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[ScreamingMeemie]

I used to be able to dwell outside of myself…even while consciously inhabiting my own body. I could remove myself in such a way that my skin felt like an onion peel around my spirit. “Were the events happening around me actually real?” Did I truly, really exist? Did my mother’s life really intertwine around mine, or was she living in another story?

I could use this ability to disengage myself from the upsetting events of my life. I used it when my grandpa died, and my parents didn’t tell me until we had crossed the state line into Wisconsin for his funeral. When the reality that we weren’t taking a vacation came crashing down. I used it when my dear friend Marcus killed himself two days before high school prom. Instead of prom, I attended a wake that year. I used it to see myself through the four and a half months I was engaged to a mad man. It was the painkiller I chose to erase the throb of a crease in my head from his ‘75 Firebird’s door frame. In labor, it helped a frightened 19 year old girl deliver another girl into a life of what is only known now.

Just when was it that I lost this ability? Was it when he placed the ring upon my finger making me his and erasing all that it was I thought I could be? Was it the birth of a son so frail I gave up all to defend his right to exist from those who would assault his respiratory system and ease him away from me? Or was it yesterday? When I picked up my high school yearbook and looked at the old “daily faces”-the faces you see daily and don’t care about really until twenty years later? Was it in realizing that this woman is not the woman she intended to be?

[ananda]

1. ...

You could either write a novel, semi-autobiographical of course, or maybe you could keep talkshows in business for a good while.

Seriously, that's good writing.

Sue

[blogbear]

3. Sure As Heck Is Good Writing!

[classof56]

2. Writing has been my refuge lately.

That and DU are helping keep me grounded and sane. Your peace is beautifully done and you should consider a market for it. I belong to a local writers group and besides our critique sessions we have a public reading every few months, an excellent venue to share what we've produced. Your account of your journey would be well-received and you'd find validation. At least, that has worked for me and many others in the group. No best-sellers here, just lots of loving support from other writers sharing their words and lives.

I'm getting several of my pieces ready for submission. I hate the thought of rejection slips, so it's taking a lot of courage to make this step. It's also taken me almost six decades of living to get to this point. But the writer's spirit within me compels me to try. You try, too, okay. You can be the woman you intended to be!

Best thoughts and wishes.

Tired Old Cynic

[oneighty]

4. An escape mechanism

my own is well developed after seventy years.

How else can we stay sane and heal our broken hearts?

((((((((((hug)))))))))) Mrs Grumpy

180

[Hidden Stillness]

5. Very Good Writing, MrsGrumpy

That is really great writing; you should keep it up. Of course the question becomes: how much of it was real reference, and how much was imagination? Writing is so therapeutic, or can be if you really hit the nail on the head, that sometimes all you have to do is get it and tell it clearly, and it was actually never so bad again. It is as if you have told it to a friend.
The following is a copy and paste of something I wrote a couple of years ago and posted at another website. I called it just "A Short Story"--part real, part invention:


All my efforts had finally come to nothing, a dead-end, and so I felt that night that I had really come to the end of something--wits' end, maybe, or the end of a road. All the past that stretched behind now came back, as a memory of loss, lessons not understood, lost opportunities, love that never happened or died. What was it all for, when it all came to falure; what did it even mean? I sank further, a chance frustrated, a life lost, until finally spit a curse at God for never helping me at all. Now faced with my unhappiness, depressed, tired, I started to fall asleep, and as I drifted off, these words rang in my head: "Words that meant nothing, roads that led nowhere, a mirror that showed nothing..."
The dream began this way: a place familiar, yet not familiar, and people behaving as usual, but this time with all their intents, feelings, and inner meanings, as well as the outward show, totally clear to me, and known. At last I understood: I felt. It went by stages. At first, I learned the falseness of things, the difference between inner and outer. People smiling and shaking hands, and glad to be rid of each other; love never spoken; oppression that masked as tradition; the cold abuse of privilege; pretended happiness. I heard the sounds of conversation, and that the words that were spoken were not the words that were heard; the unsuspected, silent pain of the other. Yet all believed they made direct contact, and each was isolated, on a separate path, like ships that pass in the night. The words that pretended to describe, pre-formed, applied, that stopped one step away, on the outside. People unknown, their whole lives, and I heard:

Another name for Hell
a self never shown
A life that passed, play-acting
the one who lived, unknown

No relief for all my fears
To speak with a voice that no one hears
None to comfort all my tears.

Then it branched out, more complex, and I knew that we could never know the hidden other, never even find our own "selves"--a soul within a mind within a body; the life lived on Earth among others, the private fate shared with God--the gap between the life lived and the dream that was sought, the gap between what they knew and what they told. The true self all etherial, and the outward show surrounding it, all we can grasp with thought. A kaliedoscope of all perspectives, levels, the orders of reality which we can never know, and all shadow around us, overwhelming, and I tried to sort in my mind how all these things..., when suddenly, the dream began to fade.

Then I heard a sound from outside, woke up, and forgot everything I had learned.

[joeybee12]

6. Keep going...my gut reaction is this is a short story you're thinking of..

...am I right?