Let’s start with the obvious; I’ve not been active here lately. There have been a variety of reasons for this, but taking the time to try and begin processing a significant paradigm shift in my life has been an important and necessary first step on the road to recovery. In the time of my absence, I have done little to create as my mind, when left to wander its varied and sometimes unpleasant halls, finds its way into ruminating over past situations and conversations. How they went wrong, how they could have gone right, what could’ve been said, what shouldn’t have been said. A swirling kaleidoscope of hypotheticals and regret. Even as I write this I find it difficult to focus on the intended theme of the piece.
I was genuinely afraid that I might have lost the ability to get lost in writing. Every time I found myself in front of a keyboard, the words and stories were blocked by trains of thought brought on by a Dark not dissimilar to the one described in my story, Roadside Attraction. This Dark stymied my creative muscles from flexing for the better part of 3 months until I read about my story. A friend of mine asked if they could use my current situation as the basis for a short film. I, of course, gave permission and thought nothing of it beyond that. Then I read the script. Though, not a one to one recreation, seeing near-identical facsimiles of conversations I had been part of put to paper by someone else unlodged something in the creative dam the Dark had constructed.
Stories can be a way of providing context to the various situations we come to encounter along our way. Unbeknownst to me, I had performed this loose contextualization for myself. I had begun work on a story that was about the thing I feared most happening months before it began to set upon me. I’m currently revising it, but the general theme and character motivations hold true enough that I find it equally eerie and therapeutic to read through. Upon starting Local Brew I had no clue how close I would brush to the subject of divorce, but in the process of editing, I’m finding that I’m chipping away at the Dark. If you care to take a read to gather a clearer picture of what I’m talking about you can click the link to the story above.
Humanity will always need stories to balance out the seemingly random cruelty life doles out. The need for symmetry and resolution is baked into all of us and sometimes reality won’t show us the climactic moment of our third act the way that we would like, leaving us confused and feeling alone. Stephen King is one of the best selling authors of our time, love, or hate his style. He tends to center his stories around the more personal journeys of a few characters, even when they are backdropped by incredible and epic struggles. One of the greatest modern horror filmmakers, Ari Aster, used Midsommar to dramatize the overwhelming hurt he was experiencing through a break up of his own.
When in the middle of a storm it can feel overwhelming and unending. The roar of wind and rain punctuated by the unfettered crack of thunder put on an incredible display of chaos beyond our hope to control. As children, the dark under our bed and the deep of the sea offer untold horrors that stretch beyond our grasp of sanity. Then we learn how to swim. The storm passes and the air smells clean once more. The lights turn on and the only monster awaiting us under the bed is a pair of socks long forgotten. In this stage of my life, the hurt felt unfathomable. Life overwhelmed me with a cosmically large situation that I struggled to define or understand. Reading a story, though, turned the unknowable terror of hurt and heartbreak into a graspable moment.
As a reader, I realized that divorce is not the end of my life. As a writer, I’m learning to take back the creative spark for my own and use it to tame the fears that run wild through my head. I find myself, once more, longing to plumb the depths of imagination after allowing a story to touch on something that felt far too close for comfort. Some days are better than others, but through it all, I'm now finding my footing in the uneasy ascent. I let a story break into the places I was afraid to go and it shone a light onto the monster under my bed. Turns out it was a little more than an old pair of socks, but there were far fewer teeth than I had feared and the dam is beginning to crack.
"Stories should have the suffering, not people." ~ David Lynch
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