by Anne Pellicciotto
Writing my secrets has always been my secret.
I’ve scribbled away, diligently, in the margins of my life and, by now, in my fifties, I have a fully completed manuscript. Though it’s never done, is it?
To keep the creative spark alive, over the years, I’ve taken workshops, gone away to residencies, joined critique groups, attended conferences. With the support of a writing community, and because I’ve had no choice, I kept going. I’ve written and rewritten: the very first version was a novel. I deviated to other stories, essays, blogs. I’ve always come back.
I’ve mustered the courage to pitch to agents. I’ve gotten kind rejections. I’ve gotten silence. I’ve gotten a bite: Interesting, send it when it’s fully polished and ready to go.
It’s not ready to go; it will never be ready.
Then, one misty morning this past October, in a holler, in West Virginia, that hawk swooped down and caught me in the gaze of his beady yellow eye. I stopped in my tracks. Everything became still. My heart thumped in my chest as I watched him, expanse of brown and white striated wing, sail upward.
“Simplicity and freedom,” I whispered, as he hung above me like an untethered kite. Then a smile, the first in ages, spread across my face.
I’d escaped DC for a much-needed break from the pandemic and political mayhem, from the helicopters circling over my neighborhood, rattling the windows in their frames, from appalling events that had yet to unfold. Over the course of my week in the woods the panic attacks subsided, my racing heart calmed, the mind-numbing headaches waned. I slept through the night. I wrote through my days. I hiked through the fields, along the brook, taking in the scent of jasmine and decaying leaves.
Maskless, out in nature, I could breathe.
Back in Washington, I felt immediately trapped again. This suffocating feeling was not unfamiliar to me: trapped as a kid in a home with my drunken, enraged father; confined in a young marriage that was supposed to have saved me from my imploding family.
In middle-age, in this time of Covid, I felt a bubbling urgency, once again, to escape.
As a professional change consultant and coach, I’d spent the past six months guiding clients – business owners, artists, solopreneurs – through their pandemic pivots. In doing so, I’d navigated my own business pivot. I ported my services online and zoomed my days away like the rest of the white-collar world. My clients were inspiring: in the face of so much adversity, many made the shift from survive to thrive.
The problem was: I wasn’t thriving. I hadn’t been since way before the pandemic. The silver lining of Covid for me, one of the lucky ones who hadn’t been inflicted directly, was that I could see my own fragility – and its polarity – my vitality.
The encounter with the hawk had woken me up to a glimmering possibility. But what was I supposed to do? What did simplicity and freedom mean?
Initially, I took it to mean selling my house, divesting of my belongings, shuttering my business, and driving west across the country to seek out a new life. But that vision – along with a parade of real estate agents through my home of 22 years – only accentuated my fears. When I closed my eyes at night, the image of pulling away from Park Road, a car crammed with my earthly possessions, drifting around the wide-open west, untethered, ironically, did not feel like freedom. Instead, my chest felt constricted; the sleeplessness and anxiety returned.
My therapist told me, frankly, “Anne, you’re scaring the shit out of yourself.”
I chuckled nervously. I bit my thumb cuticle bloody. Did this mean I wasn’t ready? Ready for what?
I went back to my half-finished vision board for clues. The collage of pictures ripped from magazines and glued onto posterboard depicted serene scenes, isolated abodes with decks and Adirondack chairs facing vistas of water and mountains. A pink lotus flower bloomed out of the left upper corner with the word contemplate pasted above it.
When I really focused, I could see: the images were of me, very still, in quiet places. I had to close my eyes to access what was in the depths of my heart, a secret well-kept from even myself: I needed simplicity and freedom in my life to, shhhh, write.
Even typing these words, revealing this truth to the page, felt like a betrayal, like something I should backspace and erase. But that admission – that writing has always been my passion – was a door, and I stood on the threshold.
My manuscript sits, weighed down by secrets. When will it be ready? When will I?
It’s time to double down on Monday Night Writing Salon, I tell myself. I’ll sign-up for a memoir class at the Writers Center.
I blink my eyes shut and reopen them to my vision board, propped on the radiator. A calm river runs down the center, a kayak piercing the shady green water. A bluebird, not quite a hawk, drifts across a sunlit sky, song notes emanating from its beak.
I exhale a puff of exasperation, bend closer to the collage, brow crinkled. A woman in white dives into a tropical blue abyss. A hiker gazes across and open field toward the horizon with the message: Trails are merely suggestions.
The truth stares me in the face.
The truth speaks to me in my dreams. The hawk opens its hooked beak and says I can.
I don’t need another writing program, a swirl of busy work, a litany of applications, rejections, submissions, decisions.
I have but one decision to make.
I don’t need a grant; I need to grant myself permission to stop zooming and go.
Writing is a story burning inside me. Writing is a decision to feed the flames.
Writing is the hawk that has reminded me, has lured me, has eyed me.
I stand at the edge of the field feeling the nudge of the breeze against my back. I take my first step through the tall grass. The ground feels firm on this path; my heart feels light. I am in motion.
The next steps are practical; this is a self-funded sabbatical. I prepare my house for rental, post an ad, field the inquiries, draw-up a lease, begin to sort through my possessions. I take another step and reserve my cabin in the woods, in the mountains, by a river, with a good desk and chair and light and air. I make those symbolic pictures real.
I have already run up against Resistance – a very familiar voice that says things like: “Well, you’re not a real writer,” and “The world doesn’t need another book,” and “Isn’t it a little late for a career change?”
This time I reply sweetly, firmly: It’s never too late to become who you are. It’s never too late to be free.
Anne Pellicciotto, life coach and owner of SeeChange, writes about the crossroads in life that break and make us. Heeding the hawk’s message, she’s hit the road for a year of simplicity and freedom. In the void, Anne plans to complete Strings Attached, a #metoo coming of age memoir in which she marries her music teacher lover to save herself and, eventually, must break free from him. Follow her midlife coming of age adventures at www.seechangeconsulting.com/blog or on Medium at https://anneseye.medium.com/.