Writing is My Drink

And My Drug of Choice

They say “when the student is ready the teacher appears.” The rest of the quote, by Lao Tzu, reads “When the student is truly ready the teacher disappears.”

This process has always been alive and well in my life, especially when it comes to books. I have a large library and I buy way too many books. I once worked at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver for the Christmas season, and I didn’t make one cent. In fact, I actually owed them money on payday because I bought more books than I had time to work for.  I read constantly. I have books stacked up beside my bed, at the little table at the foot of my bed, in stacks in the living room, on my desk, on the piano bench, and on the sofa table, to name a few.

As I work on the memoir I’m writing, many of the books in my library are practically jumping off the shelf to resonate with me. Unburying things in my office is literally my way of finding the gold in books that I’ve forgotten I bought. Recently I unearthed a couple of really good writing books. One is called “Writing is my Drink: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice (and a Guide to How You Can Too,” by Theo Pauli Nestor.

Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Angela’s Ashes,” says of the author, “Nestor has a big heart, a real feeling for the pain and craziness of human life.”  High praise for one of my favorite authors.

Nestor shares her writing life, her wisdom, her angst, and her joy, She also shares her struggles with trusting herself, her intuition and her own voice.

“Writing offers promise,” writes the author. “At its best, writing comes from the wild place, from the home of the undomesticated, the untamed, the feral. The place that promises that we can bend time and space, the place beyond practicality, punctuality, and iPhones.”

With the use of the numerous writing exercises included at the end of each chapter, readers will unleash their own potential and find their own wild, untamed writing voices, from Kirkus Reviews.

In her introduction to “Writing is My Drink” Nestor says, “This is my story of false starts, dead ends, and minor and major breakthroughs. … “I’ve come to believe that even if the process takes us longer than we want and even if our words are read by only a handful of readers — or only by ourselves — they are still worth our time and attention. Expression in itself is worthwhile. When we commit ourselves to the page, our lives become larger, if even just incrementally, and our sense of ourselves sharpens. We remember the value of our own lives and the lives of others. I don’t know how this happens. I only know that it does.”

I have just started to do the exercises in the book but I’m already feeling more motivated, and less distracted by life. Nestors writing is so raw, honest and compelling that I feel guided by her to let go and write without analyzing everything and just letting go.

One of Nestor’s suggestions is to write about what scares you the most which I can relate to with my memoir. Here she explains what writing about such issues as her abortion used to do to her psyche. “There is was: the thing I didn’t want to give, I was reluctant to release the story of my own abortion to the page, but mostly I wanted to keep buried the guilt I’d carried for years. But this time I wrote past the electric fence of reluctance. I’d burned up all my stalling time. I knew that if I were going to be a writer, I had to stop hiding. As I typed rapidly in the dark, sweat ran down my sides. Two hours later, I typed the last words. I lived.” As opposed to the fear of dying from writing scary stuff.  

Her words of being terrorized by what she’s putting on the page is easy to relate to.

I think Nestor’s writing appeals to me since a lot of the writing in my memoir has to do with living with a childhood trauma, not so easy to even remember let alone transfer my rage, vulnerability and hope to someone else through my writing.

Still I’m motivated and inspired to write memoir by reaching out to people and letting them know there is now treatment for complex trauma, as well as hope. And I’ve found a way to be in the world happily and with joy.