Fighting With My Writing

None of my flesh-and-blood husbands ever accused me of being married to my writing but I am. In fact, it’s the longest and deepest relationship I’ve had in my life — starting as a tween writing bad odes to the passage of time (“Oh Time, Zipper Your Fly”) and cataloguing the drama of high school in frayed and tear-stained journals. Writing erupted early in me and has dogged me ever since and yes indeed we are now like an old married couple, fighting the same decades-long fight and alternating between hatred and deep love. I wish I could just leave my writing, as I have men, jobs, and toxic places but here I am at the damn keyboard again, being seduced and per usual, I’m succumbing. I’m such a slut.

When he was in eighth grade my oldest son said something that seems apropos of writing: The best thing about banging your head against a wall is how good it feels when you stop. For a myriad of reasons I want to stop, I do. It’s painful, sometimes, this writing life. And it’s not like I’m making my living this way. So I don’t have to pander for money or an audience, I just have to be me which is the problem, I guess. Truthfully, the way I write probably undermines Business Phyllis (I run a virtual Academic Coaching service for high school kids) because my Writing demands that I be raw, naked, real, cursing, mocking and stirring up trouble. You can just imagine what they think of THAT on LinkedIn. In a recent article about how I really wanted Trump to suffer and die I revealed that I once carried a handgun into the mountains and was ready to shoot a man who might follow me…