Disposable

A friend from school (you know who you are) recommended that I read "Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Paterson. I had seen it for years. It's a book belonging to a genre called Children's Realistic Fiction, and it won the prestigious Newbery Award in 1978. Two films have been made based on it also. I have seen the first one, a Canadian film, made for TV (1985), not the later one by Disney (2007). I was so impressed by the writing that I ordered the author's book called "Stories of my Life." In "Stories of my Life," which Paterson emphasizes is "not a memoir," I'm not sure why, she describes, among many other topics, the story behind "Bridge to Terabithia." For me it was the most moving portion of the book, because I always wanted to be a writer, for as long as I can remember, and even wrote fiction in elementary school. I wrote fiction again in 1998 when I took a creative writing class by Bob Sloan, a writer in Kentucky, when I was teaching child development there at Morehead State University. It was a six-week class, and I wrote a story a week. I have written no fiction since, with the exception of the start of a fictionalized story about Comanche, the horse from Custer's unit who survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn, written from the horse's point of view. It remains unfinished. Something I would very much like to do is get back to where I could write from my imagination again. I don't know how to do that. I went to graduate school in the first place because I knew I would have to write something. I had to write something for my two graduate degrees, and I loved the writing part of all that. It taught me a lot. But maybe that kind of writing killed my imagination. I worked in journalism also, and enjoyed that, and now I am blogging. Maybe both of those experiences have killed my imagination. Maybe teaching college killed my imagination. I don't know if something inside me has died or if there is still a way to recover the imagination required to write fiction. I can't put my finger on it. I don't even know why I want to write fiction, other than that is something I used to be able to do but now seem not to be able to, and I feel like something was stolen from me, or maybe I destroyed it myself, writing about all the things I was writing about for pay, every day. The part of the book where Paterson talks about where she got the idea for "Bridge to Terabithia" is very personal and very emotional. It was very painful and difficult for her to write the book because she was reliving the experience of her young son and the tragic death of his female best friend. I believe the children in the real-life story were younger than the characters in the book and the film, but the emotion would have been the same, and it is powerful. She talks about writing from the deep places inside, the places that are difficult to navigate, some might say. She said writers write to "answer their own questions." Maybe I haven't done that, or maybe I have, not knowing that I was doing it. I wrote my self-published memoir and it was painful at times, reliving certain things, and now as I write these things every night, I wonder how much of my heart do I really want to engage. I feel like when I do, people either feel sorry for me or they simply ignore it, so why bother? Paterson talks about what it's like to feel that people think you are disposable. And I think that is probably the point exactly. Now, if I could communicate something about that without people feeling sorry for me or ignoring me, perhaps I would actually be getting hold of something that would touch another person. I know what she means by feeling disposable, and I bet someone reading this has felt that way. I know my late sister felt that way before she took her own life, and I think that is important to understand. I don't want anyone to put one of those "care" emojis on this, please. I am not asking you to feel sorry for me or tell me that you care about how I feel. That is not why I write. But if you can relate to something you read here, if you have felt the way I'm describing, I would appreciate a "like" or a "love" or a comment because I would like to know if I wrote something that resonated with you. That is what I'm after. Because you are not disposable to me. Everyone has a story and everyone matters. Social media is very cruel at times and I don't want to participate in that cruelty, either receiving it or passing it on.