Getting Started (or not)

I began this blog about a month ago in order to work through some of the more difficult decisions/issues in my life. Of course, right after I created the blog, I realized I should have waited a month, since my final comprehensive exam for my PhD was March 21. So now here I am, almost three weeks post-comps, still in the middle of grading hell, but beginning to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. I have loads of work to catch up on, but I did just find out I passed my exam, so at least I have that knowledge to keep me going through the long grading days and nights ahead of me.

So now it's onto the dissertation and on with the rest of my life, whatever that is. The thing with comps is that they drain so much time and energy that by the time they're over, most students have little left to give to a long original project. But perhaps I am still too recently post-comps to make that conclusion.

All I know is that my writing is very rusty. I have been writing tons of student critiques, short essays, and, of course, study responses to practice comp questions, but I haven't been able to do my own creative writing for quite some time now, and that really bothers me. What bothers me perhaps even more than the time constraints involved is my lack of creative energy and my lack of drive to create. I used to love to write; now I have to say that it is very painful. And yet I still believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the path God wants me to take. I guess what's difficult to reckon with is the lack of positive feedback/encouragement here in Houston and the uneasy feeling I have that there isn't an audience for my work. I am a Christian, but I don't write to or for a Christian audience, and my work is often much too dark for a popular audience, especially a popular conservative one. And yet I can't keep my beliefs from influencing what I write; they flower out of me and through me and give every word fragrance, even if some of my Christian friends wouldn't recognize the spirituality behind my work. And yet, I do still have that stubborn belief, that stubborn gut feeling that tells me to keep "going for it," and to keep sending out the work that I have done.

The problem is that the work I have done is now so old--I keep sending out stories that are ten years old, because I just can't seem to get my newer stuff together. And that's incredibly frustrating. It also didn't help that I was several chapters into the novel that was supposed to be my dissertation and had to hear from my director that "the two threads of the novel aren't coming together and I am not interested in either thread." I knew what I'd sent to Evan (not his real name) wasn't working, I knew those threads weren't coming together, but I didn't expect him to kill the book completely, which he pretty much did. Getting over that has been like getting over the death of a loved one; I still really want to work on that novel, but I realize that it isn't going to work as a dissertation, at least not unless I radicially change it. There's also a problem with Evan's health--he's had two strokes in the past three years, and, frankly, I worry that he's going a bit senile. He often forgets who I am and what it is I'm working on. And yet, I can't really change directors, because Evan has been my mentor for so many years, and even though his mind is a little fuzzier now, I think his sensibility is still the closest to mine. It's just hard to reconcile the mentor I had in him when I first came here with the one I have now.

To make matters even more difficult, my other mentor, the woman with whom I work in literary scholarship, withdrew from chairing my oral because she was "no longer inclined to work with" me. That's all she said, Bartleby-the-Scrivener-like, just "I'm no longer inclined to work with you." I assume she was angry with me for not doing the oral last semester when we had planned to, but I knew I wouldn't be ready by then, and I still think I made the right decision to wait. And at least by switching to the creative oral I will get a chance to discuss my actual dissertation rather than work on yet another scholarly article, but it hurts to lose not only one mentor, but essentially two.

So that's why I started this blog, and that's why I called it "Restarting from zero," because I feel like that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm throwing away everything I ever thought about myself, about my strengths and weaknesses, even about my calling in life, and trying to listen to God's voice. The problem is that even after all this, He's still saying "write," and I want to so badly, but I just can't get past the pain of confronting the darkest parts of human nature, of the world, of myself. Every time I start to write I'm in tears, which makes for some interesting moments when I'm on my laptop in the middle of a coffee shop, and I just can't seem to push past the pain no matter what I do. I'm even crying now, when I'm writing this, just this stupid blog, because even thinking about the pain is too much to bear. So I hide, in Christian service, in a church I'm probably overly active in, and in silly TV shows that numb the pain, when really what I should be doing is confronting it.

I just don't want to live my life this way, always afraid to write, always in pain because what comes up is so unsettling. Hell, I'm so good at getting my students to fall in love with writing, you'd think that I'd be able to stay in love with it myself. And I do love it, but I hate it too, whereas right now I don't have so many negative feelings associated with singing, so I prefer to sing, except that sometimes I think I sing when I should be writing. It's so much easier to sing in front of an live and accepting audience that asks nothing more but that you lift up your praises to God. There's something about the moment of live performance--and live worship--that drives me more than sitting in a dark room or trying to be anonymous in a coffee shop. And there's also something to the fact that most contemporary Christian songs fail to address the dark side and therefore what I sing is rarely controversial and almost never difficult emotionally (I find this a weakness in praise and worship music, but I'll address that in another blog).

So right now I lead worship at my church, and people seem to think I'm good at it, and I could potentially be happy doing that, just continuing on teaching writing and volunteering my voice to the church and not writing at all, but I really think God wants more from me than that. Or maybe I should say he wants something different from me. Not that I can't still sing, but I should not be putting that talent first. It's just so hard sometimes, and I am so swayed by the crowd and by positive and negative feedback. I know if I were to audition for a professional singing gig I'd get tons of flack and then probably hate singing just as much as I hate writing, so I'm sure this is just all about the bruising of my spirit and not really about a change of direction in my life.

But where do I start? Or, more importantly, how do I start over yet another time?