I used to post here often - I kind of dropped off the face of the Earth for a moment there. There was a small part of me that did not know if I would ever write again. To begin, a lot of this had to do with life circumstances. Between July and September of last year, just as I placed the bow atop a story and released “The Wheelhouse Incident”, I had lost my job in catering.
I’m sure fellow writers know that while we would love to sit all day and observe the inner machinations of the worlds and relationships we build in our heads, daydreaming doesn’t pay the bills. Shit, obviously catering didn’t either. I was at the end of my rope and in pursuit of a greater opportunity, I took a wild step back from writing for a long time and addressed a couple of facets of my life that had come undone.
I don’t think I believed in the whole “tortured artist” trope. I’ve written horror and tragedy because I like writing those things. I also think it makes the happier moments within those genres stand out more and mean something. But there’s a difference between understanding a character and what they think and why they do what they do and feeling the character. I found there were certain instances in stories unpublished that I was marrying the inner dialogues too close to how I really felt, so I began to read with a lens of “this is how I’m feeling”, and once I did that, I figured it was time to take myself seriously.
Once I patched that back together I got on finding a new job. I’ve been exceptionally lucky to land a modest full time job that covers the basics, and it’s empowered me to come back to writing. For the longest time I stalled because I was afraid I wouldn’t like anything I put out (part of me was also afraid that I would’ve lost my “edge” being medicated, which is utterly ridiculous and pretentious, but it was a valid fear at the time).
Then as I began to get back into writing I tried a few projects that ended up sputtering out.
There’s one that didn’t, and I’ll speak more about that come May 1st.
While all this was happening, my father who I’m very close with began to suffer at the hands of our woefully broken medical system. Doctors went from concerned about his post surgical pain to writing off his chronic nerve pain as hysteria, throwing him on a litany of different SSRIs and painkillers. It wasn’t until this started that I realized how lucky I was that my own mental health journey had seemed so…easy? And with that came the eventuality of my own self-questioning. Did I really need the medicine? Was I really that bad?
And my Father told me something one day over the phone that changed all of that in an instant.
He told me he was proud of me. He said my strength had kept him moving on.
My strength? What strength?
Growing up, Dad was strong. Dad is strong. And now that same man is recognizing that I have strength, too? My brain melted. I was thankful I had finally decided to take charge and eliminate the mental fog and spiritual weight I’d been lugging around.
In one of my many conversations with him, we discussed my grandfather. He passed away five years ago from leukemia. It left a sizeable gap in all of our lives, of course with something like that it’s going to. Since my Dad’s birthday was coming up I wanted to do something in remembrance of my grandfather. This was as I was editing my next project and wrapping up publishing details last week. I reached out and got in contact with the veteran records department (Grandpa was a Marine) and got ahold of his discharge papers. I saw a story in them, one that I’d shared with my Dad.
Within that story there was a unique tragedy.
My grandfather had been stationed as a marine at Camp Lejeune for six years, starting when he was 19. For those of you unaware, there’s a massive lawsuit involving the tainted groundwater there. Toxic volatile chemicals from nearby plants seeped in. They drank, showered, and cooked with this water.
Leukemia is named as one of the biggest concerns in the lawsuit.
And I doubt my grandfather ever put the two things together, did he?
That a choice he made when he was 19 would put those chemicals in motion to play a direct role in his death at 82?
And that carried a haunting, existential echo in my chest: What things have I done that are already in motion? And if I don’t know what those things are, how could I ever hope to stop it?
My father and I often have philosophical conversations when he’s feeling well enough to. I listened to him talk about his father with great love and appreciation and admiration. And he told me that through his father’s strength he was able to become a decent enough man. And I realized the same was true for myself. For every day those chemicals seeped into my grandfather's DNA, he outputted love, determination, and gratitude.
And it was a direct answer.
But I can outlast it with the way I affect others.
And telling stories, I realized, is how I affect others. It’s my language of doing so. Not just for entertainment or allegory, but for morals. And I’m far from the only person to have realized their reason for being, or their reason for doing what they enjoy, and I love that.
Storytelling is one of the oldest, truest human traditions.
I am honored to have a part in it no matter how small.
This was a long winded way of saying I’m back, and I plan to stick around this time.
