The first glimmers of spring were starting to appear on the trees in the stunning park across the way from our condo.
It was still chilly outside, but I think knowing that Utah wasn’t my “real home” anymore gave me the ability to admire the beauty with a fleeting and mildly warmer appreciation. Knowing that I would be leaving soon seemed to allow me to stop trying to make myself see the beauty around me; instead, I just did, and I could let that beauty stand alone as a fact.
But. It was also the time of year that my mom used to call “mud season.”
When all of the snow starts to melt, it leaves a muddy mixture of brownish-gray sludge that gets all over everything. It ruins your shoes and gets the hem of your jeans really dirty, too. And, it makes your car disgusting and filthy all the time. The ground would melt during the day, and then freeze over again at night, which always made me feel depressed and crunchy inside.
So with that reality in the mix, it seemed like any of my warming progress kept getting thwarted by the chill of the night, and I remained stuck and sullen most of the time. And even though there was a hopeful promise on the horizon of sunny days, green trees, and sunshine on my cheeks in the future, the muddy reality all around me made my hopes come to me in short-lived bursts.
Clearly, I still had to process through all of the ugly sludge to get to the other side of myself.
So I spent most of the first week while Lou was away catching up with Jackie, and writing journal entries to myself over hot black coffee in the dirty coffee shop. I needed that specific catharsis I could always find when I was grinding my thoughts into words, or spending time with the one friend in Utah that still represented everything that was good in my life.
Even though I had such a breakthrough about my faith while I was away, my understanding and my personal clarity about the Mormon faith didn’t alter my love for Jackie one bit. In fact, I maybe loved her more. I felt like my friendship with her had never been twisted up in any part of my confusion while I was living in Salt Lake — rather, I discovered that my connection to her was sacred in its own way, and there was nothing that could change that for me. She understood how things ended with Lou and her husband, and she seemed to just know that my time in Utah was meant to be short-lived.
Simply put, I love Jackie. And I knew that I could to cling to her for accountability when it came to wrapping up things with Sam.
I only traded one or two texts with Sam when I first got back. He was just checking in; and, he was curious if I’d heard anything from Roy. When I replied, I tried to keep things general — even though a huge part of me was struggling with fears and insecurities over the fact that Roy hadn’t contacted me.
I tried to be patient, and I did my best to be “unattached” to how things worked out with the pilot — but my emotions on that topic were loaded with confusion. And therefore, my emotions were pretty loaded when it came to Sam, too.
I remember Sam’s texts were cryptic — per usual — but he also seemed extra evasive and aloof with me, too. The gaps in his communication always made me feel like a bad person for wanting more from him. But when I got back from England, that kind of behavior made me feel angry at myself for involving Sam in my life in any way at all.
I remember hating how I felt about Sam.
The very idea of Sam made me feel guilty in two ways: I felt guilty about how my crazy feelings around him had impacted my marriage, but I also felt guilty for wanting to completely cut Sam out of my world. On the one hand, it was 100% obvious to me that I owed it to Lou (and to my marriage) to totally disconnect from Sam; yet, on the other hand, I felt like I owed Sam something for all of the hours he spent with me while I was writing the series.
At that time, I couldn’t picture the plans I had made for Eloise without some part of Sam in the mix, but, I also couldn’t imagine how I could keep Sam in the picture if it was going to continue to harm my marriage. So it felt like there was no way for me to address my double twist of guilt without compromising myself in some way or another. Only this time, I didn’t want to make a decisive choice between my marriage and my career anymore.
And…I think I really wanted to believe that I wouldn’t have to.
So I processed all of my feelings with Jackie. I remember telling her how worried I was about every scenario in my head. If Roy wanted to buy the pilot, that would mean that Sam might end up being a part of my future, and I already knew that wasn’t healthy for anyone — including Sam. But if Roy and his team took a pass, I wasn’t sure how I was ever going to recover.
My personal doubts about whether or not I was a good enough storyteller on my own were overwhelming me with this sort of preemptive kind of grief. And even though I knew if Roy took a pass on the series, it would resolve all of my worries about Sam, but it would also mean that I failed again,and maybe it would prove to the world that my belief in myself was nothing more than the delusions of a silly and very stupid dreamer…
As you can see, all of my thoughts during this time were totally self-involved and very dramatic. Here are a few gems directly from my journal:
“The world is unfair. Sam is a terrible writer [in my opinion], and he has experienced multiple successes with live action narratives. But if [Roy] takes a pass on the scripts, then that must mean that I’m the terrible writer… Not Sam.”
“What if losing myself [with other writers] happens to me again? What if I always lose my mind when I’m writing stories?”
“I wish I didn’t care so much about Eloise. She isn’t even real, yet I worry about her all the time. I know I should really be worried about myself, but worrying about Elle IS worrying about myself. I wish I wasn’t wired like this… It’s exhausting to feel like this about someone you created in your own head. ”
Those are just mere snippets from my exhaustive journal entries from that week of my life. When I re-read these entries now, I remember exactly how crazy I felt.
I was consumed with fears that Roy would reject me — which I was certain would hurt me deeply, and maybe even break me again. But I had equally powerful fears over the idea of Roy wanting to buy the pilot. I didn’t know if I could ever trust myself again…
So this complicated internal struggle kept tossing me into a familiar ditch I’d been trying so hard to get out of, and so my first days on my own felt horrible and kind of maddening. Every hope I had inside of me felt like it was covered in a sloppy layer of mud…
