Defeating the Demons of Doubt

A new friend sent me this email yesterday: "I know self-doubt comes to all writers, even successful ones like yourself. When those doubts come, what do you tell yourself?"

My first thought was: Hmmm. What DO I tell myself? Because right now I'm experiencing a level of self-doubt more intense than anything I've had in my previous forty years as a published children's book writer. I'm totally consumed with self-doubt! I'm paralyzed with self-doubt! I haven't written anything since a major rejection in January, weeping, wailing, and wallowing in self-doubt!

It is time for some stern self-talk.

But what am I supposed to say, given that my past platitudes don't seem to be working for me any longer? The chief platitude is that, when it comes to writing, and to life in general, it's the journey that matters. It's not reaching the dreamed-of destination of publication, but the joy in the writing itself: the process, not the product. It was so easy for me to say this when I was getting published with relative ease. Now that (to speak with frightening frankness) I'm not sure if I'll ever be published again, my glib assurances that publication isn't what matters, oh no, it's WRITING that matters, ring a bit hollow. 

For to be a WRITER, in almost every case, is to yearn for a READER, for that deep and beautiful form of human connection. To be an ACTOR is to yearn for an AUDIENCE. Few actors would be satisfied with delivering even the most heart-wrenching rendition of Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy merely to themselves in the bathroom mirror. Artists, musicians, chefs... all crave to share their creations with others,  and to have those creations appreciated by others. We just do.

So we start to doubt that this is ever going to happen. What if we NEVER get published? Or get published and our beloved book is a DUD? Or get published ONCE and never again? What if, what if, WHAT IF?

Huh, Claudia? What do you have to say NOW to your no longer smugly confident self?

Deep breath. Deep breath. Deep breath.

Okay.

1. It is impossible to know whether we will ever be published, or (if published) well reviewed and showered with accolades. As physicist Neils Bohr famously quipped, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." We simply can't know this. It isn't ours to know. Stories abound of hugely successful books that were rejected many times before receiving an offer, or largely ignored after publication only to achieve posthumous glory. WE SIMPLY CAN'T KNOW.

2. But we CAN know with absolute certainty that NO unwritten book can EVER be published or indeed ever shared with any reader anywhere.

3. Publication comes in many forms. So actually, my first point, as written, is untrue. Today in the age of the internet, self-publication is increasingly respected and rewarding. Indeed, I'm self-publishing this blog post and expect to get a couple hundred readers as a result - a couple hundred other human beings who will read and ponder these words and perhaps draw benefit from them and maybe cherish them forever! Smaller publishers based outside of New York often lavish love  - and significant promotion - on their authors. I have one friend who has joyously published all her DOZENS of books with small publishers she finds through a modest amount of online research. I am pondering writing more poetry and trying to publish some of it, where publication will mean having the poems appear in a tiny publication read by hardly anybody and paying nothing whatsoever, but this will still please me enormously. There are so many different ways of being published. 

4. Finally, well, finally, the platitude I rejected above is, in the end, as true as anything else I've said here. If writing brings you joy, just DO IT. I miss writing. I miss it intensely. I miss lying on the couch with my mug of Swiss Miss hot chocolate beside me, scribbling lines on a blank page of narrow-ruled paper with my Pilot fine-tipped pen. I miss that little glow of satisfaction when I complete a page, or one single poem to share with a few friends. The fact is that I happen to love being a writer, which I realize more keenly now that I'm not letting myself be one. 

It might have been otherwise. I might have realized that I didn't miss writing, that the agony and ecstasy of it was too hard on my heart, and I would have a much happier life without the rollercoaster of emotions that comes with being a creator - and in particular, a creator who longs to share her creations with the wider world. If you are doubting whether you want to continue writing, or painting, or making music, those are doubts worth weighing. No one has to be a writer or an artist of any kind. We can walk away at any time (and then walk back at any time).  One friend did so happily, decades ago, saying she was tired of being "daunted, taunted, and haunted" by unpublished manuscripts. She hasn't had a moment of regret. 

So: doubt can be an enemy, but it can also be a friend. 

Which one it is can be up to us.

Two-Thirds of the Way to One Hundred

Seven years ago, on August 21, 2014, my 60th birthday, I wrote a blog post trumpeting the curtain's rise on what I was calling Act III of my life. The timing was partly reflective of my recent retirement from almost a quarter of a century of teaching in the University of Colorado Philosophy Department as a tenured professor. It was also partly reflective of the milestone birthday, though my husband always maintained that our cultural fixation on birthdays ending in zero was purely a fetish owed to Base Ten math. 

That post now seems. . . quaint to me. The woman who wrote it was so sure that Act III of her life was going to bring with it wondrous adventures, now that the main tasks of those middle-years of her life were accomplished. Little did she know that she would return to significant child-rearing responsibilities for her two little granddaughters following her son's bitter divorce, or that she would face the anguish of a family member's entanglement in the cruelty of the American criminal justice system, or that she would bury her husband after his heartbreaking decline from advanced Parkinson's. 

