born for 9 months until my body knew the baby was organized and developed enough to see the light. It feels like a thing I’m not allowed to do or think or say or be—so much so that sometimes I’m not even aware that it’s there. How can you know you can have a thought when you haven’t realized you don’t let yourself think it?!

The line could also be called “fear” or “resistance”. I could spend my entire life writing the scribble part of my story, and I have done this! For years and years. I chased and chased connecting thoughts and memories as if I did it long enough, something would click and it would all make sense. At least I was still alive while having these same old thought. Insight is a form of change, and if change were easy, it would be called something else, like bubble gum.

I think many, many writers spend their lives narrating the scribble, too afraid to stop and ask questions and to listen for the one true thing they are afraid to say. Having control can feel like a good idea, even if it means you’re the guy on the bar stool telling the same fucking story for ten years because you’re too afraid to say something new or true or real.

I think growing up and knowing there was a narrative under the one that I heard around me trained me to listen very, very carefully for words that would help me begin to see the story under the story, the real story.

The real story feels like bones, like skeleton. Everything else depends on it.

If you are finding yourself stuck in your story, go to Camp Honest and try these prompts:

What I really want to tell you is…

What I’m not telling you is…

What you don’t understand about me is…

The End