The Weeds

I am lost in fog. Thousands of sinewy stalks of wild growth reach upwards of a mile.

In January, I set an intention—I will write And Then There Was Cancer…, the first memoir in the series I’ve just designed. It will recount the past year and a half of my journey to and through a rare lymphoma diagnosis.

The first part of the project is tedious. I spend months collecting journal entries and text lost on storage disks, merge multiple drafts, dictate hundreds of handwritten pages, and curate more than seven hundred typed pages into a five-part structure. Six months of reading my own handwriting from the worst year of my life have their own remarkable moments and take a certain toll.

But on June 30, it is done! I have met my goal, and I am so ready for the next one—complete a draft of the book by the end of August—starting tomorrow, July 1.

I feel my way through, impatient hands pulling and pushing at the growth surrounding me.

Then July 1 arrives, and here I am, sitting at my kitchen counter before a binder full of organized chaos with no idea where to begin. I mean, I have the structure, the material, the excitement for the project, but here I am stuck in the damned weeds.

So I write about the book. I write around it, under it.

I move commas. I delete the errant “the” and “a.”

I change the structure. I commit to the structure. I change it again.

I tell myself I am writing my way in.

But the book is resistant! Why won’t you behave? I finally demand and slam down the cover of my laptop. I walk away—a “see if you get written now” to the stubborn thing.

I give in before it does though. A conversation with a friend who has been having the same issue with a piece of writing forces me to acknowledge what I already know—revisiting text for avoidance and working with diligence often wear the same face.

It is not the book that is resisting; it is me, struggling with the too-familiar “I can’t write the book. It won’t be good enough. If I never finish it, it can never fail.”

Beneath that is something harder to acknowledge. I am turning sixty-four this month and am one year into uncertain remission. What if I run out of time before I finish the book?

I stop. I stand in the damp, earthy scent of the wild things growing around me. I listen to the reedy wind. And I hear it—clear and clean—

Mortality is an argument for moving, not polishing. For writing through the weeds to the next draft with all its beautiful moments and rough edges.

I return to my manuscript. Ok—let’s write a book.