“What if We Make It?” | Life Update + Winning NaNoWriMo
“The end will come.
What if this time we make it?”
Reads a note by my desk. One I wrote when I tried to write all my novels in a night because I believed the possibility that a massive asteroid may obliterate us all by morning. I remember my reflection in the window that night. Far off from the one I see looking back beside me now. Her hunch has returned, hair all but gone, and her face so much harder than I’ve ever seen her. A new me. This is probably the longest I’ve gone without obsessively observing my beauty in ever mirror I pass by. There’s something shameful I see in her now. Like a woman whose lost it all and has one purpose now and that is to produce. She is too far gone to be worth anything physically, but her mind is still capable of creating and so she sits down at this desk again, and averts her eyes to the task at hand.
It’s been nearly a year since I was in this seat. With my tools all aligned and towering around me. A new addition is the stack of craft books to my right shadowing the stack of self help and coping skill books beside it capped by my own works long since abandoned, but never forgotten. Along with the vision board I had painted and pasted together last December in my year of the tiger, so ready to make real growth in the life I desperately wanted to start living. At that time I believed I would too. I’m not sure when that changed. I think it was a fragile thought from he beginning. A sensation that was beginning to wax and wane with the instability I’d been trained to work around. That was when I had direction: something to do and someone to please. When the prospect of truly working only for myself came up, I think my mind became too overwhelming. I tried to escape and ended up being shanked by more pain in reality than I could imagine away. Pain disguised as medicine. People aren’t medicine, and one pill doesn’t fit all, especially when taken in an attempt to dull the shameful sensation of a new reality that overwhelmed my usual capacity for anxious depression. So, I let go and I flew into my final hurrah..
Clearly, I hadn’t kept that thought in mind. What if I make it again, even this time, even with all I have now to be ashamed of? I hadn’t expected to survive that night. Certainly, I had no intentions of surviving well into the Fall and now winter as it has appeared to become outside of these windows that surround me. Even in the hospital, coming down and physically healing, as my emotional mind slowly shivered back to life. I saw no life for me on the outside. I was happy to entertain the idea that maybe this, the final resort, would actually help things, but deep inside, I knew, I was too far gone.
It has been a thought I’ve had a lot since, though: What if this time I make it? Meaning, what if I don’t force myself to die out of desperation and punishment for what I alone cannot come to terms with? I knew, as I lied contently hollow in the hospital room, content in its simplicity and sheltering atmosphere, I was a writer. The word had no flavor, but it was all that I cared to do, and free from expectations of my own or others, it was all I wanted to do, as shallow as the desire was. My only sensation going in was a sparkle of fear not knowing if we would be allowed to have paper or not in there.
Alone in my room, with the lights off, so the only light coming in was through the window, at the adult sized plastic drawing desk, I wrote everything. Every hollow observation of the day and the goings on in my head, which to begin with were few and far between. I had no shame then, only pure honesty, since as far as I was concerned I had died that day anyways. I was sure life would catch up with me eventually, and yet, I am here. It has been three months since the hospital stay, and only one since I was able to make it more than a day without shriveling into some form of self destruction. This doesn’t mean all is well. Far from it in fact. I’m still worse off than I’ve ever been, but I’m moving and to some degree living in the shadow of what once was. Certainly, everything has changed, even my brain chemistry, a few times over actually, and so it will continue to I’m sure for the rest of whatever life brings me.
The end will come, but what if this time we make it?
That is all I live for now. The belief that maybe a future will come once again carries me through these nights as I’ve started to plan ahead again and act on what my spirit calls me to do. Meaning, the only thing I can physically, mentally, and socially manage, and have done so to some degree since infancy. I’m capable of many things in each of those aspects, but this is all I have to bring them all together, which I must since choosing any of the above has proven to be truly deadly for me. I’ve seen it time and time over, though this time has truly changed me. For better or worse, I’m sure it’s a bit of both. I’m excited to see. It’s a similar sensation that I had at the start of the pandemic. Let’s just see what happens. What an incredibly historic experience to be a part of. One’s life is all that.
I hope this thought can carry us through.
As of this moment, I have just wrapped up NaNoWriMo, winning in a record eleven days for the third consecutive year. The first year, I had no intention of winning, since I hadn’t for the nine years prior that I had participated. I chose it as a leadership project just to have something to check in with each week and somehow managed to get close enough to 50k by the final week that I felt I had no choice but to wrap it up. It was a comparably miserable time in my life, where I also felt no hope and was just desperately jumping at any direction that was appointed to me. Having just discovered Kpop as a once was teen fan fiction composer, my mind had been buzzing with the idea anyways. I just let it go and somehow finished the first rough draft of a complete story that didn’t wrap up in bullet points.
The following year, I had a plan. The revised plot that I developed out of that first draft discovering I could make the story hit even closer to home by exploring some of the traumas of my past through the characters experiences. I finished the 50k in seventeen days and managed to finish a my eyes only readable draft by the end of the month.
That brings us here. Somewhere along the way of the revision process that followed. I forced myself to let go and chase after anything else that could spark my soul. I should have seen the signs of running immediately, but then again, I wasn’t as well versed as I will now be forever in the ways of warning signs and red flags. Having gone through the most transformative season of my life so far, I used NaNoWriMo this year to get back into the craft of creative writing. No rules, no restrictions, and your damn right I had a page in my draft reserved for venting which I often turned to when the anxiety began to set in sparked by whatever stimulus happened to pass the emotionally damaged portions of my brain. It kept me writing. Along with plans and miscellaneous scenes from maybe stories as they came to me. This work I’ve titled in its own Scrivener doc as Popcorning. My new location for breaking into random creativity and darker thoughts as they overtake me. That’s how I made it. Now onward. Diving into edits on that first draft as this revising version of myself, just in case we make it.
Respectfully,
- Melody LeeMarie (M_LM)
