On Writing and Rejection and Writing Again

Memoir Series

Photo by Jonathan Wilk

It starts with a sentence, usually while I am in the shower or driving or washing the dishes, or doing some other everyday task that requires little of my conscious attention. It grabs me (the sentence) and triggers an emotional response that then elicits a litany of sentences and thoughts and paragraphs that go in a direction or different directions depending on how self-critical or controlling I find myself to be.

I think to myself, “I should go type this out” or, in my worse moments, “What the fuck is wrong with me that I have not yet written a book?”, and then it all stops as depression and inertia set in, once again prompting in me the thought that I am a failure at writing, at being an adult, at life, at all of it.

I started reading at a young age and found a secret hiding place for myself within the pages of whatever story was engaging me at the time. I voraciously read anything and everything I could get my hands on from fiction to biographies to autobiographies to the Encyclopedias that lined our shelves. I whiled away much of my free time as a child and teen between the bindings lost in worlds that were either much better than the one I was living or much different.

The content really did not matter to me, I loved it all, devouring books in a matter of days or a single day at times, constantly seeking more. My younger sister often begging me to put it down and play with her as I would say, “One more page,” and then sneakily read another chapter before putting it down and running outside.

I was eight the first time someone noticed my writing. Our third-grade assignment was to write a poem. I wrote about the rain, a thunderstorm to be more specific, I was terrified of them at the time. My teacher and my mother thought my little poem was very good and submitted it to Highlights Magazine. Do you remember Highlights? It was filled with content only for children and had a section of writings submitted by children.

The rejection letter came in the mail (or maybe there was not a letter at all, I can’t really remember). I do remember scanning each new one that came in for a time looking for my poem. It was never there.

I tried not to care. I was warned again and again that it was highly unlikely it would be accepted by my mom, my teacher, the submission guidelines in the magazine, by everyone. I had steeled myself not to care. Of course, I cared. I was eight.

I pretended not to care.

In fifth grade, my reading teacher was big on writing and let us know that we’d be reading books and writing short stories throughout the year. I was both nervous and excited. I submitted my first story and it was decided that I should be bumped up to sixth grade reading. Sixth-grade reading was terrible for me. I was in a classroom filled with kids I did not know well at all who were all preparing to leave elementary school behind. The work was also much easier than the work in the fifth-grade class. I was not at all challenged there and my mother wanted to send me back to the fifth-grade reading class, but my ego could not handle that idea so I stayed in sixth, feeling awkward and apart.

Fifteen years later I would run into my fifth-grade reading teacher. She was now teaching at the junior high (middle school in contemporary terms), and I was there with The Imagination Theater Company, a touring educational theater company that did shows on substance abuse prevention, child sexual abuse prevention, and conflict resolution. I was the moderator for the substance abuse prevention program, acted in the sexual abuse prevention plays, was program director for the conflict resolution program, and directed some of the plays.

“Are you still doing your writing?” she excitedly asked me after the program.

“No, I am an actor,” I replied feeling confused and even dismissed as clearly, I was there as a performer not understanding at the time that I could even identify as both a performer and a writer. Digging back into my memory of that moment now I am realizing I felt really upset that she referenced my writing in a way that made no sense at all at the time, like really upset, like, “Can’t you see I am an actor now! Why you gotta bring up writing to me?!?!”

I was working three jobs at the time, always running behind financially and in other ways, stretched so thin I often felt like I would break. How on Earth could I fit writing into the reality I was living that barely offered me enough sleep? Plus, who said I even wanted to write? WHO!?!? Yeah, my anger was unearthed, she’d drawn my attention to something I was not ready to explore.

In the last semester of my junior year in high school, I took a creative writing class. With the exception of a sci-fi story I wrote in seventh-grade English class, my writing up until that point mostly consisted of book reports and other nonfiction-type writing assignments, and I was very excited about this creative writing class, plus it was taught by a beloved teacher in my high school. I got an A on my first assignment which was to write a very short story (five pages or so) about something sad. My submission was complete and total fiction about the kidnapping of a five-year-old girl. Everything else I would write in that class was pulled from my own experience.

The first full-length story I wrote for the class or ever, actually, was about my stepfather and the abuse I had experienced from him. Although I fictionalized it for the class changing all of the names and a bit of the details, the bulk of it was my version of events as they happened.

I got a B.

The grade felt like an extension of the abuse. I asked for some feedback and my teacher’s main criticism was that he found it unbelievable that the mother character would just sit there and allow the abuse to happen without stepping in. I was furious to the point of tears as I explained to him that the story was based on what I had just lived through (what I had barely survived). He had been gone for just a couple of months from our home at that point, and we were just expected to go along, my sister and I, as if he had never been there, as if he and his torture of me had not dominated the last six years of my life

“I still can’t imagine she just sat there and did nothing,” he replied.

Again I was being failed by an adult in my life. No adult wanted to see it, not while it was happening and not afterward. I had a friend tell me when we were Freshmen that if I ever told her another story like the one I had just told her about what was happening in my home that she’d be calling child protective services. That scared me and I just never told her anything else.

I think this was the moment that I gave up a bit (or a lot) as a writer. I had shared my most vulnerable self, my pain, some of my darkest moments in this life, and I had been rejected. It wasn’t the B so much, it was his disbelief in my truth. I stayed in the class, my writing continued to improve. I say this based on the A grade I ended up with, but I don’t really know that my writing improved nor do I remember learning much about the process of writing in that class. The teacher often said how much he hated giving A grades, and for me, like so many of us, learning was not a priority for me, getting good grades was. It was the emphasis and still is in our current education system and way of life. Produce and be rewarded.

Writing as an enjoyable and creative pursuit receded and was replaced by writing as a way to achieve. I wrote many papers throughout college, none of them from my heart or soul, with the exception of one class and one teacher. It was a communications class at Columbia College. He drew forth in all of us an emotional response to life and embraced each of our lived experiences as fact, never questioning the validity of our stories, only encouraging us to tell our stories more fully and with more depth.

I, however, was fully intent on acting as my path and saw the writing I did in that class while rewarding and the connections with the other students there meaningful, as a means to completing my required general courses for my degree.

A decade passed with acting at the fore, and then on a cold night in November of 1996 at the age of twenty-nine years old I established conscious contact with my primary guide and opened up to my work as a channel. I also stopped reading, unless the content had to do with spirituality, channeling, past lives, healing, etc. My escape into fiction, into other people’s stories stopped and most of my reading along with it.

I recall walking into a Barnes and Noble at that time, wandering around for a bit, pulling books off of the shelves and putting them back, finding myself completely overwhelmed by not just the books but all of the thoughts that had gone into the writing and publishing of all of these works and had to leave.

It was very strange to spend twenty-five years completely immersed in something (the world of the written word, authored by others) and then just abruptly leave it. Oh, I tried a few times. I’d pick up a work of fiction and try to get involved, try to get excited, but I just was not feeling it. I only wanted to exist in a reality of magic and healing. It was as abrupt as my turn was from actress/waitress to psychic/channel/healer.

My own writing was stuck there, somewhere in the no man’s land in between the two versions of me.

I don’t know why or how, but I am suddenly writing again, for pleasure, for play, for me, and for any of you who gain anything from it. I am trying not to get into my head about it, nor control it, and instead, when the sentence starts while doing the mundane thing, sitting down and typing it out and allowing the flow to continue from there.

It is terrifying and exhilarating all at once.

Thanks for coming along on this ride with me.

Speaking of healing, Jon and I are offering a Reiki I Class via Zoom this Saturday, July 8th. Registration closes tonight, so if you’d like to join us or find out more, you can head here