Exceptionally Wise Drug of Choice
“But what I like doing best is writing. Period.
Sitting here before the computer and transferring onto the screen the things that I hold in my head and heart.
Nothing matches this feeling.
Nothing brings me this particular kind of joy.
And I need it. I crave it.
When I don’t have it, I suffer. I feel like a drug addict with an exceptionally wise drug of choice.”
– Elizabeth Berg, Escaping Into The Open
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Tricia Lott Williford
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Tricia Lott Williford says:
This is beautiful, Jessica. Thank you.
Jessica says:
Oh, that stings. I felt that need, that craving, still do. But the rawness of the pain is healing.
Every member of our family, parents, even grandparents, siblings, wrote books, stories, poems. It was more than my drug of choice. It was in my genes. It was my identity and my worth, my closest confidante and my “blankie.” I had my first book published when I was 14. My dad’s response when I held the first copy in my hands was, “When are you going to write your second book?” Publish or perish. Yet I LOVED to write. So I wrote more books, hundreds of articles for newspapers all over the country, Christian and secular magazines. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words in inch-thick ledgers that span a six-foot shelf in a closet. I won awards. I taught classes on writing. I spoke at conferences.
Then God blocked me. It took me months to realize it was God. Every day, a dozen times a day, I would sit before the computer, wanting to “transfer onto the screen the things that I hold in my head and heart.” NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN. My brain was empty. It was frustrating. Then it was frightening. It stirred up panic and clinical depression. If I wasn’t a writer, who was I? If I wasn’t a writer, what made me matter?
Gradually, as I let him, God whispered to me, “First of all, you are a child of God. That’s the foundation. We will build on that.”
I still love to write. I just try to remember to come to Him now and find out what He wants me to write before I come to the computer.
Blessings to all the writers-at-heart out there.
Jessica
His Scribe: jessicareynoldsshaverrenshaw.blogspot.com
and (currently) hiddeninjesus.wordpress.com