Undercurrents, and reaching "desert" status.
A phoenix rebirth story, the origin of this pen name.
Where to begin.
Since deciding to become a writer, I’ve seen a lot of articles go by about writer’s block, about how one is a writer, about the trials and travails of being a writer, etc.
I’ve never seen an article entirely resonant with my experiences of writer’s block. Maybe those of us who have gone through this—for I am told that no human’s experience is entirely unique—maybe we don’t want to talk specifically about it. Maybe we can’t. Maybe there aren’t words to show others what has happened and the impossibilities it creates inside us.
***
It sounds so pathetic to say, “My parents reacted poorly to everything I wrote, and now I flinch with every word I write.” It feels like I’m making excuses, that I’m playing the victim, that I’m being inaccurate. That if I were stronger, more resilient, that none of that would matter, that words would just come out.
The problem with that idea is that my role in this story isn’t as the victim. It’s as villain.
My mother is not truly so terrible, says the surreality of it all. She just storms around, raging, at everything, all the time. She offers encouragement towards good grades, church attendance, getting married, and having grand-babies. She constantly tears into my dad, destroys him verbally in his absence or at his existence. She offers comfort when one of her children is sick, in a ‘yay I’m needed’ sort of way. She asks questions about my projects, which might be a sign of love or support in someone else, but she does so in order to own them. I am a collector’s item, an extension of herself, that she holds in order to have good standing before church society, showing that she is righteous, which is all that matters. She loves me, because she says so. But what I actually care about doesn’t matter. What I want doesn’t matter, unless it reflects well. / None of this is true, she would say. This is not who I am or what I have done.
My father, who I looked to as a judge of right and wrong, (when everything I did was accused of as being wrong I needed an arbiter), disparaged my stories with every flinch. What I wrote was unnatural, distressing, or simply wrong. (Someone he knew couldn’t be a writer. It reflected badly on real writers). And nothing came from me but always belonged to someone else: he saw the influence of what I’d read, never my own decisions. / ‘Is everything you write about shifters, (like that one series you read at fifteen)?’ How can you think that? How does that even make sense, considering everything I’ve written and the wide range of characters I’ve loved? Yes, this story has a shifter in it, but have you read medieval folklore? Everything involves animals somehow. I’m following the folkloric mode, here.
And writing was dangerous. It would expose family secrets. Like I’m doing—but not doing at all—right now. How can words ever capture what happened? They don’t. It’s like how some characters are real, whole, alive beings that we tune into as we read about them, where the brushstrokes of sentences evoke more than is captured by mere letters on a page because we touch their living soul. Whereas other characters are mere puppets, mostly empty shells created by writers for a purpose.
***
I began role-playing characters as a way to learn how to have actual relationships. Since I did not wish to follow in my parents’ footsteps, I would learn from role-played characters with friends instead. I wanted to watch what characters did when they fell in love, when they grew close, when they negotiated hardships, when they came together through conflict, friction, and increased communication and understanding.
I did not think I had enough creativity and knowledge on my own. I turned to other writers to co-create with me. For years, I thought it was working. I watched characters fall in love, pursue their dreams, and go for what they wanted.
But I also made devastating choices. I chose to connect with and love writers who could not actually love back, could not trust or respect me as a creator, could not take an interest in my creativity or my interests, even when I made it easy for them. I fought to please them, fought to earn their trust and their love, to convince them what I brought to the table was worthwhile, not worth scorning or ridiculing.
In order to exist in the relationship, in order for my characters to exist on the page, they had to be made small, ineffective, exiled, or turned into a pariah. They had to stop interacting, stop mattering, stop being. Cease insights, cease interacting. Going through the motions was allowed, but nothing real. Nothing lasting.
It must sound so pathetic. But at the time I was making what I thought were informed decisions. I made compromises in the spirit of collaboration. Those two are best friends since elementary, I said, if one wants me to disappear from her story-lines so she could have her best friend all to herself, I will do that so she will be happy, etc. Their happiness mattered to me. Why in the world would I want to provoke more rage (one) and unhappiness (the other) when the power to invoke ease was mine?
