Thu 16 Jun 2011
Parallel lives
Posted by PJ under blood geek, creativity, illness, writing
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It’s funny the parallels life hands you. I’m currently doing the final polish on my old novel, Blood Geek, which has a heroine (Susan) who spent most of her youth caring for a sick parent. She’s ready to burst free of her constricted life, to explore the larger world in a way she’s never been able to before.
When I wrote this story I was much younger myself and imagining what it would be like to have your life defined by the illness of another. I had no experience of it in my real life. But there is this haunting echo, now that I am helping to care for my own mother, that keeps bouncing through the chambers of my heart. It’s a little disturbing. I knew more than I thought I knew back then.
How could I have? Because those parallels were not just about one thing, not just about the illness of a parent. They were about living a constrained life and wanting to break free. Back when I wrote this book, I had spent a number of years living such a fenced-in life, dealing with my own illness. I also was yearning to break free, to explore the larger world—in a way I’d once done before getting sick. The book was great therapy in that, although I’m not Susan and her life is not mine. It encouraged me to break free and I did for many years.
And now I am in a different phase of my life. I have no vision for what comes next. I can’t see that far beyond the day-to-day. I do know that when I get back to writing something new again, I don’t want it to echo that day-to-day in the slightest. Which is not to say I might not use some of these characters again—in fact, I fully intend to. But they will be engaged in some other enterprise, something that blows the doors open to other worlds with no fences.
I also know this, and the last week or so has only crystallized this “revelation”: creative work is not a luxury for me, although I’ve been treating it that way lately. Creative work is absolutely necessary. It helps keep me as sane as I’m ever going to get. It helps me breathe. I need that room to breathe or I, the me that means something, will cease to exist. I will become nothing more than another middle-aged woman going through a life of duty and chores. That person will not be worth knowing, and will not be a balm of comfort to an aging and ill parent, or anyone else. Including myself.
Creativity sets me free, no matter how limited my life is at any given time, to be the best person I can be. I will cling to it, thank you very much, as my golden-glowing life preserver until I slip beneath the waters of oblivion.
