The Tin Man and Little Sausage — Chapter 1—or The Book I Drove Across the Country Not to Write

Prologue

I wonder if sometimes a hen gets desperate to lay her egg before it has hardened. I wonder if she ever goes to her bedding and pushes until her eyes cross.

I wonder what she does when nothing comes out but maybe a little fart. (Do chickens fart? If not, what a loss. How else do they make each other laugh?) Does she despair? Does she wonder what her purpose is? Does she wonder how she is to spend the rest of her day living as the hen that did not lay an egg? What actually is she supposed to do? Go outside and scratch in the dirt and eat bugs? How will she feel about herself when she tries to fall asleep that night? Will tomorrow be more of the same? Pushing and pushing and nothing and then back to the dirt and the bugs?

It’s the strangest thing to walk around with the deep urge to create but to have nothing that feels satisfying emerge. It’s like a soft-serve machine watching itself be created and feeling so excited to squirt out chocolate and vanilla and other flavors that will feel so good to get out and delight others and then, the machine gets to witness its handle being pulled and both feel and see that nothing emerges. Maybe a little air. Big deal. Air. It’s a fart without gas. Who but trees and plants get laughs or praise for making air?

Does the soft serve machine want to spend the rest of its life as the thing that didn’t serve?

I don’t think so.

Chapter One

The book I drove across the country not to write was supposed to be called You Don’t Look Adopted, Ten Years Later. I wrote 64,099 words in five months trying to find a reason for this story to live. At one point, my best and most helpful reader, HBL, wrote to me, I was thinking this morning about your writing, and I think that when you are confident in your direction you are succinct and clear in your writing, but when you are unsure you tend to use a lot of words. When you wrote YDLA, you were clear and concise. What he didn’t have to say was, You’re not there yet with this one. We both knew a bunch of loosely drawn circles when we saw them.

HBL was the one who told me That’s your voice, that morning ten years ago when I stood in the middle of the wintery road in Martha’s Vineyard, half hoping to be hit by a truck. I’d been trying and trying to write You Don’t Look Adopted, and that morning I gave up. I stood in the middle of the desolate road, texting him all the reasons I couldn’t write my story. He changed my life by hearing my voice in what felt like complete defeat to me. I hadn’t yet known that vulnerability could be a powerful tool in my writing (and life). I didn’t yet know that the less I hid my vulnerable thoughts, the more truthful my writing would be and the more it would flow from source, moving ever forward to something larger than itself, the consciousness of the reader.

I had thought my vulnerability was my problem and therefore something to circle around. I didn’t know the vulnerable soft animal of my body was the story. I didn’t know it was the point. I didn’t know my story, and I, truly had permission to be the in the world. I didn’t know that all we had to do was show up.