When a Collaborative Isn’t

For many months now, I have been working on a collaborative book, a collection of personal essays, with a group of other writers, with the intention of putting together a compelling argument for why writing is central to who we are as women, and how we navigate the ebbs and flows in our lives. A collection that was fearless in its willingness to stand in our Voices. Also, an invitation, we might have hoped, for other women to own all the parts of their stories that make them who they are.

Well, the collaborative has fallen apart…and I’m left today with an energy that feels like a deflated balloon that went from buoyant, to buzzing around the room angrily while losing lift, to laying limp, soggy, and shriveled on the carpet. How to regroup, when I feel exhausted, angry, and defeated? Everyone else in the group appears to be moving on, but this is so like me. Always just a little behind in the processing of feelings. Just now feeling, “Oh, I have been affected. I am hurt.”

Julia Cameron might call this a “Creative U-turn. I do feel like I am at a crossroads. Will I take my chapters, some of which I am quite proud of, and look for places to submit them? Will I sigh and decide that I was never meant to be published and go back to writing for myself, family and friends? Will I remember how good it felt to work to deadline on a project that stretched me as a writer; and decide that tagging on to other peoples’ agendas isn’t necessary? Because this wasn’t my idea originally ~ but it sounded like a good one, and it was a reason to write. And it wasn’t my deadline, or my agent ~ but it sounded like a way to write and have my writing seen. And we all threw out prompts, and like an exuberant puppy, I wrote to all of them, but I didn’t clarify my vision for the book, until it was all finished, and I realized we hadn’t written one. It is not the first time in my life I looked to others to take the lead.

I’m in that uncomfortable place where I don’t know what is next. I have no chapters to polish, no book proposal to write. One of my classes is coming to an end, and I don’t know how I want my workshops to proceed. I do know this. I love to write. I write for my life ~ to unravel it, understand it, honor it. That is not a collaborative effort ~ but a singular endeavor. That I can and must do alone.