Plans for the New Year?
I think they include the usual, which means finishing the memoir (ha!). I also want to write a lot more, and send it off to magazines and journals, online and print. I seem to spend too much time fluffing around on the internet, and too much time not writing and not reading books. I would like to earn more money, but that's common to most of us, isn't it? Considering I earn hardly anything, however, I really need to earn more money!
And what will I write, besides the memoir? Creative non-fiction, and whatever fiction comes. Medical matters interest me, how we cope with illness, or not; how we cope with other people's illness, or not. Parents and children interest me, and how adults become parents, and how adults behave as parents. My own experience as a daughter has shown me that no amount of well-meaning makes up for the damage done by mental illness, paranoia, emotional manipulation and a mania for control.
What is the fate of this memoir that hangs around like a bad smell? I lose heart, get bored, then become enthusiastic for a while, then that slips away and I don't write for a long time. It's the writing in a void, it's the pain, it's the pointlessness sometimes. For whom am I writing? It's to let others know what it means to live with a mentally ill parent, what my mother and I suffered, what my father suffered. It's to correct the balance, to show that behind the laugh that seems to come so easily lies the hurt that never goes away.
Many of us wear masks, it's nothing unusual. Too many of us forget, or are ignorant, that this is so.