Every action I took was a disruption on what they wanted. Yet they could not tell me to leave, and I would not go unless told. I was told, instead, that I was wanted, that my characters were wanted, and even if actions contradicted the words, I/we stayed in pursuit of a better solution.
I knew exactly what they wanted. I gave them exactly what they wanted.
If it produced pain inside me, that got ignored. If it devastated my characters and put them in agony, I couldn’t so much as commiserate. I did not know pain was a signal. I thought it meant it was just a sign of living. Living is pain, discomfort; sacrificing for others is the way to show your love for them. This is what they wanted, and I knew asking for what I wanted wasn’t allowed or would only produce more rage or hostility and devastation. It wasn’t just about the emotions they would feel. It was also about the characters’ lives going forward. I did not want them to be punished for my sake.
But, ragged at the end of ten years, after my efforts to try to communicate what was happening, when my co-creation was finally acknowledged by them, I collapsed.
I had turned into a desert.
***
I don’t know how to describe it to you, the sensation of having nothing left. The sensation of being so broken within and yet numbed to it, as if my brokenness did not exist if I simply didn’t look down at it. They’re not hurting me, I still insist. I can weather any pain so long as they say they love me. Love knows itself. If they love, they say they love, then it must be true. Nothing can lie about loving. It cannot. It has no desire to. So love spoken must exist.
If they love my character, if they say they love her, then they must not be hurting her. It must be something more I need to do to convince them to stop. We can find a solution, I told myself and them over and over. All we must do is communicate and find a solution that works for all of us, me, you, and our characters.
***
There’s something else I need to try to explain. There’s a concept in fantasy about being an empath, about picking up on the emotions and the tenor of the thoughts of others, and taking these into your own body.
It’s not just fantasy. It’s real.
Growing up in a home where everything was a lie, where nothing was talked about for real, I opened myself up to the reality of the present. Like a big satellite dish, I began taking in everything. Every twisted emotion, every perversion on love or wholesomeness, all the resentment, all the secret wishes to divorce, all the truth behind all the lies. If bodies are just organisms of vibrating matter, then I was an antenna picking up every current.
I carried it all within me. I tried to sort through it and navigate the overwhelm of information.
Sometimes it was helpful. When my sister was deaf for a year as a toddler and wasn’t able to learn how to talk, I somehow miraculously could understand what she was saying.
I became “good at languages,” but what I really became good at was understanding what was going on beneath.
However, even though it seems like a superpower, it was never meant to be used this way, completely open, taking everything in. I tried explaining this to my dad once, after I’d finally recognized what was going on in me and how it was turning everything inside to a jumbled mess. He reacted badly, trying to fend off the idea of it happening by pointing out how badly I navigated the goings-on. If I really could pick up on everything, he said, I should have always known what to do and what to say. But just because I was getting everyone’s emotional undercurrents and the brushstrokes of their true thoughts, it did not automatically mean I knew what to do about it.
It also didn’t mean I couldn’t be deceived. Hell, I can betray my own self; others can, too. And when I felt something was off, within certain deceptions, I ignored it, eager to write it off.
***
I took in not only my parents’ full sets of feelings, but also these others, these friends I was trying to collaborate with and create worlds and lives with. I knew, instinctively, they weren’t telling me everything, that they weren’t being honest with themselves or with me, so I took them in still more to read them better. A violation of their privacy? Maybe. But it wasn’t done consciously, and I did it to understand why they were hurting me, what was happening in a confusion of turmoil.
Some people say empaths are just good at reading “micro-expressions,” but in my case, seeing people’s expressions had nothing to do with it. I was taking so much in that I couldn’t see at all, overwhelmed by the flood of emotion. And it explains nothing of how I could know the feelings of my friends, even collaborating long-distance.
