A life's work

In my bedroom there is a bookshelf.



On this bookshelf is a box.



A wicker box. Or a woven box. Or something. I don't know what exactly it is (nor do I care). I bought it at Crate and Barrel four years ago when I was decorating my brand-new bedroom in our house in Sandy.

And aside from its aesthetics (which I like a lot), its 18x10x11-inch dimensions contain some of the most important things in the world to me.



The items hold no monetary value, though…and they have nothing to do with Charley. Or at least not tangibly. Nor with Anna. But second to the people I love and cherish, I think I'd be most devastated if something destroyed the contents of this box. If my house were on fire, I'd be running in to save this box if I thought of it--even before saving photos.

The box is filled to the brim. I'm not sure if it could hold more, even if I rearranged its contents for the thirteenth time.



An assortment of two or three old three-ring binders; file folders and informally bound stacks of printed pages; numerous journals; at least one five-subject spiral notebook; more:



What it contains: (almost) everything I've written over the course of my entire life.

The starts of three of four stories (destined to be epic soap operas, no doubt) that I wrote in middle and early high school, more often than not based on my circle of friends at the time. A childhood diary or two, mostly blank. A journal that we were forced to write in daily during freshman English in high school. A briefly kept journal from late in high school (which covers some of when Charley and I first started dating…yowsas). Printed pages of the really bad poetry I wrote in high school and early college. The autobiographical essays, personal narratives, and all the creative writing pieces I wrote in writing classes in college, both before and after becoming an English/writing major. Poetry. A few short stories. Even a long-forgotten start of a screenplay (for a class, mind you). Two or three full journals that I kept while in college and in the first years after graduating. Printed copies of the epic-length emails I wrote to a few friends post-college, for the times when I wasn't keeping a journal. A pregnancy journal I kept while pregnant with Anna. And weightiest: another three or four journals--all full--that I wrote in for the first 18 months after Charley died.

The only thing missing? The contents of this blog.

It's an unwieldly box. If I had to estimate, I'd guess it might weigh 20 to 30 pounds. But what it really contains? A weight that can never be measured:

Thirty years of explanations of why I am the way I am, what makes me me.

What I hope it is someday? A legacy to my child, in case she ever wants to know more about her mother, what made her tick and made her to be the person she came to be…just in case, like her father, I'm not here when she wants answers to her questions.

But even if my daughter never reads a word of it, it's something priceless, solely for me: reminders of battles fought, of things I've learned, of celebrations earned. It's a way for me to travel through time…and rediscover myself, and celebrate, and marvel, again and again.

And hell, even without all the heavy mumbo-jumbo, how many people can say they produced 20 to 30 pounds of creative or personal writing over the course of 10 to 15 years? (General population here, I mean…not prolific writers. ;o))

---

A month ago, though, it was just a box in my bedroom. Granted, I've had that box on that bookshelf and used it to house the same contents for over four years…and those contents haven't changed in the last month.

Well, I guess they changed a little. And a lot, all at the same time.

You didn't necessarily know about it on this blog (or even if you've seen and talked with me in the last month), but I totally freaked out on myself earlier this month. I had my normal support group on the first Wednesday of the month, which happened to be on March 2. And for whatever reason, the simple fact that it was now March, and spring, and it had been six months since Anna started kindergarten, and I still didn't have a job and an income…and…whatever…but I totally flipped out. Except I didn't really know I was flipping out until I started a blog post over the course of a few days, around March 4.

I may or may not eventually post a(n edited) version of the original blog post, but I was astonished--and not in a good way--at what the entry revealed about myself. Wisely, I refrained from posting it and instead emailed it to a few friends who all, also wisely, told me that I was being way too hard on myself.

Thank god for trusted friends.

They did an excellent job of allaying the worst of the foul beastie's attack, but I found myself digging through old data CDs and printed, graded copies of essays I wrote in college, searching for a couple of autobiographical pieces I'd written that helped explain some of what I spewed out in the aborted blog entry. I found the essays…and several poems, other essays, and pieces I'd long forgotten about.

