2011......Anybody Home?

Am I the only one grateful to see the last of 2010? I myself can't personally complain, I mean, getting laid off with a whack of cash, and becoming debt free (but can it last? THAT is the $64,000 dollar question, Merv) into the bargain is hardly reason to gripe, to my way of thinking. Oh sure, I had a minor setback, a three week attack of nerves; of the, "What the fuck do I do NOW?" variety which fortunately passed when I went to the land of citrus and picked a bunch of oranges for breakfast. Amazing what fresh Vitamin C, sun and surf can do for your mood. Then I come back here to -7 degrees celsius and thought I was going to lose my mind again.

Yes, I think this last year sucked for a lot of people, to put not too fine a point on it. Marriage breakups, relationship breakups, and my God, the amount of deaths that friends of mine went through last year was horrendous. I counted myself lucky that the only thing I lost was my job. But you know, recessions do that, layoffs happen. It could have been far worse, I could have little or no money to survive on, and still had a debt load.

Right now, oddly enough, I am in Aurora, land of my youth, or at least the nether part of it. Am staying over at my brother's following my youngest nephew's eighth birthday. Because it's a school night, everyone is in bed by nine-thirty. So I followed suit, and fell asleep on the couch. Having a vain belief that I can cat-nap anywhere during anything, (and usually I can) I thought, oh well, I'll just be awake at six is all.

Ha.

I woke up at 2:04, suddenly seized by apparitions, and unlike the Ebenezer Scrooge kind, these were the post-November "What the fuck am I going to do with my life?" variety back with a vengeance. No real character to them, just greenish black bilious feelings of anxiety and panic. The ones that caused me to have so little sleep during the month of November and December. I don't know whether it's because I'm in an unfamiliar environment, or because the Bailey's went down the wrong way and is now acting as a insomniacal agent, or whether my subconscious is just a perverse fucker who likes to wait until my defenses are low before it strikes my most vulnerable fears, (that is to say, the fear of failure and dissolute poverty in a garrett) but I can say that it sucks large.

I'm pretty much sold on the idea of teaching in South Korea for a year or two. This too is a frightening concept. It means I'll have to give up my life here in Toronto, one I've worked quite hard to achieve, but for some reason, feels as though it has slipped away on me. I'm not quite certain how it happened, or what I did or didn't do to make it happen, but it feels as though I've left the party somehow and I wasn't even aware I was going. I got the apartment I wanted, had the life I thought I wanted, and although I was alone in it, it seemed fairly nearly ideal. Granted, I had a job that wasn't satisfying, but it was THERE, and it did carry me through ten years of fairly traumatic events. In many ways, it was the one stable thing I did have in my life, as people changed, left and died, I at least had that. Then that went, and it left me with some wherewithal, and although I'm not frittering it away, part of me feels as though it IS being frittered away, as I sit here, wondering what to do next...

Hence, the panic. The panic of indecision, plus the panic of knowing that I should be writing, but am not, and I'm not likely to get such a lot of free time to write again. The panic I should be working at anything so I'll have money. Then I panic again and think, "What if I want to go to South Korea and teach? What then? How can I do that if I'm working?" Or the thought, "Why South Korea? Yes, it's got money behind it, and you can travel, and the income tax is light, and you can come back after a year or two with some coin, but then what? You'll be forty-five and no further ahead than you were. What do you then? Who will you be then?"

I know I want to, have to write, and I wonder, is this is all a big feint to keep me from writing? Writing is hard by the way. It's frightening and it tears me up and freaks me out. I write letters, I write in my journal, I write on this blog, all of it done to keep me from attacking my fiction, because it's the fiction that's the terrifying stuff. This? This is nothing. Mental masturbation. Nothing will suffer because of it. It's the equivalent of chewing on a mental hangnail.

I have my characters who have patiently waited for me for TEN YEARS to finish their story, and they have achieved such a sheen in my mind's eye, they are so relentlessly solid and real to me, that I feel I've been hiding from them, like the dentist or a landlord. (For the record, I am on excellent terms with both my dentist and landlord.) I have over some three hundred pages of their story finished, (don't get your hopes up soon, it's a 600-700 page book) their deaths and their loves, and they still stand there, just staring and glaring at me. Brooke, with her Louise Brooks bob, rolling her eyes and impatiently lighting another endless cigarette, Ethan just shaking his head and sighing, and tiny, adorable, dangerous Quinn hollering at me to "shit or get off the pot". You think I'm crazy, don't you? Of course you do, and of course, in a way, I am. Every writer is, to a degree I think. It's a semi-sort of benign schizophrenia we practice.

