Post #2 for the DIY MFA Book Club.

Today prompt: Tell about a time you had to honor your reality.
Has there ever been a moment when writing felt completely incompatible with your real life–when it felt like there was just no way you could make the two exist together?

Summer, 2015:  Life can stop you in your tracks just when it’s time to hit the restart button. I walked 500-miles along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. I was celebrating the completion of two years of self-imposed mourning for the demise of a decades-long marriage. It was also the end of a two-year moratorium on any form of dating. My arrival in Santiago would kick-start life fresh and renewed: new loves, new home, new challenges.

But along that route, a voice crackled into my iPhone that the true love of my life, the NGO I founded to support Kenyan girls through college, would close before I returned. My whole reason for being was that NGO. My Camino walk wrapped around a crowdfunding campaign that raised $50k so that 25 more girls could begin college. My NGO was the place I hid when the pain of my reality overflowed. My NGO was the place I spent 15 hours a day. My NGO had become my husband, my best friend, my adventure buddy, my lifeline.

So began my swim through molasses. And it was through this molasses that writing saved me. I could pour out the anger, or the hurt, or the injustice, or the panic that I faced each morning. I could turn to the page when there was no office to drive to when the sun came up. Oh, if only the sun wouldn’t come up. There were young women in Kenya who had depended on me for the last ten years.

There was a time during this period that I quit writing. But to be alive, I knew I had to put pen to paper. I wasn’t ready to give up on life even if many around me were worried that I would. Writing let me create a temporary world where everything is okay. It gave me time to regroup so I could face the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. It let me jot down escape routes.  And then it held me accountable to those routes. My writing told me I had to leave the old behind. It delivered a schedule for me to follow, and three months later I packed up my Jeep and drove 1000 miles north and started all over again.

There’s a happy ending to my story. It ‘s one of survival and dogged determination and the ability to find positives no matter how dismal life becomes.

It wasn’t me who reclaimed my life, though. It was my writing.