That’s right! My contract at Yahoo ended last month so I’m back to working at home and spending most of my time working on my book. So far it has been going great. The therapy for the past year has definitely paid off. I’m finding myself armed with techniques to stave off the anxiety that leads to procrastination, pain and avoidance. I’ve also been reading Writing Down the Bones, which has been providing me with reminders to deal with my fear (even the best writers write a lot of crap!), motivation, and understanding.

But I’m being too abstract! Basically I have been letting my hand do the writing and trying not to muddle it up by thinking. Yeah, I was thinking too much, treating my writing like a problem, if only I could solve it like an equation I would find the perfect answer. But writing isn’t perfect, it’s never perfect, and there is no answer, it just is what it is.

The best thing I’ve done for my writing is to allow it to suck. I’ve gone back to writing for me instead of writing for an audience. I’m writing to find out what’s in my head. I’m learning about me, about how I feel, and about what I want.

Once Natalie Goldberg showed me how writing is like meditation, it clicked. Funny thing is, this is how I used to write. When I was a teenager and dealing with crazy the adolescent crap that we all go through and a whole load of stuff teenagers should never have to go through, I wrote to cope. I wrote to slowly let out that pulsing time bomb that was growing inside me.

Somewhere along the line I stopped and I’m starting to think that that’s where the pain came from. The malignant growth pushed the limits of what I could handle and started to push on the nerves in my shoulders and neck, creating warning signs like headaches and backaches and pushed down in my stomach making my bowel crabby and my colon spastic. My joints all cried, “we can’t hold it in much longer! Do something!”.

So I went to therapy and wrote with my mouth. I wrote stories in the air that floated away, read only by my therapist and recorded only in her notes. Now, it’s time to get them on paper again.

I’m back! And I’m gonna diffuse the giant ball of fear cancer with the written word.