incalculably diffusive

I’m sitting here on the couch watching Charmed in a pink crop top and pj bottoms (currently modeling all my fashion choices on Alyssa Milano circa 1999) and my bed and the dragon novel are calling my name but I’m playing with book stuff instead.

The past week, the structure of the book has coalesced in notes on my phone and I’ve felt an energy and an urgency around writing: it’s like I finally saw a good portion of the bridge laid out in front of me instead of constantly feeling like I was building it as I go.

And, after spending the last hour putting pieces together, outlining, and annotating, I feel deflated and discouraged. I look at my current word count and wonder how I’ll ever make it to my goal. What if the story I have inside is so much smaller than I thought? How do I end it when the end is me, and I’m still so messy? How can I write a book about coming home to myself when that homecoming is a life-long process?

I google my own dissertation and estimate the word count based off pages: okay. I’ve put this many words down on paper before, I can do this again, no matter if it feels like wandering through a dark forest sometimes.

The words will come, I tell myself. It will sort itself out.

I believe this, and still: I can’t shake the mopes. I want to see it already done. I am the girl who looks up spoilers so I can start processing any fictional loss ahead of time. Of course I want to flip to the back to read the last paragraph of my own story, or at least this next chapter, ahead of time.

I want to know how it ends.

____

Last week was a good week. I made a decision that is good and true for me, and I felt free and glad and powerful. I got curious about my anxiety and lethargy at work instead of (only) panicky (there was still plenty of panic) and unearthed some insights that made my mouth round in wonder. I wrote down things that I am letting go, I wrote down things that I am inviting in. I flung my arms out on my therapist’s couch and cried, “I feel great!”

I was sailing.

The next night, I was just using all my tools to stay afloat.

“I am my own adventure” I wrote down on my quote board last week. It felt true then, in a giddy, joyful, powerful way.

It feels true now, too, but in a “gingerly climbing the mountain, oh-god-careful-watch-that-rockslide” way.

Last week, I was finding a rhythm. I thought I might know how it ends.

___

My favorite paragraph in the world is the ending of a novel: Middlemarch.* I cannot read it without crying (and you should absolutely not read it unless you have the read all the chapters preceding, but a total of zero (0) people have taken me up on that so here it is) and one of the things I love the most about it is that it’s not really an ending at all.

Dorothea had to learn that no one else can be our adventure, that no one else can be our ending — and that it’s not really the ending of our lives that counts, it’s all the middle-ness (see what George Eliot did there), the tedium, the tiny choices, the small kindnesses and unkindnesses, the ways we abandon and come home to ourselves every day.

Sometimes love isn’t a sonnet or grand gesture, it’s a silent prayer at 2am. Sometimes the heroine’s journey isn’t a fist pump in the air, it’s the work of minute-by-minute self-regulation (drink water/eat a snack/breathe/grounding exercises/repeat). Sometimes, getting stronger looks like getting softer.

I am my own adventure. And I have no idea how it ends.

*A woman once told me that the Gospel of John contains all that is necessary for this life and the next and that is precisely how I feel about Middlemarch. Never ask me for a favorite novel recommendation because it will always and only ever be this 800+ page tome of perfection.