Ugly Bags of Mostly Water

I’ve come a long ways from my first adventures in writing. I’m actually not that far off, it seems.

My first real “I’m going to write a book” thought was inspired by the 1996 single-player turn-based strategy computer game called “Deadlock: Planetary Conquest”. The plot of my imagined novel centered around a faction of children who’d discovered they’d been cursed to live out their lives as children (peter pan style) and who also had super powers somehow unrelated to their perpetual childlike bodies.

I made it a few 100 words in before realizing physically writing a book was… not as easy as I’d expected. (Yes, dear reader, I still have those pages of scribbles tucked away somewhere)

Thirty years later I’ve lived a ton of life, and still, writing is always harder than I expect. Feelings. So many feelings.

Always the shame of thinking: people should be paying more attention to my feelings.

Or the anger that why do sentences HAVE to be structured in this way.

And, inevitably, the dread of seeing my future of sitting in an office writing emails about things I barely understand. Because it’s the only way I can figure out how to get health insurance.

September of this year I started taking Birth Control for the first time in my life.

What a strange thing to say.

What is even stranger, I think, is how it’s turned out to be a tipping point.

I was vaguely excited about starting Birth Control. My ties to femininity are… complicated, but real. And while makeup and boys and dresses were things I still don’t relate to, the uniquely feminine journey of taking oral contraceptives was always fascinating to me.

Logically, I understood the angst behind it. Of course it would be the woman who had to take the brunt of conception prevention. A single pill a day? And I almost saw it as a man might. It doesn’t seem that hard.

But then I started taking it.
And after the first two days, I’d decided:

—this is bullshit in its finest form—

You expect women, who already suffer from the prejudice of being “too emotional” to remember to take a tiny pill every day that will cause fundamental changes to their mood, their body, their affect, how they feel as a PERSON IN SKIN?

You mean to tell me women out there right now are just… walking around on Birth Control like it’s NORMAL? (I say that to myself as I sit in my car during lunch and cry for NO REASON).

Do you even understand what messing with someone’s hormones DO to a person?

Well. I understand better now. And while I have nothing to apologize for or to, I still feel shook. WHAT EVEN ARE WE IF NOT WALKING BAGS OF HORMONE CHEMICALS. WHAT IS REAL WHAT IS NOT REAL AND WHAT AM I.

What does this have to do with writing, you ask?

OH, I’ll tell you what it has to do with writing.

In Westchester, California somewhere during July 2001 my older sister (who was seventeen and very much emotionally twenty) decided to take all of us sisters to the movie theater. We made the trek—all five of us—down Sepulveda Boulevard to the new movie theater next to the highway.

I don’t remember how we decided to watch Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and I didn’t have any cultural context to know it was based on a computer game.

All I remember is that for the next two to three months after, EVERYTHING in my life revolved around that movie. I wrote. And I wrote. And I WROTE. It was incoherent. Frenzied. Absolute young estrogen filled rantings of a fourteen-year-old girl who’d JUST had her first period and was suddenly standing on the PRECIPICE of her DESTINY.

You could imagine my surprise, then, when TWENTY-FOUR years later I start taking estrogen birth control and suddenly find myself having written 168,026 words over 57 straight days. Luckily, this time I’m thirty-eight and my writing is… much more coherent.

It wasn’t the point of the Birth Control, though. The point was to sync up my follicles so that Dr. Sacks could stick a giant needle in me and suck out my mature eggs.

Which happened.

And before my wife can say “Lisa, why is your word count your biggest takeaway from your egg retrieval journey?”

It absolutely wasn’t my biggest takeaway.

It is, however, my desperate attempt to distract myself from the fact that none of those eggs they harvested made it (Well. Two of them made it to blastocyst, but the PGT-A testing revealed too many chromosomal problems that they’re not compatible with life). And it does serve as a small consolation prize to the crushing sadness and uncertainty of the future.

Because it wasn’t just 168K words.

It was me remembering a part of me I’ve always loved. And even though I feel like a fraud who needs extra chemicals to be productive, I realized writing is one of the few effective tools I know I can use to process my feelings. The page can’t be offended by the truth, even if it takes me a while to get to it.

Anyways, I felt like writing yesterday. And today. And tomorrow. And hopefully the next day. And FUCK does that feel good.