How to Not Write a Book in Six Months or How to Shed an Adoption Narrative Instead of Write It

My East Coast adventure is coming to a close. As soon as the roads are plowed, I’ll be heading back to California.

Much to my surprise, instead of writing a book while I was here, I found a way into the vast field of myself. I learned that the left brain’s need to ABC things and to timeline the shit out of my life had become a prison of I have to tell myself and you what happened because I don’t (want to) exist in the now, and that one way to slip into the pure potential of present-moment right brain is to relax my body and lean into wonder.

I feel I’ve gone in a full circle back to some time shortly after my birth when, my self tells me, I shot out of my body in response to my nervous system’s overwhelming response to mother loss, and I have lived slightly outside it ever since. During these six months, and maybe even during the previous year, I have been creeping back home into the skin that defines the boundaries of me, into the body that for so long felt like a land meant for someone else and now feels like a me I have not much met, a reunion that feels full of respect, promise, and shy curiosity.

This morning, I went to open the document I’ve been working on all this time, My Chrysalis Year, and I realized I’d thrown it away by mistake the day before when I was cleaning up my desktop. I had about four seconds of panic as I thought 60,000 words! and then I had the feeling that a giant tail had just fallen off my backside. I started to Google how to retrieve a Word Doc, but I felt like I was trying to pull on dirty clothes.

Those words were used up, a voice said to me. I dare you not to retrieve them. I sat with the lightness of not dragging the tale of 60,000 words behind me as I mentally packed up to go. It felt so good.

When I wrote You Don’t Look Adopted, I had felt like I was playing with knives when I wrote. It was hard work, and it was sexy and fun and dangerous. I did not feel those things these past six months. It was more like trying to chew gum I’d chewed the day before. I kept at it, trying to find the flavor, but it was gone.

If I were to place a bet, I’d wager good money that I’ll write about all of this in some way or another in the next handful of years because that’s what my brain is wired to do and it’s one way I have of loving the world. But what I know is that right now I’m happy to set the notion of book aside in order to focus on the miracle that I found permission to prioritize and learn the language of my body. I get to bend down like a mother and put my ear to its mouth. I get to listen to it instead of focusing so damn hard on beating it into shape and focusing on the noise (whose voices even are these?) that is my mind.

Here, then, are the ten steps you can take if you would also like to spend six months not writing a book.

1.     Use the same words you’ve been using for much of your life, in basically the same order. Get bored and quit.

2.     Think the same thoughts you’ve been thinking for much of your life. Get bored and quit.

3.     Be writing instead of living. Get bored and quit.

4.     Go outside and fall in love with trees.

5.     Mistakenly (?) erase the 60,000 plus words you used the six months to write and be unable to care enough to retrieve them.

6.     See that words can be a path instead of a book and can magic-bridge-Indiana-Jones you from one state of being to another.

7.     Learn that while words can help you articulate love, you can’t experience it if you haven’t dived headfirst into your body. The body doesn’t need to write. It wants to play or rest.

8.     Care more about being than doing.

9.     Believe that not only snakes shed their old selves.

10.  Dare to put more importance on your breath than your thoughts.