The only way out is through

At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

The last few days have been challenging on the work front. I've reached the point where it's time to get going on the writing and I'm really not sure I know what my story is. I have no outline, as my thesis committee has more or less forbidden me to use one (it's for my creative good, to free up my mind from all the structure I like to impose on it). All I have as a result is a pile of personal documents -- letters, journals, school records, etc. -- and a lot of questions.

I've been gathering and sifting through these artifacts all summer, partly in an attempt to organize all the debris, partly to determine what can be thrown away. A lot of this stuff was boxed up, occupying unnecessary space in our closets, so it needed to be dealt with. I think I've finally streamlined everything as of yesterday, so the logistical work is done. Which means I can no longer avoid the really tough part: the emotional excavation of the memories in those boxes, memories I've blocked out for a long time.

I unearthed something in one document yesterday that brought back a lot of feelings, so many that I had trouble disentangling them from one another. Anger, shame, fear, hope, confusion, gratitude, grief -- I imagine there was more in there, but I couldn't stay with the memory long enough to identify anything further. It was too overwhelming.

I'm sure I'm afraid of the memory because there are truths about myself and others wrapped up in it, truths I didn't want to see before because they would cause me pain. Now that it's been so long, bringing those truths to the surface is going to be much harder work. And at the end, I get pain as my reward. Why am I doing this?

Good question.

The writing of this work plays some essential role and fulfills some crucial need in this whole process, I know, so maybe I'll have an answer eight months from now. That's the deadline if I want to graduate this spring.

In a way, I've been working on the project itself for much longer than just my recent years at Little U. on the Prairie. Elements of the subject matter have shown up time and again in creative essays I've deliberately tried to make about something else! Apparently this isn't unusual either -- one of my professors commented in a workshop that for a while, every single piece she wrote was about her dead mother. "You'll get a lot of mileage out of this," she said, about the subject dogging me. I wasn't sure at the time whether to feel good about that or taken aback by it. Does anyone really want to look at his or her personal griefs as something to "get mileage" from?

Anyway ...

I finished another reading this week -- a collection of short stories by Madeleine Thien called Simple Recipes. Many of the stories were published in literary journals before becoming part of the collection, and interestingly, now that they're side by side, the repetition of one theme among them is very noticeable. Specifically, each story seems to deal with a child's experience of being caught between parents whose relationship is slowly unraveling. The cause of that dissolution changes from one story to the next, and the actual conflict doesn't always take center stage, but the author does seem to circle the theme over and over as if she's searching for some way of understanding it. I can't say it makes for great variety in a short story collection, but the gaze trained on that repeated idea is compelling.

Speaking of which, it's time I turned my eye back on my work. To the dig, then ...