Lost and Found

I’ve lost the joy for writing.

I’ve lost the joy for writing.

After a brief search, I found it somewhere back around 2018, when I was regularly writing blogs and short personal essays.

Then in 2020, I was made redundant during COVID and took it as the nudge to finally write the novel, I’d been waxing lyrical about for… well, most of my life.

I pumped out 110,000-word fictionalised memoir and (oh God, this is embarrassing to admit) sent sample chapters to agents immediately. No editing. I was that confident / ignorant. Amazingly, I got a couple of requests for the full manuscript, which just boosted my already misguided ego to claim - I’m going to be a published author!

Six years on, and I’m not a published author.

I’ve had some short stories published in anthologies, long listed in the occasional flash fiction. But the elusive novel is still pending publication.

I’ve completed a second story since then, that did short-list in a manuscript development competition, and which I’ve rewritten and edited it many, many times. I’ve done various writing courses, attended and volunteered most Brisbane writing events, attended several writer retreats, and joined two writer groups. I’m a far more educated writer than the one who naively sent a ridiculously long, unedited manuscript off six years ago. And, most importantly, I’ve built a community of wonderful literary friends around me.

But I’m still not published.

And, somewhere along the way, the pure joy of crafting sentences became the drudgery of homework, and I felt a bitter kernel of jealousy welling up inside me as I attended book launch after book launch, awaiting my turn.

I am not a jealous person by nature. I promise, I’m really not. I am the eternal cheerleader, truly celebrating everyone’s success because it delights me to see people’s dreams come true. Especially those I’ve watched toil away at this industry that is, frankly, pretty harsh.

But I’m also human. And I’ve been saying I’ll be a published author for almost fifty years, starting when I read Maurice Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ as a tiny child and realised that my vivid imaginings didn’t make me faulty or weird – it made me a creative!

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which helped explain so many things in my life, pushing me to reframe my insecurities. I learned about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria and understood why things that seem to wash off other people’s backs, absolutely crush me, sending me into a spiral of self-loathing. So, as you can imagine, the endless, inevitable rejection of the author submission process, takes a pretty big toll on me. It can be brutal for anyone, but somehow worse for us ADHDers (of which the writing community seems to be heavily populated by! But that’s another post.)

My last rejection knocked the wind out of me more than usual and left me wondering why I voluntarily participate in this sadistic game of validation-seeking. As I cried to my husband, friend, writing buddy, basically anyone who came within my orbit that week, I confessed I kind of hate writing these days. The last time I recall really feeling passionate about it was when I was regularly writing blogs.

But as I embedded myself more in the literary world, I began to feel a bit ‘cringe’ about my humble little blog. ‘Oh, are you a Mummy-blogger?’ (Why are there no Daddy-bloggers? Again, I digress. I’ll come back to that feminist rage bait in a later post). Eventually, I took it down, determined to promote myself as a serious author.

But I missed the immediate interaction with people who resonated with something I wrote. Last year, I received a message from a woman in Colorado who had somehow found a piece I’d written about weaning off the anti-depressant medication, Pristiq. It had been the darkest time of my life, and I’d written honestly about how difficult it was. This woman was also coming off the same anti-depressant and searched for stories from others. She contacted me through my Facebook page and told me that reading my blog may have saved her life, as she now knew her experience wasn’t unique and I was proof that she’d get through it. I’d forgotten I’d even written about it. I found the story and had to put it through an AI search engine as I couldn’t recognise the writing as mine. I worried that somehow, I’d plagiarised something, it felt so distant from where I am now in my novelist-style of writing.

It was mine, penned during a dark period where I used the art of creating to process my raw and scary thoughts. And it helped someone.

Yet I’d stopped writing like that because I was focused on ‘The Novel’ and I wanted to be taken seriously. And in doing so, I lost the purest joy I’ve ever had through writing.

So, I’m going to start writing my feelings again. Maybe it will resonate with some, maybe it won’t. But already my brain feels lit up with excitement. My fingers are flying across the keyboard, and my heart is getting happier by the moment.

Yes, I would still love to hold a printed novel in my hands one day and say – this is mine. But in the meantime, I’m just hoping to find joy in creativity again.

Little Maurice’s Max would be proud of me!