A Different Kind of Birthday

A lot happens in a decade, whether or not we're aware of it. Today, I am hyper-aware of what the last decade has brought into my life. It's been a journey of striving to improve, to find my way again, to overcome the obstacles I set in my own path, and to accept with open arms the gifts of people, places, and experiences that almost feel like they've just fallen right into my lap. So come down this journey with me, because today marks an anniversary I'll be celebrating for the rest of my life. Ten years ago today, I was lying in a hospital bed, barely coherent, struggling through heroin withdrawal for the fifty-thousandth time (or so it seemed) and wondering if this would actually be the last of it. It was. And while the worst of the physical pain was over and done with after my three-day hospital stay, with my oxygen levels at 67% and my body ravaged by what I'd willingly done to it over the previous two years, I had no idea what to expect after this. I couldn't comprehend what my life would be like without the one thing that had at first made me feel whole and later just made me forget how wrong I'd been. How broken I really was. Four days later, I was arrested for felony drug possession, shipped off to county jail on the hard plastic seat of a police car, booked, processed, and delivered to a cell. I've gone back and forth over the last ten years when it comes to how I feel about the details of that arrest. I could have fought those charges and most likely slipped out from under the weight of overwhelming consequences. In reality, the person who "turned me in" used connections I hadn't realized would make it possible to land me with a drug charge, effectively changing the flat-lined trajectory of my future. In reality, I was already clean and freshly out of the hospital, with nothing left to lose and no drugs to use. In reality, I was so done with the life I'd been living not just for the last two years but the last two decades—my entire lifetime at this point. The only life I'd known. I remember how oddly uncomfortable those handcuffs were as they dug into my wrists, pressing deeper between the weight of my back and the police car's plastic back seat behind me. I remember how little I cared about that discomfort, how inconsequential it was compared to the agony of three days going through withdrawals in the hospital. I remember my arresting officer staying with me through the entire booking process, waiting for me in the hall as I dressed in the bright-orange uniform reserved for inmates with felony charges, labeling me clearly for everyone to see. The man spoke to me the whole time I went through booking, and while the rest of it has completely escaped my memory, one thing stuck with me: "You don't belong in here. You're a good kid. Smart. Talented. You gotta stop messin' around with that shit." He'd said it literally as I was straightening in front of the backdrop for every county mugshot photo. I'd just finished vigorously running my hands through my hair—hair I'd chopped off and dyed from its natural auburn to nearly black after leaving the first and only physically abusive relationship of my life, which just so happened to be with another heroin addict. Leaving that relationship and changing that person's "favorite thing about me" had given me a new, fleeting sense of control. But I'd kept using for another six months anyway. They ask you to do that when you're being booked—ruffle your hair so everyone knows you're not hiding things in it. I remember thinking, This is why everyone looks so messed up in mugshots. I looked fine before, and now I look like I just woke up. Of course, I conveniently ignored the fact that I had indeed been woken up by the police that morning for my arrest. And as the woman taking my mugshot told me to stand there and look straight ahead, I stood there and looked up at the officer telling me how smart, talented, and deserving of a better life I was. The only thing running through my head at that moment was, Yeah, right. You don't know anything about me or my life. You're wrong. (Enter Exhibit A below...)

