Hi Tawnya, Thank you for your prayers...I too hope these ghosts go away so that I can have some more peace soon - though I also realize that the best thing I can do to make them feel less welcome is to take more charge of my life. I've let things be too much over the years - and just haven't taken the kinds of chances I used to take - the types of fruitful risks that make a difference in one's life.
When I look back over the last several months, it amazes me just how many mistakes I kept making - and just how inevitable it was to arrive where we are now. My W didn't really have a choice but to leave - I can see that now - especially since I seemed to be (and continue to be) such an obvious trigger for her. With her out of the house I have a lot of peace - and also a lot of quiet in which to see what I've been doing wrong over the years - not just in my marriage - but in terms of my self and my career.
While I make a living as a copy writer and have written some stuff for children's TV - it's not the writing I love - and it's not the living I aspire to...my first love is fiction writing, then screenplays, and then essays...so the copy writing I do doesn't even come close - and it's mostly served to pay the bills. I miss the inspiration of being in a story - and I especially miss the intense inspiration of being in a classroom - all stuff that I had given up about nine years ago...and haven't had time to revisit until now.
Rob, I so appreciate your encouragement for me to get back into teaching - I used to teach intro to composition and critical reading classes - so my plan now is to take the first half of next year to get back into reading and writing more, work on my dissertation, and look for a teaching job. I may start by doing some volunteer work at a museum near where I live - since they are looking for volunteers to teach high school students about some of the manuscripts in their collection...(I had studied medieval literature - and have a lot of experience with manuscript care, construction and translation). When I left Berkeley it was partly because of a conversation I had with some other Comp Lit grad students - I asked them which books they liked at the time - and they looked at me like my head was made of some kind of rhetorical puzzle - these were five friends of mine that I respected very much - and that had all reached this point where they didn't love literature anymore...they cared more about the criticism of it...and that disappointed me - since that's not why I went into it.
Now, looking back, I think it was foolish of me to have been so disappointed - as I realize that it's very different to read literature as someone that aspires to write fiction - and to read literature as someone that aspires to master the knowledge of what's been written. To me, brilliant literature is an inspiration - a reminder of how much work and discipline and care it takes to write something beautiful - while the critical approach seemed to focus more on finding picking apart the beauty and parsing it into pieces for inspection...kind of like an autopsy.
