I’m going to write a novel this year, is what I told you.
But first I’ll tell you my journaling story.
Journaling wasn’t a habit that started as a teen or when I switched from chemical engineering to rhetoric in college. I only started journaling around the time I started drinking heavily, when I was 29 and my first marriage ended. That first marriage was a classic too-young, too-impetuous starter-marriage that was never going to work, but I had always wanted to be married. I wrote previously about my intense love of “thirtysomething", which likely reflects that desire to meet a family man expectation. So the split hit me hardest in the identity.
In 2003 and 2004, living alone in an 80s-era 4-bedroom house in a near suburb of Austin, I quickly ramped up my drinking to a bottle of vodka and 1-3 bottles of wine per day, more on the weekends, since there was no one to hold me accountable. I got the two dogs in the divorce, and I had a yard, so I was able to keep them alive. Somehow I never lost my job, but I didn’t advance either. I got by.
I journaled openly and obsessively, entertaining every awful thought, recording some awful behavior, and ranting. I would habitually fill my journals with iffy draft poetry and pages of self-hatred and resentments. In later years, I journaled less often, but I still wrote a couple times per week through 2019 and beyond, but 2019 was the inflection point.
In 2019, I went to jail for a DWI. My drinking was already undoing that marriage, and it had either grown worse when we had a child in 2017, or it had more significant ramifications when I couldn’t stop. My journaling continued unabated.
After jail I went to rehab, and while I was in rehab, my wife read all of my journals. I had thrown the oldest ones out at some point, but there were at least eight years of them. I have serial killer handwriting, which I’m sure intensified the impact of drowning oneself in my constant, seething entitlement, resentment, self-hatred and deception.
I had also had a brief but also very dumb affair that humiliated her, and I wrote some very ugly things about her that were traumatic to read. She ran up thousands of dollars of legal bills while I was in rehab, then, understandably, filed for divorce before I checked out. She concluded that the person in the journals was the “real me” and her husband was an imposter.
When I got the journals back, they were hard for me to read, too, since due to my regular blackouts, half the pages were as new to me as well. It wasn’t until I read them that I accepted that we really did not have a path forward. Then I threw the old journals away. I put them in my trash three days before pickup, and didn’t fish them out.
For my entire life, I’d been afraid that once someone knows the real me, they will abandon me. Then that happened.
Journaling has been hugely important for my recovery, but four years later, I still don’t feel safe while writing. There’s a third-person view, like I have to choose words carefully. I can’t shake the sense that writing is inherently inauthentic. I’m trying very hard to present this story as neutrally as possible, without oversharing, without casting myself as a victim, but also explaining the anxiety, and that I no longer truly have journaling as a place to empty out my brain, to write things that aren’t true to see how they look.
I have to explain myself every second of every day.
Chen Chen, from “Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency”. I’m the cat with three different names.
I’ve grown a lot in sobriety. I’m good with the serenity prayer, not only recognizing what’s beyond my control, but immediately internalizing when things are not, shrugging and moving on with clarity. I don’t obsess about much anymore, since obsession was typically a salve for blotting out ongoing pain. My positive feedback loop of alcohol and obsession is broken. I’ve worked hard to get here.
But writing a novel? That’s 100% under my control, which means I collapse into a multidimensional nut-punch of shame when I write.
I’ve written 16 pages in January of my novel project. I write slowly, by hand, and I have a busy day job, so 16 pages is a number I’m proud of. But I’m expecting the overall theme of the book to involve a collapse of the perception of time for one main character, and an equal-and-opposite expansion through the other, set in two different time periods with ghostly dialogues between them, like I’m Jorge Luis Borges. It’s asking an awful lot.
At the same time, I’m positive my treatment is utterly facile and obvious. Also, I’m reading Deborah Levy’s “August Blue”, which is punctuated with dialogues between a character and her doppelgänger very much like the ones I framed out a week before starting her book, and I’m all “Well, shit, I am a derivative fuck. If anyone reads this, they’ll be like - Oh, he read ‘August Blue’.”
One word at a time, I guess.
Related - before I leave the house, I mentally catalog my brands. If I’m carrying, say, the Freitag bag, I have to use the Bellroy wallet, not the Freitag wallet, that kind of thing. I’m afraid if I’m carrying a Billykirk bag, and I pull out my journal in its Billykirk cover, someone’s going to stop and ask if I’m some kind of Billykirk Brand Ambassador and then I will shatter and melt into the sidewalk like a broken snow globe.
I threw out all the notebooks, but kept the journal cover. I’m writing my novel in it to try to imbue it with some fresh ghosts.
Anyway, it’s not like Deborah Levy invented ghostly cross-dimensional dialogues and she seems like a very cool lady who gave no fucks about it.
Sobriety tends to mean living with a lot of ghosts, some of whom are awful and some who you took for granted for a long time. They talk a lot.
Writing a novel is 100% in my control. Today, I choose to put that on my gratitude list.