I can’t claim this title as a product of my own brain, by any means. It actually came from inside a daily planner I’ve been using for years. You know, those little “inspirational quotes” that are stuck in there with the intention of bringing profound meaning into everyone’s lives when they all turn to the same page on the same day and read it. Normally, I don’t find myself particularly inspired by quippy one-liners. Not because I’m a practicing cynic (no, those days are far behind me) but because most of the time with these, I’m reading something I already know. That held true for this ‘paradox of manifestation’ bit too. Only I realized when I read it that it was something I already knew but had buried away beneath the urgency of writing, meeting deadlines, holding video conferences, being interviewed as a guest author, trying to keep my head screwed on straight while my heart’s tugging me in the opposite direction. Speed up and slow down. Do more and do less. Settle into the flow and go-go-go after it. Pay attention to this and ignore that and do everything at once because that’s what’s required of me, right? Maybe. Maybe not. I have the incredible fortune of saying that I absolutely love what I do for a living. I get to write fiction all day every day (sure, I take days off here and there), dive into other worlds, build characters and tear down walls. This is what I do, and it has enabled me to support my family fully with an income made solely from pounding away at my keyboard twelve hours a day to create stories people love. And yet this week, I found myself stuck in the kind of rut that rarely hits me anymore. No, I wouldn’t call it writer’s block , per se. More like writer’s sludge. More like dragging myself through a mud pit to reach the other side, that seldom-elusive finish line, and leaving a trail of word bubbles in my wake. Not very efficient. Not very conducive to fast writing or good story, either. But it’s a fantastic breeding ground for self-defeating tendencies, more procrastination, sitting in my home office and staring at the wall wondering why I can’t just hit my usual numbers . I realize full well that my usual numbers , on a consistent basis, are the same numbers I looked at less than a year ago and thought, ‘Yeah, right. Anyone who says they can write 10,000 words a day and have it actually be good is full of shit. That’s not even possible.’ Lucky for me, I proved my doubting self wrong and can now say it’s quite possible. My average daily word count of fiction production is even higher than 10,000 words. Consistently. Every day. And still, I was beating myself up for not being able to overachieve! Then I found this little nugget of once-felt and entirely forgotten wisdom. The paradox of manifestation: Be all in… and unattached. Oh, yeah. I was attached, all right. I was so attached, I’d forgotten what it was like to get lost in the story and let it flow through me. I’d forgotten how to enter that ‘zone’ of creativity where the rest of the world just flies by in a blur, outside of time and space, where a growling stomach or a full bladder are ignored until the last second because I’m in so deep that stopping just isn’t an option. Until it has to be. In that last paragraph alone, I’m finding startling similarities between my dream career of writing fiction and my time spent as a heroin addict. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to sustain this insane momentum of writing one book a week for my clients while also churning out my own stories that eventually get my name and my brand slapped all over them. It’s an interesting thought. Because I know what it’s like to “be all in”. I know what it’s like to pour my entire being into something while the rest of the world fades and all but ceases to exist. Of course, until almost ten years ago, that “all in” was a drug that destroyed my body and my life and left me with nothing but an empty ghost of who I thought I’d be at twenty years old and a boatload of shame that lasted far longer than I could have imagined. And oh, man , was I attached. If I have an “addiction” today, it would be writing fiction. Only instead of a drug, this world-consuming thing is one of my greatest talents, my superpower, an ability that fills me with joy and purpose and satisfaction before hopefully serving all those things right up on a silver platter to anyone willing to dive into the books I’ve written. (Today, I finished my 52nd novel, and I still feel like I’m just getting started). That’s what I’d forgotten. I was so caught up in the numbers—go faster, focus harder, hit higher counts—that I’d become just as attached to the product of a thirty-minute writing sprint as I once was to how long I could go without using before withdrawals made me physically sick. And believe me, I used to time that too. In just over a month, I’ll be celebrating ten years clean from heroin addiction. Less than a month ago, I celebrated my 30th birthday, which also marked twenty years since I started writing fiction. In some ways, it feels arbitrary to compare the two things side by side, because the differences are so glaringly obvious. Good versus bad. Productive versus destructive. Life-affirming (not to mention life-sustaining when this pays the bills and supports my family of three) versus life-taking. And yet, it still feels necessary to point out—yes, even to admit—that the two things aren’t so dissimilar. Every day, either my husband or my daughter has to come knock on my office door five minutes after 5:00 p.m. to remind me that I should have been finished five minutes ago. Until recently, I’ve forgotten to eat or ignored hunger altogether because I was too engrossed in finishing the next chapter or hitting one more sprint to add to my word count (yes, I have since set alarms on my phone for mandatory