Rewriting the Story

After a harrowing weekend of incredible music, I am off on my next adventure: several days of solo-soul-searching in the mountains. Um, wait. Folk Fest was harrowing? Yes. It was.

For four days on seven stages, I was surrounded by people living their dreams, at a time in my life where I feel creatively quadriplegic. It was excruciating. The high point was what I'm now calling Self-Doubt Saturday. The day where I woke up with this thought in my head: "I'll never make it. What's the point?" And that thought had little barbs on it or something because it stuck there for the rest of the day, making it impossible to enjoy the music, and it eventually led to some casual crying by the river.

Self-Doubt Saturday came on the heels of me finishing a rather fluffy bestseller called Julie & Julia, a memoir of a woman stuck in a dead-end secretary job who decides to do all 524 recipes from Julia Child's Mastering The Art Of French Cooking in one year. And she blogs about it and ends up in the New York Times and then she has a bestseller.

Rather than feeling buoyed by the fact that if this woman can do it then so can I, I hated her and decided that I will never be happy and I'll be stuck in this angsty purgatory of confusion and blocked creativity forever and ever and ever.

After this uplifting decision, a million singers and musicians blasting their raw talent at me through mega-watt speakers was like a sonic slap to the face.

And then. Then! I met up with the two women with whom I might be starting an HPV support thingy. And we talked about rewriting our stories. Rewriting the poor-me-with-HPV victim stories into stories where diagnosis and surgery are catalysts for change in our lives. The points at which we become the people we've always wanted to be.

I realized I've been trying to rewrite my reality, but in a way that's not grounded in faith and intuition – the stuff I've been evangelizing about for four months. I've been frustrated and thrashing and desperate, clinging on to anything I can see that might possibly be the answer. Go back to Paris! Write a novel! Become an organic farmer! I'll probably start buying shit off the Shopping Channel soon.

Right now, I'm a little tired of pretending everything's gonna be alright. Right now, this is my story: I am afraid. Deeply, deeply afraid. I am afraid that Depression will return and ruin my life like it was ruined before. I'm afraid I'll be stuck doing work I don't want to do in order to pay my bills. Or that I'll keep doing creative work that doesn't pay. Which keeps me in this purgatory state of not feeling like a true artist. I'm afraid that my relationship isn't right for me, but that if I leave it, I'm leaving one of the only truly supportive people I've ever known. I'm afraid that I'm sabotaging myself, only I don't know what parts are sabotage and what parts are not. I'm afraid I'll never feel as alive and as vibrant and as much myself as I felt in Paris. I'm afraid that was "it" and "it" is over.

And...I'm driving off by myself into the forest.

Don't worry. I'm not going to poetically and pathetically end it all or anything. I just want to quit trying so hard to solve everything. I want to stop. Re-boot. Start from scratch. Get quiet enough that I can hear. Get empty enough that I can refill. Go far enough into the wilderness that I can find myself again. I'll let you know how it goes.