This creative process is not simple. I’m finding that I’m not being pulled into the writing like I used to be, as a therapeutic tool, as a way to unload, as a survival method. Because I’m not in survival mode anymore. I’m living. Actually living a real, healthy, good life for probably the first time ever.

But so much of what I want to write about is the past. What happened, what I went through, how I got here, in this good place. From there, that bad place. And I’m mostly okay with that but I find that I have to take those backwards glances in small doses. Otherwise I begin to feel the pull of the dark side….the place I crawled and clawed my way out of to get to the light. And I will not sell my soul to that demon of darkness again, even if it means I will need to work in small increments over a long period of time to tell my tales. So be it.

And so my task is the re-creating of myself as a writer. Because when I was on the dark side I thought that that was part of my identity as a creative being. The sadness, the despair, the drinking, the drama, the tortured soul; it was, I believed, who I was and part of the writer persona. I cried, I poured my anguish out onto the blank page, I poured another glass of wine, I cried more…the cycle went round and round until I was drowning in that darkness and could not find the surface to come up for air. I could not write, I could not think, I could not function.

It took a village and a God to help me. And I am grateful and breathing and smiling and living a life I did not believe I deserved. And I want to share the journey with others who are lost in the night. So I have to tread lightly and take small backwards glances.

It starts with the First Step.