Directions

It is 2:30 am and I am wide awake. Frodo woke me up an hour ago. He kept whining to go downstairs. I tried to ignore it, but finally padded down the stairs with him to go outside. He looked confused as he looked at his water bowl. I said, “Drink Frodo... now go outside.” The wind was howling as I opened the door.

Frodo looked at me again. I pointed. He followed my finger and went outside.

We came back upstairs and I tried in vain to go back to sleep. My brain wouldn’t turn off. I am a bit frustrated with a work issue that I need to just let go. It really has no purpose other than to cause me annoyance. Do we suffer because we can’t let things go? Perhaps. Maybe I’ll just turn my annoyance into a fiction story or a character (that is always the risk you run with pissing off a writer).

I spent last night listening to a podcast on the controversy surrounding the book “American Dirt” on Latino USA on NPR. I think the dialogue is important. Yet, similar to my work issue, I am letting it go because I have to. My own book is what’s important to me right now you see.

Maybe that’s what is vexing me. 

Maybe my anxiety over my book is what is really in the back of my mind, my decade long labor of blood, sweat and tears. What if no one wants my book? What if no one wants me?

Hmmmm. 

You see, I just want my stories out there, and they are. But my book, a novella memoir, is a whole collection, rather than pieces. It is a portrait of me. It is me. I am multitudes or contain them as Whitman once said: Jenny, JEM, Jua and Juanita. I am all of those narrators and all of my names. 

I am my stories. 

In the end, maybe I just need to come from a place of gratitude, for how privileged I am that I’m a writer, and that I get to write at all. I need to have a mantra: if you write stories, they will eventually be read, by someone. 

For now, I’m following my own directions and just padding down a path. Where it leads, I don’t know, but I’m on it.