Emotions

Last week everything went so smoothly. I finished stories ahead of time. I slept well. I even felt good.

This week it’s been the opposite. I had writer’s block — one of the worst cases since I began making a living as writer five years ago. I haven’t slept well, except for last night (which was wonderful) and I’ve had headaches and back pain all week.

To top it all off I’ve been extra emotional. Thursday night I watched “Waltz With Bashir,” an animated documentary about a man who served with the Israeli Army during the Lebanese War and was near a massacre of Palestinian women and children at one point. It was hard to watch much of the film, but because it was animated it was less realistic. Then, toward, the end, you hear the wailing Palestinian women and suddenly the animation fades and you’re watching actual documentary footage from the aftermath of the massacre. And there, lying on the streets are the tiny Palestinian children the Israeli soldiers brutally murdered. It was horrifying. And I lost it. I’ve never felt so emotional while watching a film — maybe because I understood that this was not fiction. This was real and those were real, murdered children.

So I was still a little emotional when I went to work Friday and began writing  a story about Amy and Melissa McDonald, two local sisters who taught at the Shanti Bhavan school in India over the summer. The school only accepts children from the “untouchables” class of people — lower than the lowest caste. It wasn’t my own writing or even the interviews with the sisters that got to me. It was Amy’s blog. She’s a journalism student and has a beautiful way with words. I made the decision to include snippets from her blog in the story. And it was reading those snippets that got me. Hearing her talk of these sweet, innocent children and the love she developed for them made me think of all the kids in these less-than-ideal circumstances across the globe. I thought of the Palestinian children in that documentary. I thought of the little African girls that occasionally come to St. George to dance and raise awareness of their plight. And I thought of the sweet Filipino children I knew on my mission there 10 years ago.

And I cried. Right there in the office, sitting at my computer, trying to write a story. I did well hiding it. The blurry eyes made it difficult to see the screen. And as I fell myself falling into tears, I would take a deep breath and fight it off. I had a deadline to meet. I couldn’t cry all over my keyboard.

Now I don’t cry in many stories. I can only think of a handful over the years that have brought me to tears. I cried when the local National Guard unit left for Iraq and I covered their farewell parade. I also cried when they came home and I saw those soldiers kissing their little children, some of whom they had never met. I cried while writing about a case of child abuse that made me realize I had to get off the news desk or get out of journalism. And I cried when covering the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the people left without homes. But that’s a handful of stories among the few thousand I’ve written in the past five years.

Then Friday night I went to see “The Time Traveler’s Wife” with a few friends. I loved the book (and cried while reading it) and was skeptical about the film version. I didn’t think it would come close to living up to the book. Of course, it wasn’t as good, but it wasn’t bad either. And there were a few instances that nearly brought me to tears. However, I tried to fight back the tears because I was at the movie with four girls (now that’s the way to see a chick flick). I had to appear tough, right? But when I admitted that the final scene did create one tear (one that I wasn’t able to control and fend off), one of the girls said it was “cute.” So maybe it’s OK to shows those emotions.

And maybe all these emotions I’ve felt in the past few days are the reason why I was able to sit down about an hour ago and finally type out a full synopsis of the novel that has been banging around in my head for about a year. And I like where it’s going. Like every other novel idea of mine, it begins with someone dying. And there’s plenty of heartbreak throughout the plot. But I think the ending may be hopeful. We’ll see. But I’m excited about it.

Maybe the hopefulness came from a great night in the mountains of Pine Valley. One of my friends hosted a party there at her family’s cabin and it was just a wonderfully fun and relaxing evening. It was a good day.