By Helen Hokanson
How Has Writing Helped You Through Difficult Times?
I came to writing through a side door. Far into adulthood, I started working with writers as a part of my job. These strange creatures, these writers, were demanding services from their public library and I unwittingly agreed to provide them. Those first requests came, and continue to come, in demands for a library-sponsored writing group. One creative writing group, coming right up! After sharing their first assignments, they all looked to me asking, “where’s yours?” And so I wrote.
Not willingly. Then, as now, I don’t call myself a writer. Even as I sit here typing, I’m still not a writer. It’s not the thing I do unless someone makes me.
A long number of years ago my brother broke his neck in a car accident. A shorter number of years ago, I moved into his unfinished basement under the delusion that my presence would be mutually beneficial.
It wasn’t. While I certainly made things different, I made nothing better.
The situation quickly devolved into me becoming a full time caregiver on top of my full time job. My drinking became an act of survival and I spent more money living rent-free than I had on a mortgage with over-inflated HOA fees.
Nothing was easy and everything I did to make it better was wasted effort. Barkley, the ill-behaved dog next door just wouldn’t quit acting like an animal. On our walks, I required my 115 pound Max to sit like a good dog, while Barkley ferociously attacked him. His owners looked passively on, shrugging their shoulders, wondering what they could possibly do. Barkley’s a Yorkie for God’s sake and Max just had to put up with him. I spent an entire paycheck on a trainer who helped me keep Max in the yard so we could be outside together. It was a waste. The first time Barkley came to visit, Max almost killed him. Blood, both mine and Barkley’s, dripped down my arms as I carried him to his home and the sidewalk stains remained for months afterward. I still have to remind myself that I don’t really wish I’d let Max kill him and when I visit I have to suppress the urge to kick him across the street.
Mornings were fraught with worry that my brother’s caregiver wouldn’t show up again and I would have to call in to work. When she did show up, her boyfriend du jour always accompanied her, so the first person I saw, every morning, without fail, was her meth-head boyfriend on the sofa. I would come up the stairs for coffee or to shower, and there he would sit, a sour lump, backlit by the sunrise. A silhouette. Every morning. Every morning I began my day greeting an unresponsive, tooth-rotted, greasy stranger.
In the most bone-headed financial decision in the history of mankind, I had a shower put in the basement. I’m probably still paying for it.
And the list goes on. His manipulative ex-wife, his spoiled children. His needy service dog, my anchorless and drifting son, all the way to my own dysfunctional family, it was all just so hard.
The affection I felt for my niece and nephew was becoming harder and harder to express. Pal, my brother’s service dog, was always desperate for affection and wasn’t supposed to be in the basement with me and Max, but upstairs with the one who needed him. He was bred, born, raised, and trained specifically to care for someone, and that someone wasn’t me. We were kindred spirits and hearing him breathe through the crack under the door that separated us was torturous. He was trained to open doors and I often woke in the night with his weight happily pressed against my leg. Of all the hard things, sending him upstairs was always the hardest.
My son, whose plans had come unraveled, moved into the basement with me. He wasn’t working, and would spend his days doing . . . who knows what? I had nothing to offer him. No wisdom to impart. In fact, the tables had turned and even as he existed in limbo, he might have saved me.
One thing I initially continued to do for myself was to volunteer at the Clay Guild. In exchange for four hours of work each week, I got free studio time. I eventually gave it up, for I never actually had time to take advantage of it.
After I had finished my Guild chores; mopping, washing ware boards, and hanging wet towels, I would browse the micro-library. Sometimes reading magazines about glaze, clay, and techniques I would never use. Other times studying the coffee table books with pictures of beautiful ceramic pieces and their makers.
What Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way was doing there I can’t say. I kept noticing it, because, like me, it didn’t fit. It had nothing to do with ceramics and it called to me. One week I perused and it went back on the shelf. The next week I read the introduction. The next, the first chapter, The Basic Principles. I didn’t so much discover it as it persistently suggested itself to me. The day I read about the Morning Pages, where Cameron instructs you to write three long-hand pages every morning, is the day I took it home intending to bring it back when finished.
When the highlighter came out, my intent changed from bringing the book back to replacing it with a new copy.
That’s where writing truly started for me. In a sad, lonely place where I really didn’t want to do it anymore. I haven’t looked at those early journals, but I remember sitting quietly with my coffee in the early mornings mostly staring out the window. Thoughts too rapid and messy to put on paper. Journal and pen in my lap, not really even writing, but simply letting my mind spin in the quiet. I don’t know. Maybe someday I’ll look.
I eventually called the Employee Assistance Program and saw . . . someone. Was she a shrink? A therapist? A counselor? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. She suggested that I had a lot of thoughts and that I needed to organize them. The Morning Pages is where I explored the questions she asked: What do I want for my brother? What do I want for my son? And what do I want for myself?
I’ve left my brother’s home in search of my own. I took all my journals and continue to fill new ones in exploration of those three persistent questions. What do I want? What do I want? What do I want?