HEIDI REIMER
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Writing for My Life

4/11/2014

4 Comments

 
“I need to be writing,” I wrote to my best friend Anena a couple weeks ago, “because that's the only thing that will jump-start me out of this low-grade depression and inertia.”

I felt, that week, stuck in a slump, like I am doing nothing with my life. Like wife and motherhood has turned out to hold all the traps and terrors I feared it would. Though I can hold this thought in my mind—motherhood wrecked my life (yes, please tell me others have thought this thought?)—at the same time as I can watch my adorable daughters, their animated faces, their thoughts fascinatingly expressed, with so much love it's practically obsessive. 

But low-level depression and inertia. That’s what I wrote, that day. Husband away, full-time solo parenting, a never-ending winter, but most of all: I haven’t been writing.

I have a new project. A book I have begun—barely—to write, that I have waited four years to begin writing, since I first had the idea while in the middle of writing the book that I’ve recently finished. I even have a small grant giving me the go-ahead, the validation, the extra padding in the bank, to help me begin writing it. There’s an outline in my computer. There are a dozen pages long-hand in my notebook.

The space between books? The completion of a work that is so solid and established, characters you know as though they are yourself, the leap to the new, the un-nailed-down, the nebulous floating maybe possibility? Scary.

I downloaded an interview with Dani Shapiro on the Good Life Project later that day. Dani Shapiro said, "The time between books is a time when a kind of low-level inertia and depression sets in. It's almost as if the world has less colour in it when I'm not writing."

And I cried, hearing that, because my condition had been named, using the very words I'd used to describe my symptoms. 

A diagnosis with a cure.

I’ve been writing since then. Writing the new book. Writing for my life.

Also, spring, finally, has arrived.

4 Comments
Marcia Polas link
4/15/2014 01:58:34 am

Heidi:
I'm neither a writer nor a mother. But I'll use Dani Shapiro's words through you the next time I describe what it feels like when I am at a loss for opportunities to pursue my work to the degree I crave.

"It's almost as if the world has less colour in it when I'm not..."

Leave it to a writer (two I guess) to so perfectly express what I feel so deeply in my soul.

My other thought was, how lucky you (and I) are to be called so strongly to your work that you feel its lack so profoundly. I'll remind myself of this the next time the colors dim.
Warmly (and often vividly) - Marcia

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Heidi Reimer
4/15/2014 05:43:36 am

Thank you for such a lovely comment, Marcia. I love how you put it--yes, we are lucky to know what it is we need to do, and to have a body and soul that pull us toward it so strongly that we feel wrong when we're not doing it.

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Sarah Crumlich
4/16/2014 08:05:32 am

Heidi, Thank you for writing what is in my heart. Four and a half moths of winter submerged motherhood and I am feeling colorless, sapped of strength and focus, and incredibly absorbed and exhausted by this little one in my life. I have been wondering where I will find the strength to get back into the studio. And then I read your post. Thank you for the hope it contains and gives me. I realize that I need to invest in this work, the visions in my head worked and reworked until something becomes and has life, has color. I need to give, to open the doors, to enlist the help, to make a way for the work to continue. It has been far too long and my mind, body, and soul need to invest in the ways that are enriching. Thank you!!

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Heidi Reimer
4/17/2014 11:05:42 am

Oh, Sarah, I've seen your photos on FB and wondered how you were doing. Thank you so much for sharing. I know exactly what you're saying. It's so hard...to hold onto what you know you need for your own flourishing, and even to acknowledge and insist that it should be and has to be a priority. Five years into this mothering thing, I still forget how important it is not only for me but for them. I see evidence regularly that I'm a better mother when I'm writing/doing what fulfills me.

I wish we could sit down and talk about all this. I'd love to hear more of how it's been going for you.

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