Well, I can't say that Act III was boring! Though even as I write this, it occurs to me that I do find the genre of survival stories to be downright dull, with their predictable parade of disaster after disaster that the hero must confront single-handedly: fire, flood, tornado, volcano, mudslide, etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. I did bore myself with the same litany of miseries over and over again. 

Yesterday was another milestone birthday, at least in my reckoning. I'm now 67, or two-thirds of the way to 100. I can't figure out if THIS is where Act III is REALLY beginning, with all the intense drama of the past seven years just the finale of Act II. Or were the last seven years a very compressed Act III, with the curtain now rising on Act IV? Or I am entering some kind of Epilogue, which will include all the subsequent, quietly happy events of the main character's life, deemed less worthy of staging for their absence of conflict and drama? 

Or maybe... and I like this idea... maybe after seven years of a survival story, my least favorite genre (well, second only to horror), it's time to switch metaphors, and indeed to switch genres altogether. My favorite genre of film is what I call "Middle-Aged Women Following Their Dreams and Finding Themselves, Preferably in a Foreign Country." My favorite film ever, which I practically know by heart, is Nora Ephron's Julie and Julia. Julia Child finding her true calling in Paris! I also adore Enchanted April. Downtrodden English ladies escaping from their dreary lives to a villa in Italy!

I recently mentioned to a friend how I envy people who walk away from their lives and start a whole new life somewhere else. "That's my favorite genre of book!" she exclaimed. She obligingly sent me a list of titles, and so far I've read Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach, A Year by the Sea by Joan Anderson, The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg, and My (Part-Time) Paris Life by Lisa Anselmo. 

Maybe, at two-thirds of the way to one hundred, I'm going to stop thinking of my life as a three-act play, with all that emoting in front of the footlights. I'm also going to allow myself to hope that my life stops being a survival story. Maybe I'll think of it as an example of my now-favorite genre of fiction (only real life this time!): the story of a woman heading off to Paris... or Croatia... or Latvia... or somewhere she hasn't even thought of yet, having poignant and delicious experiences of a form she can't yet fully anticipate... 

Maybe I'll think of it as the story of a woman delighting in expecting the unexpected.... 

A Final Farewell

My two sons and I set off on a pilgrimage last weekend to my late husband's most sacred spot on this earth: Arapaho Ridge in the Troublesome area of the Routt National Forest, here in Colorado. 

This is where we had family backpacking trips when the boys were growing up. This is the land he fought to protect from motorized recreation that would erode habitat, terrorize wildlife, and desecrate silence. This is the place we chose as the resting place for his ashes.

It was NOT easy to get there. As we drove up I-70 on Friday evening to make our way to the hotel in Kremling where we were to spend the night, heavy rain west of the twin tunnels closed the east-bound lanes of the highway; fortunately, we were heading west. But the driving conditions were definitely treacherous. Then, at an early breakfast the next morning, my truckdriver son, Christopher, checked road conditions and found that our intended route to the forest was closed from mudslides caused by the overnight storm. We would have to make a much longer approach to our destination: thank goodness we learned this before we made an already long drive in what would have turned out to be the wrong direction.

Once we reached the turn-off to access National Forest land, we had at least a half hour of rattling along on a dirt road, and then a daunting climb on the VERY narrow, VERY steep, and VERY rutted road up to Arapaho Ridge. I don't think we could have made it in my little Honda Fit, or for that matter, in any vehicle whatsoever with me at the wheel. But Christopher ably managed the trek in his Ford F-150 truck.

And then we were there.

It was so still and peaceful and beautiful, the weather in the upper 50s, the sunshine bright, memories blurring our eyes with tears.

The sign prohibiting motorbikes, one of his environmentalist legacies, was still where he had placed it well over a decade ago!

We walked into a grove of evergreen trees, searching for the right spot, and we agreed on this one, beneath the sheltering branches of a welcoming tree.

Christopher, Gregory, and I held hands as we said a prayer of gratitude for our life with him, and for our continuing life with each other, and we cried, and it was all exactly as I think he would have wanted it to be. 

My boys, who sometimes balk at family photos, let me take this one, which made me realize how much they are no longer boys, but full-grown men. Looking at it, I'm overwhelmed by how much I love them, and how much Rich loved them, and how much they loved him.

I don't know where I want my ashes to be placed at the end of my days. There is no place I love the way he loved this one. I've never cared much about where what's left of me ends up; I just want to live on in the hearts of those who love me. But taking Rich's remains to his beloved mountains felt so right and so perfect.

My favorite picture from the morning is this one, of Christopher walking into the distance on the trail his father so loved, after we said our heartfelt final farewell.