Did you write as a teenager? Do you remember writing texts other than those assigned at school? At the age of thirteen I latched onto my first diary like a leech to an exposed wrist, carrying it with me always to prevent others from finding it and reading it. Writing down the pain and confusion was the only thing that helped.

Besides having to worry constantly that someone might find and read the diary, the other problem was that an entry re-read a few days later had zero recognition factor. Who had written this? Who had harbored these intense crazy feelings? Certainly not I. The person writing was obviously depressed in a manner that sunny me reading the diary could never identify with. Or the opposite; posts chirpy enough to elicit a vomiting reflex from a me who recognized the world for the bleak place it was. Writing letters was worse, as a reader other than myself would be involved. When I arrived at the end of a page I could no longer identify with the self that had started writing at the top. Eventually I learned that resisting the temptation to re-read something I had written long enough that I no longer expected to identify with it helped. Usually ten years was enough, but sometimes twenty was needed.

The past six months were one long reminder of this fundamental truth about writing: that in order to write you need a stable self. If your vantage point keeps shifting there’s no knowing how to evaluate what is happening. Writing something that you will disagree with next day is just distressing. You just wait for the guy holding the kaleidoscope to get tired of turning it. Heck, knowing who I was for fifteen minutes straight would have helped. Having a full scale war inside one’s skull is not conducive to writing. The number of potential selves which I feared ending up becoming was larger than two but fewer than ten. I feared I would turn out to be:  

1)     A love addict who keeps falling in love with unavailable men, or

2)     a person who meets the love of her life at the age of forty-seven, which might or might not include being

3)     a liar and a cheat, or

4)     a person who leaves the love of her life at the age of forty-seven, thereby breaking his heart, or

5)     a groupie (of the kind that sits in bars with wine-rosy cheeks and plunging necklines exposing wrinkled skin), or  

6)     a sucker, and or

7)     a martyr, and most certainly,

8)     hungry of heart.

Writing about Dad during the period when I did not know who I would become  worked, but only because Dad is equally and consolingly unable to communicate with me regardless of who I am.

The self which I did not foresee becoming was the one that actually emerged: A person who found the perfect actor for a six-month psychodrama that changed the lives of all actors on the set FOR THE BETTER. Those who needed mothering got mothered. Those needing validation got validated. Those who needed to prove that they were in control of their impulses were assured that God was on their side through one easy victory after another. Those petrified of people and women and themselves dared to take affordable risks and were richly rewarded in ice cream, backrubs and books. Those who yearned to play cats got an audience more appreciative than they could have dreamed of. And it was never too late and no one used their superego and for once everyone got both what they wanted AND what they needed. Which was to love and be loved, though those involved may have disagreed on which was the want and which was the need.

I did that. I wrote the script and cast the actors and directed it and acted in it. And I built the stage, plank by bloody plank, nail by bloody nail, while the actors were sleeping at night. We got standing ovations. That is a self I can live with and write out of.