The Challenge

I’m frustrated and have been in a horrible mood for the past forty-eight hours, all due to some silly writing challenge. NaNoWriMo. I keep trying to tell myself that it doesn’t really mean much of anything to me, but that’s not the truth. It does mean something, and it’s not silly. I scoff and degrade it in my mind because it IS important.  It means breaking down a barrier that I’ve contended with during the entirety of my writing “life”; I start something, I am excited about it, but that excitement quickly wanes. I abandon the project in the search for the next new thought.

I fix things other people cannot and finish things and tidy up loose ends in all other aspects of my life, but when it comes to the thing that I’ve always enjoyed doing—the thing I’ve always wanted to take more seriously—the place in my life where I WANT to grow… I cannot seem to break that barrier.

It’s not that I can’t keep up with the word count—I know that the word count can be a big issue to many others, but the word count part of this is fine for me. If I have an idea and a direction, I can write until the cows come home. I don’t anguish like some others do; I don’t have to struggle for hours over a paragraph or a sentence. The problem is that I’m doing nothing but writing crap. I look at it, and it’s just crap, and even though I try to push through it and tell myself that it’s supposed to be crap, that it’s supposed to be a shell of story, that I’m supposed to go back and edit and revise and that this is all part of the PROCESS…I get frustrated and angry and I stew over it. I’m to the point that I lay on the couch of the evenings with a deep scowl on my face and my arms crossed over my chest, and the boys look at me with the question “If it makes you this angry, why are you even doing this?” hanging in their eyes.

It makes me feel like some tragic, brooding artist cliché, and this pisses me off even more because I don’t like that cliché. I think you can be happy and content and craft something wonderful at the same time. I think you have to be a good storyteller, a good listener, a good observer; not mentally unstable or tortured or lost.

My husband says things that he considers to be supportive, like “Just keep going with it honey, and see where it takes you,” and “It’s okay if you don’t finish, no one EXPECTS you to finish,” and this leaves me even more frustrated. It’s not his fault that he doesn’t have the right words to support me in this endeavor—this is not his goal, this is not his forte. He doesn’t understand what would make me feel better, and I don’t think that there’s much that could be said to make me feel better. I think to myself that I would feel better if I could dedicate more time in the day to the endeavor, but in the same minute I know that this is not the truth—I would just spend more of my day feeling like this.

I lay in bed with the thoughts spinning around my head so fast that I cannot even grab one to pick it out of the mix and examine it up close. I feel the frustration in this writing challenge spinning out into other areas of my life, and the question “What am I doing?” no longer applies to the writing challenge, but to my life overall, as the negative thoughts grow out of proportion and sneak their way into other parts of my brain.

Then, out of all of this, my great-grandmother’s voice comes into my head, clear and strong. You don’t know this, but I am writing about her, in a roundabout way. The way I envision her would be a better description, I suppose. This somehow conjures her, and she is speaking in my mind—in the middle of the night—telling me things that soothe me, then telling me that it wouldn’t be worth it if it wasn’t hard. That nothing in the world that is easy is really worth anything at all. It comforts me to hear her again—I can almost smell her—and I know that what I hear is the actual truth, the main point, and finally, I can turn over and fall asleep.