I spent parts of a day or two, rereading everything…and separately, organizing them. I'd placed all the creative or autobiographical pieces I'd written into a black plastic folder sometime during or after college, but I'd never really separated them out or made sure I had a printed copy of everything. So on a rather lovely, mostly sunny Monday morning and afternoon, I played hooky from all my responsibilities, wallowed in a full six hours of kid-free time (Anna went home with a friend after school…whee!), and organized and bound everything I'd written from about 1995 to 2000. I briefly entertained the idea of having them professionally printed and bound using one of the online, on-demand book printers, but I had to be practical; I didn't have the time, energy, desire, or money to take on a project of that size. So I chose the cheapest, easiest, fastest alternative instead: "binding" my printed copies using report covers. (At least they have pretty ones available these days--and it only cost me about $7. ;o))



An extra bonus was that they provided an easy way to separate the truly awful stuff from the good and the best:



And as a result, I now have five oh-so-fancy folders of my collegiate and late high school writing--one of early, mortifying poetry (before any classes on poetry); one of early autobiographical essays and personal narratives, from writing classes I took my freshman and sophomore year; one of poetry, short fiction, and a screenplay (ouch) from a survey creative writing class I took for fun my junior year; one of short fiction from my senior seminar class once I was a writing major; and one containing poetry and personal essays from two writing classes I took my last year as a writing major. (All classes I got As in, I can proudly say. =))

Yeah, fancy hardcover copies would have thrilled something inside me straight to the core…but seeing the simple, basic stack of five years of work in college was just as satisfying, I suspect.



And actually, my homegrown method was probably more satisfying--and in a more tactile way. Most of the pieces were for graded classes, and most contained my grade and the professor's comments: things equally as precious to me as the content I wrote or the revelations I had. I could see my professors' actual pen strokes, feel the pen's scored bite into the pages: proof that they were real, authentic. By braille almost, I could trace my fingers across their words and feel, anew, the glow and pride of that 96, that 92, the A+, again. You have real potential as a writer, Candice. Can I have a copy for my files?

And as I reread all the bound copies, the grades I got, and my professors' comments in chronological order, I found something else:

Me.

One of the biggest struggles I've had in the last 5.5 years since Charley died is the isolation. The isolation that came with grief…with being a single parent…with being a stay-at-home, nonworking parent. I don't do well with isolation…and rereading pieces I wrote when I was 20 years old and living alone, completely friendless and depressed in a city where I knew no one for the first time in my life, drove home just how poorly I reacted to isolation before.

And in isolation, I start to hear too many voices in my head. (And no, I don't mean I literally hear voices; I'm not schizophrenic.) Voices that do more harm than good, that tear me down or else give me way too much fodder for unrealistic demands and expectations on myself…voices that are silenced when I'm around other people, when I'm happy, when I'm content with myself. Voices that weren't there when Charley was alive and I was happily married--or even when I was first widowed.

An unfortunate side-effect for me as time gets longer from Charley's death is that I become far too prone to those voices. Since I no longer feel at my worst and completely destroyed by grief, I set higher expectations for myself. And in my day-to-day isolation, alone all day with a 6-year-old child, the voices become my own worst enemy.

Except I often don't notice that those voices aren't nice, or realistic, or even true, much less that I don't need to believe them or act upon them. Until I sat down to write that blog post in early March, I hadn't realized that those same old voices from the past were screaming in my head. Until I reread, in order, all the things--largely poetry and autobiographical essays--I wrote from age 17 until 23, I hadn't remembered exactly where those voices came from. They weren't new voices. And it turns out they didn't have a damned thing to do with grief, or death, or widowhood…but my lowered defenses from living in the aftermath of grief gave them rich, fertile ground. And like a viral infection, those voices took hold and I never noticed that they shouldn't have been there…until the start of spring and March and a blog post ripped my blinders off.

But in the end, I got two four unexpected gifts out of a crappy start to the month:

1. Four friends who told the voices to shut the hell up. (Thanks again, by the way. =))
2. Another voice--mine--roaring through the vortex and dispelling those voices for good (well, for now, anyway ;o)).
3. I then declared I could take the month off, guilt-free…and I did. Took it easy, haven't done much of anything I "should" be doing, and it's been great. I feel much better. (On a separate note, it's a darn good thing I was theoretically taking it easier, because Anna got really sick twice in two weeks and I followed just after…so we haven't had an illness-free week in almost three weeks. Ugh. And for better or worse, April means I need to find a job, ASAP. No more 'time off' in that arena. Wish me luck!)
4. I now have all my writing organized in place now…so if the house was on fire, I theoretically could grab it in one quick (albeit heavy) swoop. The organizer in me ♥♥♥ that. ;o) Plus, the stuff from college is annotated and dated now, with introductions. Yes, I'm a geek; I know. But it gives me a happy little glow, all the same.