Denying self-denial

A description of a writer, a few weeks ago, has stuck. The author—was he a novelist, or a poet?—went through his self-denial phase as a truck driver, before he turned to writing, which he does now every night for hours on end, in a little cabin behind his home.

I scoured Google looking for this piece about him, like finding it would unlock some door. Do all writers go through a phase of denying the kind of rising, surging desire I have almost daily, to express myself through the written word?

If so, it’s a strange comfort to me. Why, in my own life, do I deny great, teaming pleasures? Not because I fear rejection as a writer anymore than the next person. Because the impulses to create are checked early on. I simply switch them off, or deny them through any number of rationalizations (a favorite: people need me).

(Of course, then these impulses pile up behind the locked door, like so many poor souls trying to escape annihilation by fire, and I get very depressed, but that’s an old story. )


Someone has likened this self-denial to a kind of anorexia; it’s like cutting yourself off from the stuff you love. I can understand the connection, since I’m a food addict. Self-denial kinda runs in my family, and I fear I've passed on this trait to my children, the way it was passed to me.

What is the price of unlocking this heavy old door, and keeping it ajar? I think, looking back, it's a dread that I will be punished, or, in some primeval way, that something--or someone--critical to my survival will be overlooked.

What’s the reward? Playing in the wash of waves at the shoreline, where the sea ebbs and flows, mixing up sticks and rocks and mud and acorns, to make a homemade stew while playing house, racing around the block on my two-wheeler, making piles of paper airplanes, telling untold stories in Rwanda, writing a short story about a young girl whose mother abandons her to a great-aunt and uncle,or a poem about hearing that your first teenage boyfriend died at age 63.