You know what’s a huge win? I just wrote. Without a plan. How about that.
This is kind of aimless to say, really. I’m just blogging into the universe here. Word vomit and all. Excuse me while I pull my hair back.
But I just wrote part of my mystery novel and had no idea where I was going.
I think I’m going to be okay.
It’s like driving at night for the first time. You have headlights, and you can see, but only so far. Their reach stops just short of where you’d really like it to. What’s around that curve? What’s over that bridge? I don’t want to round the curve to find out. And I sure as hell don’t want to cross the bridge. Not because I’m afraid of heights, but because falling off a bridge into dark water at night feels like the kind of emptiness that could swallow you whole.
I just rested my shoulders. They were tense.
I have to remind myself I’m not on some open road. I’m home, with my husband, safe under a blanket, with plenty of light.
I think I’ve been so scared to write without having it all figured out because I want to make sure everything makes sense. But how can you braid anything if you have nothing in your hands? Something has to exist first. There has to be something to work with before you can shape it.
In middle school, I was obsessed with making friendship hemp bracelets. Give me twenty minutes and a clipboard, and donezo — best friend bracelet, handled. I could do intricate knots, spirals, twists, and loop in whatever beads my friends wanted. They felt special. I wore them all the time, even in the summer when they got soaked in pool water and dried into that stale hemp smell that made my eleven-year-old self dry-heave nearly every time. And still, I’d lift my wrist and smell it again. Why are humans like that?
I made those bracelets for anyone who wanted one.
And then one day, I just forgot.
I forgot how to braid them. I forgot the first few steps, the opening knot, the little sequence that started it all. My template was just… gone. I remember rifling through the pages of my Michaels hemp-braiding handbook, hoping something would jog it loose. Nothing did. I asked my mom if she remembered how it started, but I had taught myself. No one else knew. It was one of the most frustrating feelings — to be so smooth and confident in a skill, something that let me make little gifts for people, and then suddenly it was gone. Just like that. Like the lights went out.
And now, lying here thinking about it, I realize I’ve never been good at being in the dark.
I want my headlights to reach the destination long before I do. I want full visibility. I want proof.
When I was little, I couldn’t rely on my other senses in the dark. They seemed to lie to me. The second the light switch flipped off and the door closed, the room felt alive. The only light came from the thin crack beneath the door, fed by the soft glow of a hallway nightlight. And then came that feeling — that surge of adrenaline pounding through my chest, my heartbeat so loud it sounded like footsteps coming closer. Nearing me. I’d get too scared to put my hands out in front of me, too scared to even open my eyes.
The stillness of the dark whispered secrets I didn’t want to know.
As a child, you can sometimes get around that. You can cry out. You can call for someone. You can beg for a hallway light to stay on.
But being an adult is so fucking hard because eventually you’re forced to face the dark. You have to stretch out your hand anyway. You have to move through that heavy, unseen thing that begs your heart to race and your body to freeze. Fear of the unknown. Needing a plan. Wanting certainty before you begin.
Maybe that’s why writing without an outline has always scared me so much.
It feels like being left in the dark.