***
Every devastation, every effect of my actions and words, is magnified a hundred fold when I take in their feelings. Every time I hurt them, I am always ever hurting myself.
In that context, it makes perfect sense why I chose to hurt “only” myself over hurting them and me.
Only it wasn’t “just” me I was hurting. It was also my characters. Characters I did not know were real beings. I felt their reality…but I did not know it. I could not, did not want to grasp it as real.
***
It wasn’t until I learned about boundaries and also how to turn the dial down on picking up others’ feelings that I began to see how much damage was being wrought. But that was back in 2016, and here I was, still damaging myself and my characters at the end of 2021 and the start of the New Year, feeling like an absolute barren desert. Not dry and desiccated, but with just…nothing there. Wellspring completely empty. Nothing left to give. I can’t explain the sensation. Every word I have to offer isn’t the reality of how far to nothing I got.
I both simultaneously knew how much it mattered to me, to be creative, and a writer, and to love and live alongside my characters—and didn’t know at all. How could it matter this much, that losing them and depleting myself this far, this badly, meant that I wanted to die. It wasn’t a conscious kind of wanting. It was an unconscious, a subliminal, a state-of-being of non-existing to the point that it was like a ghost inside me wanted to end its existence when it already wasn’t existing. The idea of stepping off the busy bridge felt as natural as it was horrifying. It wasn’t a daydream, it was an instinct that I had to fight against. Only it wasn’t me fighting, I realize now. It was my characters. They loved me enough to fight for me and keep me alive.
At the time, not knowing this, I would lie in bed at the close of the day, begging God for an end. Like seeking permission to give up.
The answer was distinct: impression and intent of meaning more than words, not from my characters but from something else, Do you want to tell the stories set aside for you?
Yes, I would say. I didn’t want anything else, but I wanted that, even if it felt like a dangling carrot to keep me here, keep me moving forward. The shapes of stories that were mine to tell, waiting in the wings. If I left, I would be giving up my chance to tell them, to belong to them, to grow alongside them. I cared about them.
Then stay, the impressions-beings-guides said.
I’ll stay.
Even if I have no idea how.
***
When I could do nothing else, I listened to guided meditations.
I sought help with creative-life coaches/therapists.
I pretended everything was fine to the rest of the world, and ended the last of the toxic-traumatic relationships and acknowledged the end of our collaboration and close friendship to the universe. I went no/minimal contact with family, who only ever wanted to own (or scorn) me, anyway.
I left the country and traveled to my second language.
I moved my characters and stories to the safety of a pen name, where the stalking would end, the constant scorn, criticism, defensiveness, possessiveness, and hostility would end from people who were close to me.
One star reviews are fine, in comparison.
I recognize that this is also no guarantee. People behave badly. A name can be discovered. Stalking and clinging, possessiveness can continue by new people and new contexts. But it’s a fresh start, a moment’s separation, a return of the natural order of things: for books to find the readers who will love them honestly without going first to those who will hate the experience of reading it, all because they first claim to love.
***
I no longer trust what people say or believe it has any weight. Truth—or misalignment—is found in the resonance behind the words.
Feelings, pain, and instincts matter. Even if they don’t feel like they do.
***
Writer’s block for me has been a story of desertification and blunt-force trauma. Of things akin to spell-casting and emotional murder.
It sounds so far-fetched when I write it down into words intended to be shared. There’s no way anyone will believe this. I suppose this is why you can trust my fiction. If you see someone slaughtered by friendship, held hostage by their emotions, most of which belong to others, and uncertain how to recover their own soul, that would be an author self-insert character.
The rest belong to themselves. I’m only grateful they still wish to be my friend so I can write their stories and share their journeys.
***
Here’s to writing an alternative to the typical “writer’s block” story.
If it resonates with you, then this piece has value. If it doesn’t, then I suppose I’ve opened you up to a new piece of the world. (Here’s to new experiences.)
***
May you find what you’re looking for.
May love be true, and whole, and good.