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Here I am this morning at my computer viewing a blank blog page upon which I will dump out words.  I don’t know which words, so the only thing I can do is keep on typing until the words appear here.

I feel alone in this job I am doing with my book’s writing right now.  I feel alone because I am alone.  Mine is a lonely story.

The fact that I wish to write my lonely story so well that it captures the attention, the imagination, the hearts and thoughts of as wide a public as possible reminds me of the word ‘hubris’, a word that came into English in 1884 from the Greek and means ‘exaggerated pride or self-confidence’.

I am afraid of hubris.  Right now this fear stands exactly in front of me and in my way.  It stops me ‘dead in my tracks’, removes my words from me, and will in itself guarantee hubris is exactly where my writing will end up unless I can give myself permission to know that I have value, my story has value, my words have value, and that this work that I am doing is blessed in ways I cannot mortally comprehend.

Somewhere between hubris and my fear of it lies a wide open pathway that is mine to follow.  This pathway is as clearly laid out before me, free of weeds and obstacles and as easy to stroll along, skip over or run along as is the adobe walkway I have been constructing in my own backyard.  Yes, there are a few hardy weeds that have popped their new tiny leaves out of the adobe bricks to appear where I don’t want them now that our monsoon rains have come.

But I can simply snip them off with my fingernails and they will all disappear never to trouble me again.  And it is only I who can make my fears about my work, what I am writing, and what the end result is going to be go away just as easily.

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It is the ‘nature of the beast’ of severe infant-child abuse and the mental illness that spawns and perpetrates it that silence reign.  This beast requires a particular kind of silence.  I believe that the only way this beast remains alive, and carries itself in the dis-eased form it manifests itself in down through the generations is because the silence it needs to duplicate itself is extremely difficult to break.

Difficult and impossible are not the same thing.  It is as if the beast itself is challenging me at this moment, daring me to break the silence that maintains its very existence.  It thunders.  It roars.  It bares its gigantic and terrifying fangs at me.  It shakes its shaggy mammoth-sized head at me in rage.  But thanks to the author, L. Frank Baum, I have the pitiful antihero, The Wizard of Oz, to remember as I meet my own fear of hubris, vanquish it and move on.

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I could end my morning’s verbal sputterings right here, but I am not going to.  I am going to turn around right now and stare that beast right in its eyes.  “Don’t you threaten ME with extinction, you horrible, putrefying, nasty, deceitful LIAR!  I have seen your kind before, and you mean NOTHING to me.  DO YOU HEAR ME?  Are you PAYING ATTENTION?  You STINK!  You are forever rotting, forever condemned to exist in the darkness where human fear feeds you three meals a day and lots of snacks.  Well, I don’t care if you starve to DEATH yourself!  I will no longer heed YOUR lies!  In fact, I will no longer heed you AT ALL!  You are nothing to me.  Nothing.  Because that IS what you are, like it or not.  NOTHING!”

My, that felt good!  Not only has the flimsy immaterial curtain vaporized behind which this invisible beast lurks and groans, but the beast itself has disappeared, though I am not fooled into believing its going is forever.

That beast has resided itself, all tucked in, warm and cozy, amidst every one of my mother’s words I have confronted, do confront, and will confront as I shred apart the lie that fed her life and so harmed me not only as an infant-child, but harmed the me that writes these words, that breathes this air, that has determination to finish a job I began in this world before I left my mother’s belly.

“I WILL NAME YOU!”  I shout out with my soul in the directions that beast has fled to.  “And if I am going to HATE, it is YOUR existence I will shoot my hatred after.  And hear me, oh Beast of Human Misery!  You have stolen away the joy from enough lives in my ancestral pool!  You will no longer chaw your carnivorous teeth upon my family’s generations.  Me thinks you have already stolen more than your fill, and guess what?  Not only am I going to vanquish you, not only am I going to do my best to take back from you the joy, health and well-being that you have raked from my family and carried away into your darkness, I am going to make you pay with your life!  I am going to break this very silence you require for your survival.  And if you happen to be so stupid that you don’t believe me — well — just cower away in your hidden cracks and WATCH ME DO IT — while you still can!”

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