When I was seven years old, I wrote a story. I don’t really remember what it was about – I think it was perhaps about the fawn I saw behind our school…the thing I remember the most was filling a whole line with exclamation marks and my teacher telling me that it was a good story but maybe I could cut down on the punctuation….at ten I wrote a story about the gas shortage in Canada – something to do with OPEC I think – and to this day I remember the line that my teacher singled out for attention as I read it out:
“‘No more joy rides,’ Grandma said softly.”
He jumped on my use of the word ‘softly’, embarrassing me with his praise but I never forgot his approval and the understanding that somehow I had reached him with the simple act of putting words to paper. It was around that time that I began to be silenced at home; the negative attention that my child’s shrill voice drew reinforced the idea that the words I spoke had no value, no merit.
About a year later I discovered journaling. My creative writing was stifled, drowned in the sea of grammar and expectations but writing a diary was ‘allowed’, humouring my need to always sit with pen and paper. I still have that little diary thirty years later, the random scribblings hiding the truth of the hell that was my home life. Somehow I knew that I could still never really be open, that those words would not be private, and so what I wrote in that tiny red and black book was all surface, no filler.
After I left home at sixteen my writing finally blossomed, angst ridden pale blue ink covering innumerable pages as I developed my style, tested my voice. I discovered to my delight that what I wrote transmitted far more effectively than what I spoke and even more astonishing, people listened, wanted to hear more. I began to keep a journal in earnest, pouring out teenaged dreams and slowly I learned how to talk through those pages, my stutter hidden by the fluidity of my pen.
Children came along, and my journal was used as a weapon against me, the violation of my mind as damaging as any rape. I burnt the words and stopped writing for almost a decade, turned my need to be heard inwards once more. I immersed myself in my young family, the cries of my muse silenced by the lack of time, permission denied. My word processor became an expensive ornament, dusted and admired and useless.
My marriage split up, I was left with four small children and again, no one wanted to hear my pain. I worked long hours, barely slept and all the while the volcano grew hot within, the pressure building but I had no idea how to relieve it – or even that I needed that release. I journalled a little but it barely touched the surface of that molten urge.
Then one day a miracle happened. I bought a computer, slow and clunky and a dinosaur even for those days. I sat down in front of it and the words flowed from me, almost against my will. My long days working bled into long nights writing, pouring out the tale of my childhood, my marriages, my mistakes and triumphs and somewhere deep within me the pain began to melt, I understood that here at last was my outlet, that that blank screen would listen and understand. Ten years and well over a million words later, I can declare with certainty that I am a writer, even if the gap between purging occasionally draws out, spins out of my control. My words allow me to escape the madness that drowns me at times, is the release valve that keeps me just this side of lunacy. It is my best friend and lover and confessor and every word has value.
My work has a process, a ritual that contents me. I listen to music, or have the tv playing in the background, there must be some noise or I cannot silence the cacophony, allow the thoughts to filter through the racing of my hyperactive mind. I rarely take breaks – I sit down and let it pour out. My optimum time for writing is the evening, a habit formed through child rearing as it was when the children were sleeping and I could relax knowing that they would not need me…it was also the time I most needed to fill the silence. I can no more write in the morning than I can write without the background chatter of various media.
I have a disability. It’s a lifelong condition and it is degenerative. I have weak bones and some bad engineering but for all of my forty one years I have never let it hold me back or prevent me from achieving anything I set my mind to. It’s been a matter of pride not to ever let it stop me and as a result of that I have often driven myself past what my reduced structure will allow. I suffer when I push myself to those extremes, my feet ache or I am overtired from the physical exertion. I live with daily pain and long ago I accepted that this was the price I had to pay to be ‘normal.’
Last year I took on a short term contract that required me to data enter all day, every day for several weeks. At the end of that time I was left with a nagging pain in my hands, a low throb that never seemed to go away. I knew I had developed an RSI, but being me, I shrugged it off and continued to push myself past my limits. But the writing began to tail off, partly because I felt stifled again, partly because the time it took to get the words out was not there…way down the list was the fact that my hands hurt too much and it was simply too much effort after I had been typing all day anyways. The ache spread, from my finger tips to my elbows to my shoulders and by the spring of this year I was barely writing at all…it was simply too painful.
Not having that outlet began to turn my pain inward once more and as my physical pain increased so did my emotional pain. Oh, I had my friends, and my family and the one who makes my heart glad but I needed to chronicle those changing times and I simply wasn’t able to.
The physical pain finally drove me to the doctor yesterday and the news was the worst I could possibly hear. The damage is irreversible; even I can see that no matter how I deny it to myself. I’m going back to school to get my degree, a degree that will require me to type – a lot. But greater than that, more devastating than that, I cannot do the one thing I need to do to retain my sanity…I cannot write. I have lost my voice.
There are programs that will do some of this work for me but I feel like I’m at the bottom of a hugely steep hill. It’s as though I have to learn to speak again, find a way to write that is so different to the methods I have used for over three decades. I find speaking my thoughts difficult, oral dyslexia shutting me down and closing the door to my creativity. The thought of vocalising my innermost pain shuts me down; a lifetime of conditioning holds the words in my throat and refuses to release them. I feel crippled for the first time in my life and I can’t even scream to release the pain…I am the emotional child once more forbidden to speak.
