Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Writing Bleak
The problem with writing when you’re anxious or a little depressed is that everything ends up being about death – your own death, your spouse’s, your kids’, your dogs’, the death of the great American city, Death Be Not Proud, you get the idea. It’s depressing.
I considered submitting something for an essay contest. The topic was ‘the happiest day of your life.’ Oddly, I remember the happiest day of my life but it lacks drama and angst so I don’t think I could write convincingly about it.
My Happiest Day
It was a hot summer day on Lake Superior. All of our children were staying with us in our old house on the beach. I’d reluctantly come in from swimming to start dinner and, as I was chopping onions, my younger son ran into the house yelling, “Mom, why did you leave? Come back swimming.” And I put down my knife and walked back out to the beach into the water and swam along the shore with him and the other kids and our dog until the sun almost set and my husband was waving to us from the porch, “It’s time to come in for dinner.” And when I came in, Kathy Mattea was singing “Love Travels” on the stereo.
I found myself wishing the prompt was saddest day or most regrettable day. I want to start a post talking about how cocktail hour seems to be starting earlier every afternoon and how investing in Two-Buck Chuck has been my frugal move of the month. But even with all my little snarls of turmoil, I am a Strawberry Shortcake in the world of agony writing. I am nobody’s victim except, occasionally, my own. I can’t hold a candle to true despair. Mine is hobby suffering. It’s temporal and temporary.
I have friends who are experts at suffering. They allude to the physicality of it, the aches and pains, the lack of appetite. “Why are you not hungry?” I ask. “Because I am grieving,” comes the incredulous response. Me? I am not grieving. I have avoided grieving. But I am afraid of grieving and that itself is putting me in this strange, onion-like place. There are layers to all of this and I don’t want to peel any of them away.
__________________
Photo by Tobias Macha on Unsplash
12 Comments on “Writing Bleak”
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Reblogged this on lifelessons – a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown and commented:
Red’s Wrap is one blog I never skip over in a hurry. I think this is one of Jan’s bests (of many bests,) I love how she never takes the easy way out in her writing but always gets to the true heart of the matter.
One of your many bests. I’m curious.. when you got in from leaving your dinner prep to go swim with the kids, did your husband finish cooking the dinner? I hope so….
Reblogged this on Red's Wrap.
Your honesty is breathtaking sometimes.
I don’t know if that’s good or bad. 🙂 How are you, dear DearMaizie?
To most people writing has always been therapeutic. Most well crafted stories are based on people’s life challenges. That is why most famous writers are from the rags to riches type of life.
*hug for u *
I love it huhu same feels with your work.
Love how you write about your happiest day but also write about those not-happy moments at the same time. You meet the criteria of ‘writing about a happy day’ but do so without writing something cliche, banal, syrupy, my-happiest-day-was-when-the-love-of-my-life-proposed kind of happy writing. It’s hard to write about happiness without falling into those traps and you managed it here wonderfully.
Thanks, Lisa.
You have the gift of writing, and you do so inspire me.
Thank you