breaks during the day for sustenance and other necessary bodily functions like breathing ). If I go longer than twenty-four hours without sitting down for at least two hours to write, I get itchy, irritated, snappy, and anxious. The thought of not being able to write terrifies me, because I’ve experienced that before. In a lot of ways, the four years I spent not writing immediately after I got clean were harder than the two years of addiction preceding them. The only difference was that I wanted to write but couldn’t get past the guilt of having traded two years of writing for two years of using. So naturally, the obvious solution was to add four more years to my self-imposed sentence. #makegoodchoices So when I hit this writer’s sludge, if you will, I was at a complete loss as to how to pluck myself out of the mud and get my feet back on solid ground for a running start. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ ‘Why am I failing at this?’ ‘There’s no f-ing way I just lost my mojo!’ ‘What am I gonna do? I’ve filled my entire schedule based on a writing speed I’ve apparently lost!’ The trick with that, though, is that skillsets and talents don’t just disappear , especially when they also happen to be something that brings us joy and ungodly amounts of fulfillment and satisfaction. They just get buried. They just get bogged down by being attached instead of being all in . So when I saw this “paradox of manifestation”, I stopped and had to read it again. For me, the word paradox automatically triggers a warning inside my brain: Caution—you will not be able to make sense of this. But this so-called “paradox of manifestation: be all in… and unattached” didn’t feel like a paradox at all. It felt like two halves of a whole finally slipping back into place. I felt a burst of joy and relief and a settling inside my core because I remembered what that means. I remembered that when I’m really, truly writing fiction the way I’ve always known I was meant to write it, I am all in and unattached. This is a ridiculously long-winded way of saying “it’s about the process, not the product”, “the journey, not the destination”, isn’t it? Except for those often-used sayings revolve around juxtaposing moments in time and space. You can’t get to the product without the process, and you certainly can’t get to the destination without the journey (but those patents are still pending for the teleportation devices and time machines, right?). But with manifestation (and I truly believe in this as a personal theory, because I’m living proof of the ability to turn what is most commonly impossible into the possible), being all in and being unattached don’t work unless you can achieve both. Or, to be more accurate, they don’t work well . They don’t work sustainably . I can throw myself into a project with all of my being, and if I’m too attached to the number of words I’ve written in thirty minutes or a day or a week, I’m not paying attention to how much I enjoy what I do. And then I’m not all in. I can completely ignore my word counts or my goals for a finished product, embodying “unattachment”, and if I’m just not really feeling it or letting myself get distracted because there’s a part of me still separated from what I’m doing, I’m not all in . That’s just dipping my toes. The relief of remembering that I’ve been down this road before—playing with what I can achieve and loving it wholeheartedly without having any preconceived notions of what it should be—was as close to being struck by lightning as I’ve been in quite some time. And I’m not kidding when I say that the next day, with this rediscovered paradox rebranded as purpose in my mind, the writer’s sludge was gone. I doubled my word-counts with every single sprint for the rest of the day. I was flying again. And I just stopped worrying so damn much, because I already know how this is going to turn out. I’ll finish another book and start one more project that makes my heart sing for the simple fact that I’m doing it . I’ll make my deadlines, keep building my career, find the space and the time and the breath to enjoy both this passion I’ve turned into a sustainable and sustaining way of life and the freedom it’s given me to be more of myself and more of who I want to be for my family. (Full transparency, here: I write for me. And we’re all lucky enough that my husband and daughter get to reap the benefits of it too.) Long story short—or “moral of the tirade”, if you will—is that some paradoxes have been sorely mislabeled. Some aren’t even paradoxes at all. We can have our cake and eat it too, because no one makes a cake just to sit there and stare at it. And nobody eats a cake that hasn’t been made yet. The impossible can be made possible. I am an ex heroin addict with my health and sanity (most of it) still intact and a life filled with abundance and love. I am an author with twelve hours a day to sit and write to my heart’s content and the ability to support my family (and my writing habit) with a sustainable income from nothing but words on paper. Don’t get me wrong. I worked my ass to the bone to get to both of those places—very different places and yet so intricately tied together that I can’t imagine one without the other. Maybe I’m the paradox. And I’m totally okay with it, because this is how I’ve learned to thrive. This is how I go all in and stay unattached. That’s how manifestation works, isn’t it? Being what we want to be not before or after but right now . I’d be lying if I said it’s as easy as flipping a switch, and all the obstacles in my path disappear. It’s more like riding a bike. Which was painful and scary and messy at first too (I have the scars to prove it). But when I get back on and remember that I can do this, that’s exactly what happens. So. When was the last time you rode a bike?