So I was trying to reconnect with Inside, and it was proving so difficult, I took a very extreme step. I’m shocked that I did this myself, that out of a weekend of intense depression, I found a way through.
It started a week ago, and my friend Lena was in town. We were talking about my current situation fairly in-depth, and she mentioned my ex, Nicole. She asked what Nicole was doing now, and if I’d tried to contact her. The answer was I don’t know, and no. While that relationship had inspired “Inside,” it was just a bit of personal history so far removed from my current situation, I wasn’t sure I even participated in it in the first place.
Well, the week went by, and my mood got worse and worse. There was a point during the relationship where I knew it was the best thing that ever happened to me, and now as I look back I agree with that in some ways. The pain that came out of the end (and it wasn’t just the relationship ending that caused pain at the time, there was much more going on at the same moment the relationship ended), brought a lot of growth and inspiration to my writing. As my friend Michael described Inside, it is my first book with very deep and real characters with rich emotional content. For this reason, the relationship probably was the best thing that happened to me.
But now I’m here five tumultuous years later, and I have to reconnect with the material, and things have not settled at all. The difficulties I have faced over the last five years have warn me down and changed who I am. I’d rather not be who I am right now, and I’d like to go back to where I was.
Inside is an intense book, a lot of hate and pain is coming to its pages, a lot of difficult choices and a lot of suffering, but there’s a lot of joy in this opening hundred pages or so, and that joy also came of the relationship with Nicole.
I thought I had to reconnect with the pain, which is the future of the book. Well, everything I tried didn’t reconnect me, so I searched her out. If I saw her, I knew what I’d feel, and I did. I did feel the pain. I hadn’t looked for her in all the time since we split, I absolutely had not, but she was a good painter, and an amazing person. I knew she’d be onto some amazing work these days. I had no intention of contacting her.
But I forgot something. There is joy before the pain, just as there was in this relationship.
But there hasn’t been joy in mine for a long time, I’ve practically forgotten what it feels like, and I think that was what I’d been having trouble connecting with, the joy.
And when I found her, I thought, what the hell? So I sent her a comment on her business on Facebook. Maybe I’ll send her an email, and it will probably be ignored. I told her I always knew she’d do something amazing, and she is. Truly. I miss what we had for that brief time greatly, but I got a little more written in the book, and that was the point of it.
Now if I could reconnect with joy a little bit in my real life, maybe I wouldn’t be such a moody bastard.
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