Dear Kitty,

For a moment I couldn’t write.

My inability to write was really a side effect of self-doubt, which was the result of me allegedly forgetting the meaning of the phrase ‘rest on one’s laurels’.

All I could think about was how stupid I was for forgetting the meaning of the phrase. I asked myself, continuously: How could you forget? How will you ever write a novel or a story with clever idioms or phrases like John Fowles or Sylvia Plath? What if you forget the definition of three-letter words like ‘cat’? Could this be? No. Early-onset Alzheimer? Anomic Aphasia? Impossible.

Even now I believe I only partially remember the definition (It is not at all true!). But I have to live with it. I have to sit in the uncertainty and be okay with being uncomfortable, with thinking I forgot. That is what my therapist would suggest. Besides, I hardly believe any writer really remembers the definitions of every word or phrase they’ve used. In fact, I’ve heard of great writers having a thesaurus at arms length when they write. Not me. Now that I’m doing better I think I’m too good for that.

I used to make categories of things, Kitty, of words and phrases. When I was a novice writer, I filled notebooks with taxonomies of words and their definitions, my own definitions, synonyms, and the slight differences between each synonym. I wanted to make sure I knew the meaning of all the words and phrases I used. 

A linguistics professor once told me there is no such thing as a true synonym. And while I agree, I choose to dismiss the idea most of the time. It’s too much for my OCD brain, to constantly ruminate on the nuanced meanings of words; or the words under the words. 

I was too sucked into the OCD cycle—obsessions, anxiety, compulsions, ephemeral relief— that I couldn’t write a single sentence let alone a complete, coherent, paragraph.

To remember the phrase “rest on one’s laurels,” I made a connection in my mind associating the word ‘laurels’ in the phrase to the ones in the Cal State Long Beach logo. It helped for a couple of days. But when I thought I forgot the definition verbatim, as it’s written down in the Merriam-Webster (I was very preoccupied with obsessions and compulsions), I freaked.

First, it started with the intrusive thought that I’d run into someone in the street and they’d arbitrarily ask me what “rest on one’s laurels” meant—like a malicious pop quiz who’s true intent is to underscore one’s stupidity. Then I saw myself being called into a room. It was the office of a chair in English at a university I couldn’t identify. He would say to me, “I apologize, Athena, but we’re going to have to let you go. A student complained about you not knowing the meaning of the phrase ‘rest on one’s laurels.’” And in my irrational brain it made sense. What kind of seasoned writer does not know the meaning of the phrase? 

Soon death, poisonings, and natural disasters became the vivid thoughts that waltzed around in my head. If I couldn’t remember the definition word for word, someone in my family was going to suffer an untimely death. Someone somewhere in the world would drink water that was inexplicably contaminated with arsenic. The San Andreas Fault would be triggered and the huge earthquake that’s haunted the minds of many Californians would become a reality and thousands of people would die.

I was too sucked into the OCD cycle—obsessions, anxiety, compulsions, ephemeral relief— that I couldn’t write a single sentence let alone a complete, coherent, paragraph.  

You want to know what helped me, Kitty? It wasn’t affirmations or self-empathy.

What helped me reclaim my writer identity is an essay by Cheryl Strayed (under the nom de plume Sugar) that I go back to every so often. I had forgotten about it. “Write like a motherfucker,” she says, in her don’t-feel-sorry-for-yourself attitude. And so I will. 

Yours Truly, 

Athena