Dear Maya,
I have been finding much solace, inspiration and a feeling of kinship in reading biographies lately. Namely the fourth volume of your own and the first of seven books that comprise the diaries of Anais Nin. I am a thirty-one year old stay at home mother to a four year old and a two year old. Lately my life has centered around two strong words, yearning and struggle. I am yearning for myself and struggling to find the way there, yearning for freedom and struggling with the word 'Selfish', struggling with balancing my familial obligations with the obligations to my own heart and autonimous life. Before I continue however, let me make it clear that I have a lot of love and wisdom in my life from a pretty amazing collection of friends and family so this is no pity party. I am just reading of the time in your life when you joined the Harlem Writers Guild and you have just promised to read your first short story in two months. I am a writer, and not because I have published anything or even tried to, hell I have never even finished a body of work but I know I am a writer like I know how to breath. I was born with it. I have a gift but pulling it out of my head and imparting it to paper is like trying to move a boulder. I have felt as of late, that I am almost ready to jump in, to make the commitment but for some reason I am so scared to commit as you were then. I'm scared that if I jump in and abandon myself to the creative process, that I will lose my marraige. I have a rich inner imaginitive life but I am not fully satisfied to live vicariously and I write at my best when I am surrounded by creativity and genius and have my finger on the pulsepoint of life, when I am heartbroken, or caught up in the exhileration of first kisses. My life with my husband won't include much of the above and it's something that I feel I will have to seek out on my own if I am to go as far as I think I can with my writing. How fully do you give yourself over to writing and did you find that you had to arrange your writing around your life or did it become such a part of you that your life and family had to arrange themselves around your writing? And why do you think it's so damn scary to go for something that is already inherent? How do you validate the decision to nurture something in yourself that may never make you famous or recognized, that may cost you an intact family? How do you trust that maybe instead of taking those nursing classes so you can bring in a steady, reliable income, you should be writing, should be surrounded by other writers. And the average person's response would probably be that you take the nursing classes and find yourself a local writers circle.... But that doesn't satissfy me because I worry that if they are not gifted writers themselves that their criticism won't be gifted. That I won't learn and grow as a writer without the proper guidance and inspiration. And what about the pulse point? I'm not exactly sure what it is that I need to hear from you or that you'll feel moved to write me back, just that I felt moved to write you suddenly on this bouncy bus ride to New York in between chapter 2 and 3. I guess anything will do, any ruminations or a word of encouragement.
