"One day I'm going to kill myself," I used to say with a smile.
I was a writer, after all, born of grit and teeth and bad memories. I figured that was the legacy I'd leave behind, so I accepted it with a grin and a tacit shrug.
When I was a child being a writer meant possibility, expression, a world unhindered by physics, joy, creativity, beauty. I wanted to do this for the rest of my life because inside my world of writing I spread wings that weren't instantly tied down and crushed.
When I was an adult being a writer came to mean to me struggle, pain, a way to punish myself, small glowing moments of happiness surrounded by the reality of poverty, whiskey, visible ribs, insomnia.
I see myself suspended crystalline over a dream, and I have to wonder how many choices would have led me here. Happiness feels like such a finite chance in a universe full of miseries, a universe full of dead planets and vacuums and 98% dark matter.
I'm happy now, but I see the corpses of me below the glass of my dreams, swirling in infinity
Autumn who got struck by lightning.
Autumn who floats like a bloated corpse down a river.
Autumn who's on painkillers and drifts away in the white fuzz.
Autumn who falls off a balcony while drunk and is crushed by gravity.
But in every alternative universe, Autumn was a writer.
In every alternative universe, I was chained to the page.
Because I didn't know who I'd be without writing, without the thousands of hours at the keyboard, the stacks of manuscripts, the worlds dragged out of my head. In my mind I was Autumn Christian the writer, and those words could not be separated from who I was.
I knew that I wanted to be a writer from the moment I first was able to read the word "I."
It's just that over the years what that meant to me transformed into this grotesque punishment, this burden that I dragged behind me like a thick knotted rope, always catching on the street, having to be tugged, slimed with mud.
There's an idea in Lacanian psychology called the sinthome - it's often seen as a fourth knot in the Borromean knot of identity that's usually the knots of the real, symbolic, and imaginary. He references Joyce, one of his favorite writers, and says that Joyce avoided insanity by using his art to tie together his Borromean knot. It is the thing, the object, which kept Joyce's entire world from falling apart into fragmentation.
But I'm not the psychotic son of a bitch that wrote Ulysses.
And I don't need to keep looking down into the dream, the bubble of glowing skins that hold my selves, and just see death.
Death in front of death. Because I know that once writing meant joy instead of pain. I knew that once it meant excitement and an unveiling of new experiences, instead of drudgery and a whip to beat myself with. I knew it once meant a place to be lovely and curious and express my creativity, instead of something I needed to do to prove to myself that I was good enough.
And I know that I can feel that again.
Because not every writer becomes an alcoholic and swims to their death. And even if they did, I'M NOT THEM. This is my life, damn it.
The first thing I had to do was step away from the keyboard.
And allow myself to breathe, as a human being again. To explore the world and find joy that didn't exist inside of my manuscript.
It begins slowly, the unfurling of yourself from the chain. Prying the identity out of the object you're attached to. Until underneath the fragmentations of the dreams different selves begin to appear.
It can be difficult to understand that the mythology was something that I created, not a legacy I was born into. And each day I move toward happiness, those alternate universes in my dreams begin to shift. New selves begin to image. Selves that are not just corpses, floating in glandular light, like embryos.
There's other Autumns down there, still alive.
Autumn who's a mother. (A very small alternative universe)
Autumn who goes to the beach during the day in her purple bikini and reads the Baghavad Gita while sipping on a margarita in a Starbucks cup.
Autumn who's a personal trainer and a martial artist, and spends her days in the gym pumping weights and landing kicks and teaching people how to be the best version of themselves
Maybe even Autumn who's a taxidermist, livs in a cabin and collects crystals on the side of a road.
But still, I think I'll continue to be a writer. It's just no longer the clutch of my sanity. It's no longer the thing that ties me to the earth. I no longer say, "One day I'm going to kill myself," smile or no, because destiny isn't something you have to ride like a wave, it's something created.
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