Emily goes all sad and pensive on your ass

If I've sounded a little cranky lately it's because things haven't been going well. No need to go into detail, but something happened recently that kind of confirmed all my worst fears. Okay maybe more insecurities than fears; the sadistic clown I occasionally see in my dreams has yet to try to knife me in the clavicle so technically my worst fears are still safely tucked away. But in the meantime my personal life is kind of shamblesque and I can't stop feeling sad.

Ever get like that? Where you can't stop feeling sad? And it hurts to wake up and you try to act happy around everybody so they won't tell you the same optimistic cliches you'd tell them in the reversed position? And all you want to do is curl up in the closet under a pile of clothes and sleep until it goes away?

Yeah, me neither. That's crazy talk.

This is about when I knew I wanted to be a writer. I always wrote since I can remember knowing how. I once tried to sell a series of books at my elementary school and started writing a biography of my life when I was 9. It was mostly about my parakeets. In seventh grade I won a state contest with a choppy story about how much my real dad sucks. I was on the newspaper staff. I jotted down poems on the phone ordering pads at the Boston Market where I worked.

I went to college to study writing. But I didn't know it, feel it in my core until I wrote a short story about my childhood.

One morning during my college years I woke up in my dorm room and suddenly remembered a traumatic event I'd repressed since early childhood. My roommate was fast asleep, as was everybody else on campus. Even the drunk guys who used to slam the stop sign below my window and cuss up at the girls who'd tell them to shut up because people were sleeping - those guys were gone. And I saw this image that used to scare the piss out of me just hanging there over my head. I got up and went to my computer - a fabulous Apple IIC with spellcheck and everything - and began to type up a memory I'd only just then found in my head, but one that had plagued me my entire life in the subconscious.

I wrote it that night, I shared it next week in my creative nonfiction class, and the fear just evaporated like water on a tanning bed. It's that feeling all plagued writers know, that something swims around in your head, tying desperately to articulate itself and escape, because if the pain becomes words on a page it's malleable. You can change the story, make the good guys win. Make the bad guys pay. At the very least you can make somebody care.

That's probably why so many stories end with little girls beating up their daddies. I remember the Rouge Wave said that she saw a ton of scripts like that, therapeutic pieces where girls were using the script to fantasize about how they'd really like an encounter with Crappy Daddy to go.

The day she posted that I put away the script where the lead character punched her dad right before learning that he was miserable without her. Therapy, yes, but sellable, no. Thanks, Wavinatrix, for pointing that out.

But not all stories are meant to be sold. Some are the conduit for your emotions. That story I wrote in the middle of the night was the first good thing I'd ever written. I've lost the story since then, but I have a picture of me reading it at a coffee house to a small, smokey but sympathetic audience and I keep that picture on the fridge to remind me that no matter what pains you, it will always be okay in the end.

But only if you write it down.

What do you do to feel better when you're sad?