Years
ago I smoked. It was back in the time of eyes watering within
thirty seconds of walking into a bar. I smoked at school, at work, hell I
could smoke while waiting in the doctor’s office. Cigarettes were less than
fifty cents a pack and I smoked three packs a day. If I didn’t have at least a three pack back-up
in my purse when I left the house I panicked.
Two things got
me to quit. I started tapping on a fourth pack and I lived with a guy who never
smoked. (We will be married 35 years in a few months). His friends didn’t smoke
either, I always had to hunt down an ash tray when I went to their houses. This
was before friends and family had you take your secondhand smoke outside. Partner
and peer presser was a strong thing but that I was so addicted to the ‘habit of
smoking’ made me uncomfortable.
I wondered,
what must it be like to not smoke? Imagining
a world without my three-plus pack a day habit was impossible.
“If
I quit,” I said to my live-in, “what do I do between courses of a meal in a
restaurant?” He was quiet for a few seconds, not really believing that smoking
between the appetizer and the main meal might be a reason to continue blackening
my lungs and emptying my wallet.
“Talk,” he said.
“Oh, of course,”
I said feeling as if the nicotine had already worn holes in my feeble brain as
well as my lungs.
That was 36
years ago. I won’t go into how I actually quit, (oh yes I will), suffice to say
that God stepped in and gave me the flu. If I smoked I felt sick. After a week
of nothing but ginger ale and Saltines, I decided if I didn’t take advantage of
the fact that I was already one week in to not smoking, I would never be able
to quit cold turkey again. (This was before there were drugs to help you get
over the hump).
I never smoked
again, not once, never ever.
If I had not quit smoking when I did, I am convinced I'd be bankrupt or dead.
Which has me
wondering now,
what it’s like to not (habitually)
write, to not (want) to write, to not take pleasure in my by-lines or the quest
for a title page, to not think about writing when I’m not thinking about
writing? If I don’t leave the house with a head full of ideas or a quick
focus on one, I panic. What would I do during my evenings (like right now) if I
were not sitting here tapping away?
“Talk”
to my husband? I don’t think so, he’s upstairs watching TV from the inside of
his eyelids.
What if I had
not started writing my first book during the hell-week of ten years ago, when I
took on a new, very demanding job, my dad was dying, my strong mom became an
empty husk of neediness, our oldest went off to college and we delivered our
youngest to her very first dorm room, in a place she did not want to be. What
if, in my empty house and changed life, I had not placed my ass in a chair every
night and put my MC in a car headed west away from her own miserable life? She
was alone but I rode shotgun. I gave her a new life, while not realizing at the
time, I was wanting any other life but my own. What if I didn’t have that book
to edit when my mom past-away seven months after my father did?
That book saved
my life, and yet, (after a hundred or so queries, which did not garner one
request for a full), you’ll never get to read it.
What if I didn’t
write a second book and a third book, or the hundreds of op-eds and essays that have put a
little change in my pocket? What if I stopped writing before I became a columnist,
before my picture accompanied my column and strangers recognized me over the
broccoli endcap at Stop and Shop? As difficult and frustrating as writing is,
as tough (and enlightening) as rejection can be, I cannot even imagine a life
without my words being carefully and deliberately placed on a page.
So, I guess if I
get the flu and subsist on nothing but ginger ale and Saltines, I’ll still write.
The skill, from synapse to fingertips, takes me away just like my first novel
did. It saves my life every single day.
Does it save
yours?
