Touching grass

On feeling better, and a revelation about harm

If you haven’t noticed from the rather glum themes of my posts this summer, I’ve been having a tough time. But since I last posted, I have, I hope, knock on wood, emerged from a long and terrible funk.

Part of the reason I’ve avoided (to my own detriment) calling home to family and friends more often these past few months, I’ve realized, is that I dreaded having absolutely nothing to update them about. We still have no news on the house, no idea of our move in date (though that’s of course a bright, happy light in the near distance, guiding Lynette and me into this fall). What’s much worse is I have no new job prospects and have had—until now!!—no new or at all satisfying ways to answer “How’s the book going?”

The thing with writing a researched memoir, I’ve had to learn the hard way, is that I am very much still in it, still living the life I’m trying to cram into a tidy narrative arc, still trying to heal from and process a childhood and family life I’m attempting to make sense of in a way that will help me and other people. I just turned in the latest draft of my proposal to my agent—what is, I hope, one of my last drafts—after months of staring at 20 different unorganized Google docs. Turns out I wasn’t so much dealing with depression and writer’s block as I was wrestling with a gigantic emotional block, one that’s become clear in countless proposal drafts over the years.