by Audrey Faye
Staying in my own skin. Listen to the wisdom of my ribs. I had the lesson. I understood it and I believed it and I’d seen the awesome cool things it was capable of rendering in my life. I wanted to keep going. But man, sometimes my feet hurt. This was hard work, in a very intense environment, and it’s not always so easy to keep listening.
Because when you’ve spent forty-four years hanging out in the ether, your head, and the faraway corners of imagination, it’s impressively hard to stay present in your own skin.
I didn’t want to have to do this on sheer guts. This new magic of mine was so much more fun when I didn’t turn it into a test of exhausted endurance.
So I went seeking experiences that helped keep me in my body. (No, not that one, not yet at least!)
I tried a bunch of things, and some of them make me giggle, even now. But four became my touchstones.
The first I already had in my tool kit from the early days. Go outside. Touch the elements as deeply, as simply, as fiercely, as often as possible.
The next one came from my kick-ass guide person, who has a whole lot of experience with those of us who have troubles staying put in our skin. She sent me off to hold bottles of things and rocks and crystals and see how they felt.
Not what Google or a label or a helpful shop owner said they should do. How they felt.
Yup. Deep woo. The kind of stuff that my wildly skeptical brain might have cast a veto over, except that the bottles and rocks did have things to say. Lots of things. A pretty orange rock laced with red talked of bravery and voicing what needed to be said. A gentle pink one made me want to curl up and sleep on a cloud. Then there was a bottle that held ancient heartbeats, and one that welled up grief the moment I touched it.
I carried these things in my pockets for months, whichever one or two called to me at the time. Touched them. Felt the meaning they held for me.
And I opened to the woo. After the chatty bottles and rocks, I was pretty much game to try anything once. I badly wanted a massage one day, and I figured it might be a good way to sink into my skin. The massage therapist who came up closest to me on Google maps was also an aromatherapist. And an energy worker, and a bunch of other things she doesn’t put on her website, because there aren’t a lot of words for the work that she does, or maybe because she might scare people. One day I’ll have to ask her.
I’ve spent most of my life fairly oblivious to sensory input. So it was an entirely overwhelming experience to sit in a warm, cozy room and smell a parade of little bottles and see how they resonated inside my skin. But it was also a deeply eye-opening one. My nose has strong opinions—and fascinating ones. The essential oils I love most are almost all ancient trees, ones that play deeply in the realm of spirit.
I am possibly still in denial on some of that.
But after I smell my little parade of bottles each time, then I get a massage where a special blend, made just for me and where I am on that day, gets to sink into my skin and into every cell of my body.
I have several of those blends at home—the warrior one and the lazy-sexpot one and the one that is so clear and pure and cuts through everything. I can awaken clarity or bravery or fun with one whiff.
I’m so not in Kansas anymore.
The last of my touchstones is the one I have the least words for, yet, or rather, the least verbal grasp on exactly why it works so well for me.
I have always loved music, always wanted to sing. As a child, I had dreams of my voice soaring up over a rapt audience, every note laced with magic and potency and grace.
As an adult, what I have is a very middle-of-the-road, polite choir voice. I still love to sing, and I joined a community choir here in Victoria the first chance I got. But that polite choir voice—it made me a little crazy. I wanted better. Different. Something that felt more like the voice that should belong to me, so I signed up for voice lessons.
That part all happened prior to December. I’d had a few lessons, gotten past the total embarrassment of singing while no one else was making any noise, learned some interesting things about how to improve my vocal sound.
And then, the first lesson after all hell broke loose, I dissolved into tears in the middle of some song that I have no memory of whatsoever. Words, entirely choked off.
My brave, psychic, totally awesome voice teacher told me to try it again, just vowels this time. Just sound, and let whatever was in there that needed to come out just come. I was still solidly frozen back then, and I didn’t manage to do what she asked in that lesson, or in the several that came after.
But just by offering that up, she had changed the rules of what my lessons were about, and one day a couple of months later, we were experimenting with the notes at the very top of my range. We picked a YouTube video of an operatic, high, soaring song just to see what would happen—one that I happened to know from my well-behaved choir days.
I kept to a vowel and started singing along. Just sound. Listening to the singer on the video clip instead of me, letting her notes land inside my skin and move wherever they wanted to go.
Just sound.
At some point, I realized it wasn’t just her singing anymore. It was me. A high, soaring, glorious river of music in a range I hadn’t even been able to spit at, pouring out of my mouth, pouring out of my soul as tears waterfalled down my face.
Sound, sung like I really meant it.
For weeks, every time I pulled up that video and started to sing, the tears would come. And from then on, every time I walked into my lesson, we headed somewhere new, following the clues in my voice. We traveled clunky songs and grief-filled ones, defiant anthems and wordless lullabies. And always, still, I spend at least a little time with the bell-clear notes in the sky, because I adore them and they connect me with something I can’t touch as reliably any other way.
Soaring joy for the pure hell of it.
