The kitchen table looks like it was hit by a Mail truck! Almost 600 pieces of paper are in stacks of various sizes associated into topics ... being suddenly single and surviving a divorce, Non-Profit leadership, life on Tybee Island, Spirituality and finding love again while starting over.
I sigh.
There's another 600 pages of this stuff that hasn't been printed yet for me to wade through.
Last week I spoke with a Publisher and she expressed interest in books on four of the topics. Can you give me the first three chapters of each?" she asked. "Next week?"
Every single day for the past three years I've written what was going on in my life and put it out there. My life is not-so-neatly stacked in four piles.
Picking up something I wrote two years ago, I look at how long it is. I read it and the words drip in darkness. Behind the words I can see me fighting through sadness. I put it back in its stack.
It's tough work to examine your life like this.
It's even harder to share it.
Grabbing another stack I read, "I am contemplating having a party and setting my Christmas Tree on fire ... there's nothing like little pieces of sadness hanging from the branches of a broken family tree."
I walk outside.
Goddess raises her head from sleeping and watches me. Out of old habits, she seems concerned.
A cold ocean wind whips through the trees. Brown leaves are strewn across the deck. There is no sunshine today.
Things I wrote three years ago are long, brooding paragraphs. What I wrote yesterday was lighthearted fun. A lot happened in-between.
I don't know how I would have gotten through without "writing it out," as my son Jeremy puts it. It was my way of letting all of the sadness and hurt out. It's easier to blog than it is to publish a book and I was fighting for survival and didn't have the time anyway.
And the daily writing became more akin to praying.
Then I was shocked to learn that people actually read it every day. A lot took the time to let me know. More than I thought told me they were experiencing similar things but just didn't know how to express it. These were the ones who encouraged me to keep doing it ... for them.
I'm busy remaking my life these days. Aside from my kids and where I live, everything has changed! Everything is a lot.
Staring at the stacks describing who I was, I whisper a prayer for who I am.
