Out of and into the blue

A few weeks ago, in my professional context, I was contacted by a publishing company for a “paid writing opportunity.” The contact was random, the email imprecise, though a little digging indicated they were likely approaching me for a self-help style book. When I talked to the acquisitions editor, it was clear that the person did not know my psychotherapy specialties and likely had not looked at my website or professional blog, though someone from the company had done some sleuthing to find me in the first place. I rejected a few topics that were out of my scope of competence, finally choosing something of relative interest from an extensive list. One signed nondisclosure agreement later, I approved a very detailed outline. I just about had the writing sample in the bag when I heard back from the acquisitions editor. Someone had beaten me to the completed sample and had been chosen to write the book. They would contact me (perhaps) in the future for another topic.

This was a disappointment. It was also a relief, given the time to complete the ~200 page book was sixty days from the signing of the contract, two months that would overlap with the boy’s summer vacation and free time in perhaps one of the last summers he’ll be just hanging out. Even the process of completing the writing sample got in the way of family time, coming with my mother’s first visit in a year and a half. The topic didn’t set me on fire and the publishing company churns out material, so this offer was mixed. High art, or even low art, it was not. And I would have to enlist the support of my professional and personal community to generate some sort of buzz.

However, it would have been the first time I have really been paid for writing. It would have given me the experience of writing a book and the impetus to do so. Based on what I did for the writing sample, I have the capacity to write such a book. However, I have no idea what people are interested in reading and lack the confidence and internal motivation to complete a large-scale project. Meanwhile, I’m left with a fairly specific sample that includes multiple sections. Perhaps I can adapt it for my professional blog, but I’m not interested enough at this point to do the crafting. I’d much rather write about anxiety and it ties to our families or something that feels personal and universal all at once.

Anyway. I write it out here because I can’t share it elsewhere. And maybe they will be in touch again and I’ll get the contract and have something out there published under my name, circulating in the world. But the experience was so random and over so quickly that I wonder if it will be repeated—and whether there are other ways to incorporate serious writing into my life. After all, they found me after I revamped my professional blog. What would it be like to really focus on writing what I am interested in and finding an audience that way?

Waiting room

The scene, a large living room in a medium-sized city in the San Francisco Bay Area. One child, newly 15, occupies a long sofa. To his right, a sleeping greyhound. On the midcentury modern coffee table, a sleek and simple bit of teak, he works out problems in preparation for a math placement test. Across from him, sitting in a chair bought at a Manhattan flea market twenty years ago, a man in his mid-50s scrolls down his iPhone, a pile of math printouts for review on his lap. To his right, a greyhound melts from his dog bed onto the floor. Then there's me, female, still 50, occupying another piece of teak modernity, the armrests polished and round, pale kitty curled to my right.

The boy went fishing with a friend this morning (masks on!). My husband and I went for a walk that turned into a 4.5 mile hike. We are toned and lightly tanned. Four plus months in to this pandemic, I am in the best physical shape I’ve been for years, thanks to lots of walks, hikes, and Bodyfit by Amy workouts. There will be no in-person school for who knows how long. My husband will be working from home for a similar amount of time. And I have started to see select clients in person with lots of precautions, though I am pretty much giving away my services to 80% of my clients online or in person. There is so much need and many of the folks in need do not have sufficient (or any) income to pay psychotherapy fees out of pocket (and insurance coverage is another thing altogether). Once I hear their stories, I can’t justify charging full fee. This feels good on one level and suboptimal on another.

We are a privileged group. Our income is stable and covers our expenses. We have access to many things, including technology, healthy food, physical space, health insurance and lots of time. Still, I worry about the effects of this isolation on the boy. I am sad and scared for the world and for people that don’t have our privileges. I worry about the earth. I do what I can in my small form of redistribution. But who knows what life will be like four, six, twelve months from now?

Did anything happen while I was gone?

It’s been a long time since I’ve used this space as an outlet, as a place to communicate. I almost let my squarespace wts account lapse, a kind of passive abandonment of the my long-dormant therapeutic writing space. But I’m not quite ready to let this space wither into an unoccupied domain name.

Finding time to write, to think in solitude, is harder now than when I first started the blog. Turns out being home with a teenager, another adult, and a host of other mammals while the adults have to work and teen hangs around (in a charming manner — we’re lucky duckies right now, really, which is a strange thing to say given the larger horrors of the pandemic and the state of things in the U.S.) — well, it takes up more time and space than parenting a toddler. And I’m not the tortured soul I once was. My internal writhing is at a minimum.

Still—I need to write. Sometimes about my work, which is tricky. I’m going to try an experiment. Once or twice a week, I’ll check in here. I know there aren’t many people reading at this point, so perhaps it will be like the early days of writing to survive. These won’t be polished, anguished posts. Just things I can fit into the spaces of a day. Likely short. Perhaps dull. Or not. We’ll see.

Lying in wait (a screed)

I’m feeling petulant in this week of disappointments, way too old to pout and sophisticated enough to know passive aggression when I display it, the urge to subtly pollute the waters, to leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouths.

Late cancellations in a full schedule. Those who take the easy out. The not-listeners and eager beavers. The ones whose motives are unclear even to themselves.

But here I am, sharpening the old pencil (readying the shiv?), a reliable carpenter in an unreliable world. Sure, I’ve slipped out the door. I’ve not returned the call. I have let the better part of me say yes and the worst part of me decide not to go at the last minute. And I have a job that prides itself on reliability and airing things out. 

Last night, I dreamed one of our greyhounds got away from me. We were walking along a California coastline cliff, some dream version of Point Reyes. The path was barely big enough for one person. Lorca was on lead, Hugo was not. His first disappearance was down to the water in a pack of other dogs. He frolicked. I called. He eventually returned.

The second time was my fault. The weather went from sunshine to snow. I sought higher ground, a wider path up the hill. Hugo did not come. Hugo! Hugo! Hugo! I could not see him. The hillside steepened. Children created slick paths with their sleds, icy slopes to the lower path. Hugo! Hugo! Hugo! Lorca and I took a step along the hillside and the snow beneath us began to slip. I woke up to that sensation of falling, Hugo’s name still in my throat.

Sometimes, the responsibility of it destroys me.

From the prompt Lying in the wait

Surfacing

I keep a bowl full of crystals in my office. This is not for new age reasons. I do not focus on the healing, energetic properties of rocks. I find them beautiful and fascinating, something of heft and cut to hold in the hand, to trace with a finger, for a client to press into Crazy Aaron’s thinking putty and distract themselves with patterns. Some of the crystals have their outer skins, the dull rock they emerged from, still intact. The average person would never know the color and edge that rough dullness contains.

This is what I think of when I remember the Elk, a brown-green, mucky-bottomed river on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, weekend and summer cottage spot for the lower middle class of Delaware and Pennsylvania (at least in the 1950s-80s, when my mother and I were growing up). Appearances are deceiving. What this river contains is childhood, freedom, skinny-dipping, sex, the undertow of passing ships moving from the C&D canal to the Chesapeake Bay.

When my mother’s well went dry, she filled five gallon buckets with water from the Elk to tide her over. The first night I met D, it was in the parking lot next to the beach, a memory attached to memories that fill me with yearning, regret, and sadness. From the phone booth next to the clubhouse that my grandfather totaled when driving drunk to the homemade raft created from barrels and planks to the crab pots attached to the pier – crack open the memories, go beneath the surface, and what exists is something dead and gone and alive in my mind, in the stories I tell

From the prompt: Child swimming