To Those Who Have Lost Their Words

The Story

I’ve been quiet lately. Quiet from writing for you, quiet from writing for me. As far as words go, it wasn’t my best summer.

Then again, I did some reading when I asked a group of kids I know for book recommendations and finally read (and really liked!) the Percy Jackson books. And I got lost in a frenzy of excited writing a few times when my Star Wars roleplaying game character got to develop a romantic subplot and backstory—or got to write up propanda for the Rebel Alliance after the Death Star blew up Alderaan. You know, the kind of stuff you really had to be there for, but the stuff you and your fellow gamers won’t forget. Laughter. Memories.

Last night, I wanted to write a story. It didn’t even have to be a story—I would settle for one beautiful sentence.

“So write a sentence,” said my signficant other.

A sentence. Just one sentence.

This is my sentence.

As soon as I wrote those words, I knew what I had to tell myself, so I wrote until my sentence was a thousand words. My boyfriend walked back into the room, and I showed him my screen, warning him that it might be a little dramatic in places.

He read it aloud.

I cringed.

He reached the end.

“You need to post this online,” he said.

“I don’t have a blog post for tomorrow yet,” I admitted.

“Yes, you do.”

These are the words I wrote last night. I won’t even edit them. I’m a little embarrassed, but I wanted to leave them honest and true (even if a bit muddled) in the hopes that if just one person has lost their words, lost themselves, they can know that they’re not alone, that we’re all in this together, and that there are still ways to move forward.

If you’re stuck like I’ve been stuck, struggling to reconnect with your words, your books, or yourself, reach out by comment or email, and I’ll do my very best to respond, to encourage you on your journey, and to share more of where I’m at if it helps you.

Until then, this is my story.

This is my sentence.

The Sentence

This is my sentence: to try, over and over again, until something works. It’s time to try something different, because anything else would be insanity. Indeed, I am already insane. The repetition has gotten me nowhere, and the hope was faltering…

Until I remembered where I lost myself.

Note: I do not mean to say when I lost myself, nor why I did. Those are a different story, a story of rejection and longing and changing to fit in. That’s a story I am planning to tell somewhere else.

Where I lost myself, though…

It was in a book.

My quest is to find out which book, though I already have a suspicion… but I get ahead of myself.

I’ve always lived in books. Ever since I was small and was taught (by books, naturally) that books are gateways to other worlds, I have stepped through those gateways to experience those worlds. I was one of the ones for whom Inkheart wasn’t a novelty—it was real. Anyway, I lived world after world with character after character, jumping from one story to another story to another, taking in as much as I could. The real world was cold and hard and unfeeling. The worlds in the books could be hard too, but the feeling was there. The life was. Everything I needed to know and learn, as far as I could tell.

Everything I was.

Before I lost myself, I decided to be a writer. I would no longer just take the stories—I would give them back to the world that had given me so many. I dreamed of what those stories would be, and I went to school to make it happen…

But for the reasons that belong in a different story, I lost myself.

I’ve been looking. I couldn’t find myself by trying, by asking people, by wishing really hard. That, I realized, was because I’m still in the books. If I go back in, I hopefully will find where I got lost.

One problem: the me that is stuck IN the books is the  me that lets me into them in the first place. Some days, that’s okay. Muscle memory picks up the book, reads it, and even enjoys it. Most days, though, the me that is left over can’t get into the books—or most often, doesn’t remember to try. When I do try, I’m tired, distracted, dead, unable to connect.

So I give up.

I still remember, sometimes, that I decided to write. I pull out a sheet of paper or open up a Word document and make a Plan. A Very Good Plan. I decide on a story, maybe even outline it. I decide to write every day no matter what. I even find people I think can keep me accountable and tell them that I’ll be writing.

And thus I try over and over again. I find my repetition. I fail, I get discouraged, I try again the next time… and nothing gets written.

It’s because I need myself. My story self needs stories to live. It needs to take in stories to survive. And if it’s not surviving, how is it supposed to push stories out?  

I have a list of stories waiting to be written this year. Some of them are promises. Some of them are bets. Some of them are novels that finally, after all these years, have started to approach something resembling truth. They have the chance to succeed…

As long as I’m there to write them.

And so I circle around to where I lost myself, eager to walk a new path, serve my sentence, and be someone I recognize, someone who lives. I search the books, taking lists of books the children love, gently touching the covers of the books I’ve kept tucked away until I find a place I can call home, even for a moment. The children’s recommendations pull me gently into new worlds again, even if through a haze. The books I uncover in my boxes bring a smile to my face, reminding me that I am not just this shell. I am a person.

In order to write, I need to read again. This is my something different, my way forward. I will read until I find myself wandering a story so far from my own but somehow so like home. I will smile, take myself by the hand, and lead myself into the real world, the one where I finally understand anything is possible. I will sit myself down in a chair and hand myself a paper and pen—or a computer in a pinch.

“Now write,” I will say. “Traveler of worlds, shape them for others. Show them truth.”

If I’m disinclined to believe myself, or tempted to crawl back into a hole, I’ll be prepared. I’ll draw my attention away from my doubt and towards my characters—my fragmented selves across the games I play. They prove that it is still in me. They prove that I can find truth and make it fiction—or better yet, call forth the truth that is in story. If I can bring those characters to life, I can bring more to life.

So this, then, is my sentence: to try over and over again, but not by sitting down and staring at a screen, trying to force a story out until it becomes untrue or I become resentful. Instead, I will try over and over again to find myself walking through a story. It won’t be repetition, because every story is its own world. This is a thing I remember.

And one day, I’ll be there. I might see myself up ahead, run to catch up, and have a beautiful reunion. Or… I might suddenly realize that I’m seeing what I used to see, feeling what I used to feel—not as the girl who was not yet lost, but the one who has been trying all along to be found.

On that day, nothing will stop me from writing.

I wrote this much, didn’t I?