Coming Out

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My creative self came out of the closet on Thanksgiving day 1999 on a southwest Florida beach, in front of our condominium building, where my husband and I were spending the holiday.

The epitome of the shadow writer, I had spent my whole professional life safely skirting the real thing, while copyediting and proofreading documents of all sorts,  followed later on by translating other people’s writings from and into French. I had always revered words, which I courted, befriended, chastised, cheered, corrected, rejected, cherished, blamed, accused, treasured, pursued, played or argued with, laughed at, tweaked and coaxed. While regularly keeping a journal for a great many years, I had never dared give my creative self its own voice.

My first and only attempt at searching for that voice had been in 1968, at age 28, when I registered for a three-year correspondence writing course (a substantial and expensive commitment). I felt I had finally found my way, my voice, my self. Six months into the course, I experienced the cruel end of a long-awaited pregnancy through the sudden death of the fetus. Because being four months along was too far for an induced expulsion, physicians decided to wait “for nature to take its course.” The emotional trauma caused by the harrowing experience of carrying a dead fetus for the ten days it took to spontaneously miscarry completely thwarted all further attempts at creativity. From then on, I simply kept my paralyzed creative self locked up in a closet. That Thursday morning, at age 59, she burst out of it, locked the door behind her and threw away the key.

Earlier that fall, I had heeded the nagging “now or never” feeling and started attending a 12-week creativity workshop, in an attempt to become "unblocked."  I was planning to, while in Florida, finally listen to the cassette tape of a recorded meditation on releasing one's creativity. I had bought it on impulse, though apprehensive to find out what might result if I listened to it.

On that sunny Thanksgiving morning, I donned bathing suit and beach wrap, and came down with Walkman, beach chair, and sunglasses. After surveying my surroundings to ensure the required privacy, I placed my chair under the one and only pine tree, away from the sun’s damaging rays. The low, mid-morning, November sun scattered gold sequins of light among the waves. The tide, timid as it is in the gentle waters of the Gulf of Mexico, was coming in, and its rhythm had an almost hypnotic effect on me. I stared quietly at the water for a minute, then closed my eyes, and started the tape.

The soothing voice first explained that one's creative self is really one's inner child, this part of each of us, not yet contaminated by adult constraints, which thrives on expression, spontaneous play, discovery, exploration and experimentation. We would now embark on a visualization exercise to meet my inner child. I tensed up but hung on.

After I followed the required mental steps toward a deeper state of consciousness, my mind's eye instantly made contact with a motionless four-year-old little girl. Too shocked to know how to react, I realized she was the child I was at age four, shown on the black-and-white photograph I’d kept in my wallet for 40 years. Confronting me for the first time, my four-year-old self spat angry and frustrated words at me: "You've neglected me! You don't spend enough time with me! I need you to listen to me! I need to play, experiment, create and have fun! Let me out of here!"

I had hoped and expected to be "awakened," but I wasn't prepared for the intensity of the many emotions which erupted all at once. Pain, regret, fear, shame, relief, frustration, sadness, guilt, freedom, joy, apprehension, and more pain, washed over me like a tidal wave, swelling up and flooding my eyelids.

Still motionless, she continued admonishing me: "You can't get rid of me. Come play with me. I'll show you how. That's what children do best. That's what creativity is all about. You've wasted enough time. Let's get out of here together."

Tears spilled uncontrollably out of my still closed eyelids and down my cheeks. I felt absolutely overwhelmed by the urgency of her demands, and could only answer her in my mind's voice, time and again: "My poor little one, what have I done to you, to us, all those years! Will you ever forgive me?" She no longer spoke or moved, and her image eventually faded away.

When I came back from that inner world where we had cathartically connected, I just stared ahead numbly. I felt like a lost parent finally facing her responsibilities toward a child she had shamefully neglected.

Noticing the sun's shadow had moved around the tree with the passing of an unknown length of time, I suddenly knew why I had carried with me for my whole adult life that picture of "us" at age four. It wasn't the nostalgic or narcissistic impulse I sometimes accused it to be. It was an unconscious attempt to stay close to my creative self, lest I lose her forever.

I kept staring at the wavelets, at the sandpipers skipping by the water's edge, at the specks of gold still dancing on the water surface. I knew the impact of what I'd felt had already left a permanent mark; that I would never forget my inner child's cries of outrage at having been ignored. I also slowly became aware that people had started invading my space. This intrusion broke the spell, and I left.

Meeting my creative self face to face reconnected me with that part of me I had forced into silence so many years ago. A frightening experience it certainly was, because of the implied unknowns (after all, we didn't really know each other), and the scary challenges (what was I going to do with her, now that I had found her?).

From then on, I devoted to the fulfillment of her needs all the mental and emotional energy I used to spend on keeping her at arm's length. I started, and continued, writing. Over the next few years, I attended several writers’ conferences and submitted many pieces to writing contests, winning a few awards along the way.

It took a few years before I finally conceived my website, which was born in 2015. Both the gestation period and the birth demanded a lot of work and time on my part, but, like for all worthwhile creations, it was all well worth it. By finally meeting the need which had gone unheeded for 31 years, I eliminated the void which had filled my inner world all that time.