Writing it all down

So, I guess I’m branching out. After a lot of back and forth (and ridiculous amounts of moral support from Chuck McCutcheon), I got this piece published in Medium. If I even have my act together, this link will work.

I haven’t decided yet if this is going to be a one-time thing or a new undertaking. On the one hand, the writing helps me work things out and, who knows, maybe I can do a tiny bit of good in the world if I keep writing. On the other hand, writing it all down can be grueling. Throwing it out there for someone to edit can tear you in two. Having it out there and wondering if you’ll get any responses or whether some troll will turn on you or wondering whether you’ve revealed too much online … it all takes its toll.

I don’t know why, but it reminds me of the time when I decided I needed therapy and went off looking for a professional with whom I could speak. I thought I’d found a guy, but then, after I told him my story, he said, no, he didn’t think he could work with me because he had a young child and he was pretty sure listening to me worry about the health of my son would be way too depressing for him.

And now I’m trying to throw this out into the world, hoping it won’t be way too depressing for everyone else. Like, I saw this article on the Washington Post yesterday about how researchers have discovered that infrared thermometers don’t measure temperatures accurately, and I wanted to post it on Facebook and ask “Doesn’t everyone know this?” And then I realized that, no, not everyone knows this, because not everyone spent the better part of a year hovering over their son in a variety of medical institutions chit-chatting with nurses about what works and what doesn’t. It gets hard to share, because my experience set is so far removed from what is normal and because, understandably, there are people out there who don’t want to hear my depressing story.

So, yes, I got this published, but I’m hardly in the New Yorker yet, and this effort involved the following hurdles:

• at least one agent saying he didn’t think he could work with me because it’s all way too depressing
• one Medium channel that seemed right telling authors they would not get a rejection if their piece was not used … and then still getting a rejection
• and, my favorite, the day I started all this, the n key on my keyboard going on the fritz, meaning I either get no n or two n’s every time I hit that key.

And this is all before I think about the rest. Do I want to be that guy? Do I want to be the guy who only writes about his son? To what end do I do it? Just to exorcise my demons? To get people to pay attention to me? Do I figure that maybe I could turn this into a book deal and make some money? Off my son’s death? As unlikely as that is? I suppose there’s the argument that I keep him alive by writing him, but we all know that’s just a thing you say and, at best, I’m just keeping a memory of him alive, one that will disappear some day when the last person who knew him is alive and long after this website disappears because the world has moved on to its next form of communications technology.

The things is, I could write about him every day. I don’t because a part of me doesn’t want to open this page half the time and another part thinks it’s just too much weight to throw out into the world and another part that thinks it’s only healthy to dwell on this so much. I always wanted to be a writer – and not just at a newspaper, where you have to write what the editors tell you to do – but this was never the kind I envisioned becoming.