Being Happy
What, exactly—this is what I would like to know—what, precisely, is wrong with me?
I’ve wanted to be a writer as long as I can remember. I’ve wanted to be a writer so long that it’s no longer something I want to be, it’s just… something… something to be. Something I am. I guess. I think of myself as a writer. If someone asked me who I was, that’s probably one of the first things I’d say. “Druid writer,” or something like that. Or, “a writer, who also practices Druidry”… My spiritual life and my creative life, aside from being intimately entwined, have always been the two most important things to me.
Writing makes me happy. The way breathing makes me happy, or feeling my heart beat when it’s beating regularly and without any murmurs or problems. Writing makes me happy the way lakes and wind and oceans and rocks and tress and sunlight make me happy.
So why can’t I allow myself to be happy? What is this bizarre mental block that I have? I know that once I get into a groove, I’ll be happy, I’ll be prolific, and I’ll even be pleasantly surprised by some of the things I’ll write.
During those several weeks when I managed to write a whole half-a-book, I felt alive, completely at peace with myself and my work, energized and eager to start each day. I had a routine—breakfast, morning walk, write (all in silence), then lunch, errands and/or coffee shop dawdling, maybe more evening writing, relax, enjoy. I was happy, I was productive, I had no life whatsoever. What happened? I don’t understand why I stopped.
I think, perhaps, it was because I would rather be In Control than be happy. This is a powerful realization. Let’s go with it. The same has been true in my spiritual life. I may pick up a practice and stick with it steadily, until I can feel it starting to take effect. Then suddenly I panic. Meditation: all well and good. Creative visualization: certainly very nice. Hill-walking: nothing better on a fine day. But too much consistency and commitment, and I can start to feel myself change, I can feel my powers of concentration and perception growing stronger, sharper. And I think it frightens me a little. So I stop.
The reason I stopped working on my book is because I had been writing it as a gift. I had built up a myth about how I would write this amazing novel, and give it to the person I love, and he would fall (back) in love with me. Then, suddenly, two things happened: (a) the happier I became with my work, the happier I became while with him, until I could hardly stand it (things between us not really having changed), and (b) a backlash suddenly hit me, during which I realized it was pointless, he would never fall back in love with me no matter what, and I had no reason to write the thing. The story wanted to go somewhere else. Not down the happy-romance lane. And I was afraid of both letting go of my original plan and purpose, and afraid that if I let go and lost control, that might actually result in what I had been planning and hoping for, and my relationship with this person might have benefited from it (even if not blossomed into romance).
Control. In a chaotic, unjust world, I want control. I know too much for my own good. What I want most of all is to be able to write. But somewhere people are dying, starving, struggling, and right here are many, many people drifting along in relatively directionless, stagnant lives. I could journal about these things forever—but what I really want, what really makes me happy, is to write, creatively. I suspect that the reason I don’t just stop what I’m doing and write is because I do not trust the world not to fuck everything up and render itself incapable of accepting what I have stepped aside to create. If that makes any sense…
Psychoanalysis bullshit. What’s wrong with me? Here I am, writing about not writing, trying to justify it instead of simply turning the DVD player off, sitting down quietly and doing the goddamn thing. Writing makes me happy. So why is it so difficult?
Why can’t I just relax and do what makes me happy?
~ by Ali on January 12, 2009.
Ali
A young woman seeking to establish herself as a "working poet" while pursuing a life founded in contemplation, wild wisdom and creative, loving freedom. 
OK. This is my take on the matter.
There is nothing wrong with you beyond the fact you have forgotten a basic principle that, as a student of the spiritual and mystical, you must have come across a thousand times. That is, if you use your gift for personal gain, you lose the gift.
You have a not inconsiderable talent for writing. This makes you a conduit for stories. You cannot control the story. All you can do is control the way in which it is told – your style, vocabulary, making use of your own experience and social milieu as interpretive filters. You can work on these, improve them, and experiment with them. Have fun with them. But the minute you start using them for something other than telling the story, you have to face the fact that either the story will go away and you will not be able to finish or you will mangle it and produce pap.
As a poet you allow the story, the moment, the emotion, to be expressed. Poems and novels may be inspired by our emotional attachments, by the mess that’s inside our heads, by the longing to make sense of that and of the world beyond. We are not chosen to be diplomats or great spiritual leaders or whatever else it might take to make the world a better place. We are chosen are interpreters. We write down stories – those things which help others understand themselves and the world better. But that can never be our motive, just as wanting to impress someone or make large amounts of money can never be our motive. Not if we want to write well and honestly. Not if we want to write at all.
This may sound hard, but having any gift is hard. Some people exploit them. I have no doubt you could perfectly acceptable novels and make good money at it. But I doubt that is what your writing means to you. There are rewards, as you well know. When you allow the story to be told, when you open yourself to it (rather than your own agenda), you write, you become lost in the telling (as perhaps ancestral Bards were wont to do), you become a magician, you are happy.
So. You must either abandon your current work and all the baggage that comes with it, lock it away in a box and bury it in the woods (and run if you hear the drums start beating); or you must disentangle the story from those emotional attachments and give yourself back to the story and allow it to take you and itself where it will.
Grum said this on January 13, 2009 at 4:59 am