Why are we driven to do the things we do, experience what we choose (or don’t), and feel the way we feel? How do we know things about ourselves that can’t be explained? Why do we care (or not)?
As a child, I would sit and read my parents’ 25-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica set, learning many things. A to Z, I was fascinated. The year that I was eight, I learned about autism and I learned about Nepal and the Himalayas. From that young age I knew that I wanted to travel to Nepal someday, but never at any point could I have foreseen that these two things I had first learned about so long ago would manifest themselves together in a most wondrous experience. Thirty years later, I traveled to Nepal to teach about autism. An opportunity arose that I could never have imagined or designed. How does that happen? I believe it’s because the soul already knows.
I decided at the age of four that I would be a writer. A year later I wrote my first book and even “published” it, creating a hardcover and spine out of cardboard and fashioning an illustrated dust jacket out of tissue paper. (So you could say that I first became an indie author in 1976.) I started writing poetry at age six and loved it. I continued to write more books throughout childhood, including a series of stories about a pink mouse and her friends. At age twelve, my writing career took off with the small-scale publication of my novella The Classroom Caper. During my teens I wrote several short stories and half of a novel about living through a massive earthquake (I grew up in L.A. County). And in both high school and college, my poetry was published in yearbooks, newspapers, and an anthology.
I attended college in southern Oregon, obtaining a B.A. in English, married, divorced, and remained here to raise my two sons. In 1997, my older son Nigel, then three, was diagnosed with autism. This influenced me (eventually) to write an article to promote autism awareness, which was published by two regional parenting magazines. In March, 2008 I began writing my blog/website Teen Autism. Blogging changed my often isolated, single-parent world; I finally connected with other parents of children with autism and have been fortunate to meet many of them in person. For the first time in years, I did not feel alone. I volunteered as the Southern Oregon Chapter Rep for the Autism Society of Oregon, and it was through that position that I came in contact with the nonprofit agency in Seattle that organized the trip to Nepal for autism education. What the soul already knows.
There were other things that my soul already knew. At the age of 15, Nigel began having seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy. It sounds terrible to admit this, but deep down, I somehow knew that he would, as much as I hoped with all my heart that he wouldn’t. And at the age of 40, while suffering a lengthy and particularly devastating depression, I was diagnosed with Bipolar II. It went misdiagnosed for decades because my mania never reached a point where I needed to be hospitalized a la Mr. Jones, but it was bad enough that I experienced auditory hallucinations. The strange thing is that over the years I’d had friends, roommates, and a boyfriend who had bipolar – I just always felt drawn to them without even knowing they had bipolar. Almost three years before my diagnosis, I had started writing my second novel, and one of the main characters had bipolar. My soul already knew.
Slip, published in 2010, is my first novel. You can read more about it here, but it’s based on my experiences with raising my son in his younger years. In writing it I wanted to promote autism awareness, of course, but I also wanted to explore family dynamics, marriage, and the relationships that are the most important in our lives. In many ways the feelings surrounding those relationships are universal. Our actual experiences vary, but we can easily recognize the emotions. It’s the human condition.
And that’s what I feel compelled to write about. I like the air of mystery about the soul, the beauty of it, the wisdom of it. So I write about things that the soul already knows. What we know, subconsciously, to be true. Feelings that we recognize, relationships that we experience, love lost, love fought for, love preserved. Fear. Regret. Triumph. Holding on through the deepest despair, and learning to let go with joy.
What does your soul already know?