Sound doesn’t only put me in my body—it gives my body her voice.
The voice I couldn’t hold on to. I’m a writer, and that’s more than just a calling. It was the way I was paying our bills, and it had been successful beyond all imagining. I wrote a million words in the three years leading up to the day of destruction. I had a dedicated, growing audience, a cast of characters I loved, and at least another million words to write to do their stories justice.
I planned to keep writing in my current world for years yet. I loved what I was doing, I adored my readers, and I had all the motivation in the world—these books were going to pay for the care our son would need long after we were gone. When you’re the parent of a special-needs child, there are so many fears about the future. Money can’t fix all of them, but it’s a big and mighty sword to swing at the boogeymen in the dark.
So I rode the edge of exhaustion, pouring words out of my heart. Because I could, because I loved it, and because so much was riding on getting it done.
The thing is, you can’t always choose what the bomb shards hit.
I knew right away that my writing had been wounded, I simply didn’t know how badly. I wrote stories of happy, intact families—a place where people belong, no matter what, where every soul is deeply seen and loved, and where glitter and ice cream fix all things. My books are full of scenes dripping with tears and laughter and sometimes both, all of it deeply seated in the heart of family.
Yeah. Not hard to see how that might run into a bit of a snag.
So while I did the necessary work to get my December release through the last rounds of proofreading and formatting and holiday launch, I contemplated my next book with something akin to dread.
I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I couldn’t even stay warm. How the hell was I supposed to write a book full of goopy, family-affirming love?
I started the next book at the beginning of February, steeped in the weird mix of wild waterfalls and the cauldron of hate spewing from my basement.
I gave it a freaking awesome effort. I warned my readers they would only be getting two releases this year instea
d of the usual four. I signed up my amazing writing coach (that’s code for insightful butt-kicker), battened down the hatches, and got the next book underway. I steered it into a storyline I thought I could write—one focused on an eleven-year-old girl in peril, and the love that would come together to call her through it.
The first half of the book went fine. I slowed down, got better sleep, wrote what felt good in a day, and tried to soak in the ways that writing served my soul. And on the days when I simply couldn’t put two decent words together, I learned to be gentle with myself and go commune with the beach instead.
I even got partway through the typically calamitous middle. Middles are always hard, because I write by the seat of my pants, and that usually results in some big holes by the time I’m muddling through the middle. But I’ve been through this process for thirteen books, and it always comes together. Sometimes I write the ending and then go back to the connecting bits. Sometimes I just apply liberal amounts of duct tape and bubble gum and the book miraculously holds water.
But things felt different this time. I kept doggedly writing scenes, trying not to despair at how many words I was throwing out because they were terrible, even as I wrote them. Pretty sentences, void of meaning.
Void of feeling.
It’s hard to write an ending drenched in love and family when your own is riding stormy seas. And in this case, it was very hard to use the eternal heart of family to call an eleven-year-old girl home.
My girl’s going to have to be made of sterner stuff.
I could write the words—but I couldn’t mean them. I couldn’t imbue them with the conviction they needed, and I knew the story was flat as a pancake because of it. The piece of me that had always ended up in my words—the heartbeat of my fictional family—was bleeding.
Telling my readers they weren’t going to get this book was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It felt like I was giving up on them, on my son’s future, on my promises, on financial security.
But it also felt absolutely necessary.
Writing is an act of creative love.
I’d tried tapping into my past, to slide myself emotionally back to a time when I channeled these books more easily. I can’t begin to tell you how much that hurt or how much those words sucked.
Sometimes, you just can’t go back.
I finished the book. And I knew it wasn’t gonna fly, even as I sent it off to my story editor. After thirteen books, I have pretty good instincts—and this one just didn’t get there.
I stared at it for another week, hoping for one of those really cool moments when the dots start moving, make a new shape, and stuff untangles into a thing of beauty. But it didn’t come, and I knew why. I’m not an outline writer, not a plot-and-structure kinda girl. I have picked up a few pieces of writerly craft along the way, but the truth is, I write by instinct. I feel my way through a book, through the pacing and plot and character emotional arcs and everything else.
I feel.
It’s like flying an airplane. Some people get around by the instrument panel, and they don’t care much whether they can see out or not. I’m one of those crazy fighter pilots from an earlier time who needs to fly a couple of loops in a clear blue sky to figure out which way France might be.
I wasn’t going to turn these limping words into a book unless and until I could feel France again.
And not for all the money in the world was I going to release crap.
So I put a tearful, heartfelt, deeply honest post up on my Facebook page, one that came not from the author, but from me, frail human being.
I wish that every person on earth could be gifted a day like what happened next.
Comments, many hundreds of them, wrapped in the energy of thoughts from thousands more. A tsunami of love and support and advice and encouragement, from people who had been through a divorce and those who hadn’t, from those new to my books and the regulars who had been with me since the beginning. So much balm for my bruises and sorrow and guilt and grief.
