I used to have this recurring dream where I am lost in a large department store or downtown. I lose my phone or my purse or something else that is very important and I simply can't find it. I search and search and search and always wake up before finding anything. In other dreams, I don't even know what I'm looking for. The first therapist I had in my twenties asked me what I thought it was. The answer was easy: myself.
At the time I started thinking about a story that later turned into a literary project posted a chapter a day for two months on my blog and — after many, many, many attempts to publish — finally became a published book. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I started writing about two friends who lose their best friend to her boyfriend. It was supposed to be a cautionary tale about what could be happening when your friends start dating and stop hanging out with you. As the narrative goes on, they stop bitching about being abandoned and start looking for their missing friend.
I started out writing from the perspective of the betrayed friends but later realized that the self-inserted character was actually the isolated girl, lost in a very suspicious relationship.
So I've been going through some shit recently (who hasn't?) and landed on a Twitter account by a woman who calls herself a holistic psychiatrist. She writes these very accurate threads relating family dynamics, mental health and even gut health (which is right what I need because I have faults in all three areas). One thing she mentions all the time is how children of emotionally immature parents take a while to figure out who they are because their whole lives revolve(d) around their parent(s) and how the result of healing is finding out who we are. And this is especially annoying because it is exactly what all my therapists say.
And this month — and the reason you aren't getting a story this full moon, but a personal essay —, I am writing the first draft of my #NaNoWriMo project. My outline started like this: a witch enters menopause and kidnaps a girl who can supply her with menstrual blood. But what happens to the life of the girl who's captured?
I wrote for a week and 6000 words about feeling trapped, when I hit a wall of unpreparedness. I thought of bringing in the characters from the girl's previous life to come and find her, but wouldn't I be repeating the same formula from my last book?
I don't remember the exact wording, but I read on a dust jacket once that Gabriel García Márquez said that all authors were always writing the same book, and his was about loneliness. I keep asking myself how many books about finding lost women I will have to write before finding myself.
Anyway, despite being caught up in my own shit, my Nano project is actually doing pretty great. After so many years of short stories, it’s nice to use whole pages to describe food and dress and backstory (sorry for making fun of you, Tolkien). I’ve been using this app to help me out and keep me stimulated to write my 2000 words a day. It works most of the time.
I might keep you posted in the next weeks to let you know how my novel is going and I would love to hear from you, too, if you’re doing the same.
And don’t forget to check out my book. For now, it’s only available in Portuguese, in physical form and only ships to Brazil, but as soon as the ebook or a translation (can you imagine??) comes out, I’ll let you know.