Un-Deferring My Dream So it Won't Sag Like A Heavy Load

Would you blow it if someone offered you your wildest dreams come true?

Would you procrastinate? Wallow in doubt? Let yourself and everyone else down? Possess so poor a concept of your own writing/craft/art to never fully actualize your lifelong dream of publishing a successful memoir?

That's what I'd do. Make that what I'm now doing.

I'd better pull it together, get organized, focus my writing and gather up some serious self-discipline. SOON. Oh, and drink a shitload of strong coffee.

After all, we all know what happens to a "dream deferred," don't we?

Except in my case a "dream deferred" congeals at the very top in its own excess milk solids and grease, like a perfectly good pumpkin spice latte left to grow cold and useless in a sticky minivan cupholder.

Someone I know would curtly advise me to, "Get over yourself and get writing." I'll see to it that I do both pronto.

Sometimes I'm afraid to write begs to be written. To write my experiences as real and raw as I lived them.

Fear holds me back. I'm afraid to be judged by the masses. Afraid to be perceived as a bad mom, which is absurd because most of what I plan to explore/expose in the book occurred years before I had children.

I'm afraid to be as revealing, as frank, as edgy as I want to be. Afraid the whole thing will flop. Deflate like a balloon.

Often I fail to understand why I feel motivated to bare all in the first place. Then I remember my editor saying the word "catharsis" from so many miles away on the phone. Catharsis.

ca·thar·sis as defined by dictionary.com is:
–noun, plural -ses /-siz/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[-seez] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation. 1. the purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, esp. through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music.
2. Medicine/Medical. purgation.
3. Psychiatry. a. psychotherapy that encourages or permits the discharge of pent-up, socially unacceptable affects.
b. discharge of pent-up emotions so as to result in the alleviation of symptoms or the permanent relief of the condition.

Hopefully -- via catharsis both on my part and on theirs -- my readers will somehow connect with, relate to, heal from, and perhaps even learn from my detailed to the bare bones memories, my utter failures and defining moments.

The poem I briefly referred to above happens to be a poem I love, a favorite of mine. I hope you are already familiar with A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes. If not, here it is for you to mull:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I hope my dream ignites in an spectacular explosion of words, three chapters of explosive, fiery words to be precise.

Now to put my pen where my mouth is ... Now, where's that coffee?