You see, this is what happens when you write. You let these people into your life, and they end up RULING your life. In many ways, they become more real to you than a lot of people you know. They have to be, otherwise, how will you, or anybody, believe them? Much less believe IN them? Not that you know them any better than anybody else, just because you created them. Like anybody real, you have to discover them. It's just my luck, I've discovered that they're a dangerous, hot headed, furious bunch. No shrinking violets my lot, oh no, not them. Life has been a hell of a lot more cruel to them than it has been to me, and they let me know it in no uncertain terms. It's the heat of their unspoken anger I feel. Their need to have their stories told, and here I am, farting about, wasting my time doing nothing when I could have spent the last TWO MONTHS working exclusively on their stories. No wonder they're angry. I don't blame them, I've neglected them shamefully.


The funny thing was, life got in the way. Or rather, I felt it did, and let it. Damn. It's amazing the excuses you make to avoid the issues in your life, like your writing or getting a job and surviving. Like the excuses people make to avoid going to the gym. Now I have to try and do both now. Get my life in order and work on my book. I need to do the former for me, and the latter for them. My secret hope is that they will both turn out to be one and the same.

But then I look around my apartment with my painted walls and artwork, in this old apartment building with the woodburning fireplace, (MY FIREPLACE!) and I think, maybe I should. Maybe I should write, should stay just where I am, and desperately hope it will all work out. Perhaps the money will come through and I can stay where I am and finish their story and I can still have my lovely apartment where I feel at HOME for the first time in my adult life. Maybe I can have all that, and stay in and write stories and books and live a little comfortable life and grow old, with my hair gone white, and one day have interviewers in for tea while I sit there in my chair by the window and my grandfather's table, telling off-colour jokes in my eighties.

But then, a rather forceful but gentle voice inside me says, or rather feels, "No. This chapter is done. This isn't the real life you hoped for. You hoped for things from people who weren't really there, and misread them the entire time. You expected them to do things they couldn't, to save you from having to face yourself, when it's been for you to do all along. It's only this surface life that kept you content for awhile, but too much has changed. This isn't you any longer."

All of which just spins me into FITS. "Alright then, Wise-Guy, who the fuck am I then? And who am I supposed to be, if not this person living this life right now? Who's the alternative and what do they DO?"

Can I just tell you how frustrating realizations like these are? And how frightening it is when you're not even sure you can trust them? Am I fleeing this life because it's habit, and I've never settled down, or am I fleeing, escaping, leaving, because it's true and I haven't found what I'm looking for yet? I know the book is the one true thing I have in my life that's real, and maybe that's why I'm so daunted at finishing it. When I'm done that, what do I have left? You see, it's not the starting that's the problem, it's the finishing and the what's after that, that is driving me nuts. It's the looking for the rest of my life that scares me.

There is a part of me that wants this life I have now, but there is a part of me that knows I need to go out further and find something else. It isn't my book, since I know that will be done and won't be a part of what I'm looking for. That was started long ago, and may have been the hidden cache of an old life I needed to build, but didn't finish. Now I suspect I need to finish it before I can move on with this new life. Or move on into it.

I'm sorry if I'm blathering away self-indulgently, I know I am. You see, I always need to write things down before I can see if they're real or not. This, this is just ruminating. Some people see shrinks so that they can get themselves opened up to see what is going on inside them. I write everything down, and I don't believe I have any hidden corners that some dim light hasn't been shone into. Perhaps it's just a form of literary narcissism. Most likely that's it to a T. I'm being self-indulgent I know, but in a way, right now, it's necessary. There's a block there that's keeping me from moving forward, and I need to take it apart and look at it to see just WHY it's there, so I can keep on going forward. That I've had to move forward, I've never doubted. I just have to figure out HOW.

So, welcome, 2011. Ready or not, here I come.