They didn’t see the author—they saw me. These people who had read my million words and fallen in love blew right past the news that their beloved series was on indefinite hold and wrapped me in utter acceptance.
I still go back to that wall of words often. Not very many people have proof like that of how much they matter.
I’d already decided that I needed to do what was right for me—but they gave me permission to do it with a light heart. My beautiful world of love and family will live on in so many hearts—even if I can never write another word there.
I shifted gears, started writing three or four things, waiting for one to take hold. And one did. A story with more attitude and less glitter, carefully rooted outside the most hurt places of my soul. (It’s called Lesbian Assassins. It began as a dare, honest.) A chance to play and write something a little less emotionally draining.
It’s been fun, even if the whole plan to keep these characters a bit more at arm’s length hasn’t worked out all that well. And there are stories percolating in the wings. I sit down these days eager to write, my fingers struggling to keep up with the flow.
I sit down knowing that I am still a writer.
I don’t know that anything I will write ever again will touch quite the same chord in the universe as my first series. I got the amazing chance to be the spinner of a dream that lives deep in the heart of so very many people, and I know full well exactly how special that was.
I still don’t know if I will ever be able to go back to those stories.
But I figure if that time comes, my ribs will know.
Being happy when it’s still messy. My life these days is basically happy. I didn’t expect that—a lot of the divorce self-help stuff talks about how the party who got surprised by all of this will be forever running to catch up.
Not me. Somewhere in the last few months, I got clear of the wreckage. Not entirely—I don’t know if that’s possible when you have kids and the legal stuff isn’t settled yet. So maybe it’s more accurate to say that my heart got clear. My life got clear. Shit will still happen, but it doesn’t get to sit in the driver’s seat anymore.
That doesn’t mean crap doesn’t hit the wall, or that I’m a cheerful fairy free of anger and the occasional need to throw things at the wall and the more frequent need to vent to a friend or two. Sometimes one of my Lesbian Assassins characters gets way too moody and I have to go have a chat with her and explain that she is not me and she doesn’t need to track my emotional state all over the place. (There have been a couple of cathartic scenes written that won’t ever see the light of day, however…)
Sadness still visits regularly too. For my writing, for my marriage, for my kids who are in many ways only now starting to register what they’ve lost.
My head is not stuck in a sandy beach somewhere—these things are very real and in some ways, because they contrast with the happiness, I feel them more deeply. I try simply to let these things that are not happy arrive, to notice and be gentle with how I feel. I will never make a good Buddhist, but honoring what rises up in my body matters.
And then I invite happiness back. If I’m feeling stuck, I go find a bossypants wind to help me find fluidity again. If I’m drifting in ugly conversational circles in my head, I go walk under the moon to my cove and let the waves lap my toes and carry the nasties out into the great primeval waters.
I let the light sneak back in.
Because the thing is this—I can mourn and be happy. I can be sad for the things that I have lost, and that my children have lost. I can have moments where the missing of these hits the back of my knees or the front of my heart so hard that I just want to wail into the merciless universe.
But those moments come—and then they go. They are honest, and they’re mine, and I do my best to rest easy with them even when they’ve crash-landed into one of my happy days. Honoring grief matters, especially when there are two little people watching and they’ve lost something too.
But there is no dude with a clipboard taking notes and keeping track of whether I am sufficiently miserable. The quality and importance and value of my marriage doesn’t have to be defined by the scope of my grief. Moving on doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. It simply means that I’m making a choice to visit grief’s house, rather than live there.
I got walloped the other day, watching a sweet old couple hold hands at the beach. They were sitting on a bench, watching the waves stirred up by the summer breezes and sharing a drink of something pink and bubbly. She reached up to adjust his ancient straw hat and then took his hand in both of hers.
I wanted, desperately, to be him—to know that someday, when the lines are etched far deeper in my face, that someone will want to hold my hand, and perhaps to fix my hat, too.
And who knows, maybe that will happen. But I won’t be sitting there with the father of my children—and that’s worthy of grief. My children will never see us sit there together, and that stirs up sorrow for me too.
And knowing all those things, I can still choose to be happy. Not every moment, not every hour—but enough of them that the painting built from these brush strokes will be one I like.
Because, let’s face it. It’s got to be a lot more fun to live in the painting called Woman Caught Dancing than the one named Woman Mired in Grief.
The need to dance. Let me start off by saying something that anyone who knows me will swear to be truth. I am not a dancer. Not even close—I’m one of those kids who hung out on the walls at the school dances and tried desperately to avoid certain humiliation.
I feel music. I have rhythm, I just have no idea how to translate that to my awkward hips and limbs. I have not shimmied anywhere in my life.
But at some point in this journey, I promised myself I was going to try new things, even ones that seemed like they might be two hours of non-stop cringing. I was also still on a quest to find ways to be more present in my body. And, if I’m telling all the truth, as a girl who grew up with Flashdance and Dirty Dancing, I have long harbored the secret hope that I am not destined to be this awkward forever.