Kris Reflects on Writing, and an Anniversary Approaching

I'm totally writing this from bed.

It's kind of weird and deja vuish. When I started this blog, back in the early days of the pandemic, my office was in shambles and I did my computer "work" (which, since I didn't have a job, meant blogging and Goodreads and such) on my bed and on the couch on this laptop. But I was spending too much time sitting on soft surfaces and having awful posture because apparently I was on the laptop a lot so my husband encouraged me to finally dig out my office and get back to using it. Which I did, and I'm sure I wrote about it so I'm sure you can go back and look. In those days I wrote on the blog a LOT.

But today I lack the physical energy to go sit at my desk and the laptop was nearby and I've been wanting to get on here and write this, so I'm writing from bed and it's deja vu. Which is interesting because I'm also reflecting on an anniversary. On Saturday, it will be 2 years since the pandemic started for our family. March 5, 2020 was the day our school district closed schools (for up to 2 weeks, the message said at the time, wow that reads weird now) and we moved my husband out of his office to work from home (he would lose the job less than three months later.) 

So now I have New From Here by Kelly Yang sitting next to my leg. I started reading it today. I've been so looking forward to this book. It's a middle grade novel loosly based on her family's pandemic experience moving to the U.S. from Hong Kong and getting separated. I've been so looking forward to it And it is really good. But it is bringing  up the feels. It is also about a kid dealing with his ADHD while remote schooling...an older kid than mine was but still oh so familiar.

And then it occurred to me...could I write a pandemic novel?? For kids?? Maybe...in 10 years.

I have been doing a lot of reflecting on writing over the past couple of days because I did land the writing volunteer gig I think I mentioned last time I wrote. (No, the URL of the blog isn't changing lol.) I'm going to be working with a resident in a memory care facility helping them write their life story and I'm SO excited about this opportunity. I won't be sharing details about the project in this space because I know from experience when you volunteer in health care privacy and confidentiality are important and I need to be sure of my boundaries. But I am so excited to take on this opportunity.

So I've been reflecting on my life as a writer and one of the reasons I've been avoiding writing lately is that writing has, for the first time in my life, not felt like a respite. In fact, it's felt like another stressor, another thing I haven't done enough with in my life. Does this happen when you reach mid life? I don't want these years to be full of regret.

See, I always wanted to write, to be a writer. For as long as I can remember. I always wrote stories (well, more story beginnings than anything, finishing was never something I was great at.) I was told what a good writer I was and was always going to be a writer. And in the back of my mind, even as I went into adulthood, I was always going to publish that novel one day. I even finally, once I reached my thirties, managed to pound out a couple of rough drafts of different novels, but never something that made it past halfway through draft 2. 

And I'm in my 40s now and I'm....not...a writer so much. I still do a fair bit of it for myself, have had things published in a periodical or two over the years, but it never materialized in the way it was supposed to and now it feels like something that is...well, still doable, certainly, I'm not dead yet, but something that feels a lot less likely as the years go by. And the frustrating part of that is not so much that it's true because let's be honest it's true for most who aspire in art of any kind. It's that maybe it wouldn't be true if I hadn't wasted time, wasted years, if I'd gotten better and more disciplined early, if...that's a lot of ifs.

So now I have this volunteer opportunity. To write someone's life story. To help someone preserve their memories in a real book written by me. And it won't be widely published...as stated above, the boundaries are quite clear, while I will receive a copy of the finished work and while the person in question has waived their HIPPA rights to some extent so they can talk to me and do this, I am not at liberty to widely distribute their life story or turn it into a screenplay or anything of that nature.

And to be honest I'm incredibly grateful. Because of course it would be awesome to have a bestseller with my name on it and be in Oprah's book club and all the things I used to dream about and that would be amazing. But if this is the only publication I ever have for the rest of my life...if literally all I do is help people preserve their memories and their stories so they don't disappear in a book which will have two copies, one for them and one for me that's totally okay with me. Because really all I ever wanted was to write something that matters. And more importantly having this opportunity makes the idea of sitting down at my legal pad or my typewriter or my whatever it is and taking on my work in progress sound fun again. Not so that I can publish by 50 or be on the bestseller list or quit my day job (which I haven't got) or any of it...just because the act of putting words down, read or not, makes me who I am. And I think I'm reaching a place in my life where I really genuinely feel okay about that.

Let's see. We did media consumption already sort of. I'm also (finally) reading Naomi Shihab Nye's 2020 poetry collection and also my book group book called The Plot (ironically, or maybe not, about a washed up writer with the perfect story to tell.) And I'm about to go watch me some Parks and Recreation.

Today I'm grateful for writing, this blog, my dad, technology (when it works! Dude, that's a WHOLE OTHER story we didn't get to,) Ash Wednesday in person, books about faith, and my kiddos.