Hitting your head against a wall is not the fastest way to move it. ~Mark Sheppard
These last several months I feel like I have been working reluctantly through some rudimentary twelve-step program. As I rifle through nine ‘work in progress’ manuscripts that consumed much of my thirties, remembering, reconnecting, and often times reliving regrets and failures, I feel like I’m due for a testimonial. So here I am, stepping in front of the room: Hello. My name is Michelle Ladner. I’m an aspiring author. And, it’s been a decade since I could legitimately call myself a writer.
Honestly, I can’t believe it’s been nearly ten years since the last writing conference I attended in which I pitched a manuscript to an agent. Regrettably, it’s been half that time since I have been in contact with many writing and publishing friends who were, at one time, my every day. Is it weird that I feel like I owe the community some kind of penance or deserve some sort of hazing before I’m permitted to toe those waters again? Writers write. Real writers write through their pain and trauma. I quit. Though I spent a long time in denial about that fact.
My passion for writing and my drive to conventionally publish was everything to me. Until it wasn’t. Truthfully, I hit the proverbial wall the moment I left Diana Gabaldon’s keynote interview at ITW Fest in 2011 with a sharp pain in my stomach and blood filling my panties. A miscarriage. Just a few hours after I had pitched my manuscript to a conference room of agents and editors, of which eleven requested full drafts and six asked for partials. My dream realized, a real chance to stand before the gatekeepers. Eighteen people in the industry that day wanted to read my writing, but I laid it down after hailing a cab to the ER, and wallowed in that night’s trauma. For a time that would be understandable, but then I spent the next ten years unraveling with every trauma and challenge life threw at me until one of the biggest parts of my identity became round-filed with all of my other false starts.
So where do I go from here? Approaching age forty-five, an unemployed hot mess of a human whose five-year-old runs circles around her, I’m relearning how to love words again by listening to Audible in the carpool line and thumbing through my manuscripts late into the night with hopes of rekindling a flame that once burned bright inside me. I’m not sure I know what steps I’m supposed to take to reclaim this lost part of myself, or if I will ever find it. But timid hope peeks out from behind the words of Arthur Ashe, “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”