I haven't written in a long time. I'm not even a dried up desert anymore, I'm emptiness. I am a prisoner stuck deep in a well, with the walls so close that he can't stretch out his legs. I am at the bottom of the well with the walls closing in, the air so scarce that it is hard to take in a full breath. Up above the circle of light is so far that it looks like the Moon in the perpetual darkness of my prison. All I do every moment of my existence is lie curled up in a fetal position on the floor and try not to think. Thinking hurts too much, making each moment of my life unbearable, raw with pain.
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I haven't written in a while, and I start to realize why. I can't let go of reality enough to write a fictitious story. The real life is beating up on it's characters leaving them helpless, whereas in a book, a character always has a choice.
Cancer. In the real world, cancer is the true villain, scary, merciless, undefeated. It strikes anyone who has a body and is alive, regardless of age, race, sex, and social class. It kills off innocent children and vicious dictators. Cancer truly knows no bounds.
In a novel, a heroine will find her true meaning in life while fighting and beating it, or if she is so unlucky and actually dies, her legacy will be continued in the next generation. The true friendships will be forged, and the old ones will become more solid. The whole world will weep if she dies, and on her death bed, she will finally understand how truly remarkable her simple life has been, and how she has blessed everyone she's ever touched with her existence.
Love. In real life, you beat yourself up for loving someone so much that you can't find the strength to leave the abuser, or cheater, or just a plain asshole. You find yourself stuck for 15 years in a meaningless unhappy relationship just because it's easier not to rock the boat, and what will happen to the children.
But in a rose-colored romance, the heroine is swept away in the arms of a perfect, brooding but caring, handsome prince, and a man always does the right thing while his woman is sobbing on his shoulder in her PMS-induced sorrow. (Which is to hold her tight, and pat her on the back, and whisper gently, and kiss away her tears, instead of accusing her of being moody, storming out the door, and driving off in a midlife-crisis muscle car with the tires screeching.)
Job. In this economic depression world of lost jobs and foreclosures, every one of us has been struggling with being laid off, or underpaid, or overworked. One can't fathom to leave the stable but mediocre and mundane job with 401K and health benefits right now in order to pursue one's aspirations and start own business selling cupcakes or moving to TImbuktu to volunteer as a non-profit lawyer saving women's lives. You have a spouse to clean for, children to feed, aging parents to care for. You forget that you always wanted to be a juggler, or an icecream taster, and you keep on doing your 12-hour a day office job with the boss from Hell, because damn it you need the money to pay off your student loan, and keep timely payments on your second mortgage, and fix that carburetor in your car, and pay for your child's afterschool activities. Who has the time to find a perfect job?
In the self-help book universe, the career advisers tell us that YES WE CAN get this perfect job in this failed economy. We just have to believe in ourselves and try, try, try, try, try, again. Not meant as fiction, but surely functioning as one, the self help job search books are full of fantasy. The hero always wins in the end and opens his own business of creating a user-friendly natural hair dye for puppies that he dreamed of since he was 5. He rakes up oodles of money in record time, and becomes a self-made millionaire. His story is featured on Oprah and Good Morning America, he is interviewed by Barbara Walters, and his show is syndicated on Bravo TV network.
Life's Purpose. In reality you are struggling every day to juggle your overbearing cruel boss, your needy spouse, your wining children, your conniving ex-spouse, your sleep, your health, your faith, and your sanity, which you constantly feel slipping away. Add on top of that loss of job, troubles in love, or cancer, and you got yourself a REAL reality that the majority of the population is facing. And in some countries, there's also war, hunger, persecution, sex slavery, genocide. That's real life, without hope, without the light at the end of the tunnel.
But you still have your dream, buried away yet surfacing when you see yourself running freely with the wind in your sleep, or catch a whiff of magnolia fragrance, or glimpse the way light is reflecting yellow autumn trees in a lake. It catches you off guard now and then, inspires you for a moment, and then dissipates into the usual state of despair. You'll never reach that dream. You'll always struggle here in Hell on Earth toiling away like the rest of us.
In a novel, some Paulo Coelho, or Antoine de Saint-Exupery, or Serdar Ozcan, or Richard Bach, will have the audacity to create characters that deny all life's struggles and strip away the shackles of the everyday existence and live on the periphery of societal norms. They cross a desert barefoot, they fly with seagulls, they talk with roses, they make wine out of water, just like Jesus. They can do anything. All because they believe that they can do anything. And they have a goal, a dream, which they will do anything to achieve. And through all the struggles, and desert treks, and flights on the wings of seagulls, leaving their lives and loved ones and self-possessed bosses, they finally reach their rose garden and guess what? They talk to the rose and the rose will reply. Because that's how it is in a perfect world of a book - a character is free. Unconstrained by laws of physics, biology, or society. Love prevails, the dream is attained, the battle is won.
That's why, while I'm trying to make a sense of what life is offering me or people around me, and how I can survive in this grim reality, or how I can lift the spirits of the ones who are suffering just like me, I can't find time to escape into an unrealistic world of literature. I have to deal with what's here and now.
And find nourishing soil for a seed of my own dream, and make sure it stays alive.
