Some years ago, I was in a relationship that wasn\u2019t working.
He resented my immersion in my writing as I often chose it over being with him.\u00a0My consistency and dedication to my career made him feel envious since he had\u00a0nothing similar in his life and he felt ignored, neglected and uninspired.<\/p>\n
I felt smothered and one day, when we were in the car on our
way to dinner, he said, \u201cWhy don’t you ever write about me?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re lucky I don\u2019t,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
After we went our separate ways, I was upset and angry and\u00a0when I put pen to paper, I found myself writing something about him that was\u00a0less than golden. I was doing what he had asked but if he had seen it, he\u00a0wouldn’t have liked it. He was fortunate that I didn\u2019t want to publish it or\u00a0show it to anyone. The moral of the story: If you\u2019re in a relationship with a\u00a0writer or an artist, be careful because anything you do or say will inevitably\u00a0show up on the page or the canvas. To quote a common sentiment among creative\u00a0types, \u201cEverything is grist for the mill.\u201d<\/p>\n
The original meaning refers to the corn that farmers bring
to mill to be ground into flour.\u00a0 The contemporary meaning is that none of your life experiences have to be wasted, no matter how painful or difficult. You can use them to tell your story and allow other people to relate and learn something about themselves. Award winning journalist, writer and filmmaker Norah Ephron, coined the phrase, \u201cEverything is copy.\u201d She meant that whatever happens, good or beautiful, bad or ugly, can be material for your work. You can paint it, write it, sing it, dance it or act it out. All the events in your life can be useful and when you see that you can turn something terrible into something inspirational, it won\u2019t sting as much.<\/p>\n
Two of my favorite spiritual leaders\/authors, Baba Ram Dass
and Stephen Levine who are no longer with us, wrote a book together called, \u201cGrist\u00a0for the Mill.\u201d Ram Dass regarded all of his difficult childhood experiences as\u00a0grist for the mill, a way to use the events in his life \u2013 comic, tragic, boring\u00a0or dramatic \u2013 for spiritual growth. You can use anything as a wakeup call. A\u00a0famous guru said that when he finds himself at a red light, he uses it to\u00a0remember to breathe. Whatever is going on, you can use your trials and
irritations as a guide to a better and more authentic life. When you let these\u00a0events become your focus, you can see how they shaped you and helped you become\u00a0who you are today.<\/p>\n
A marriage might enhance someone\u2019s life and fill them with
hope while a divorce might create a void that is impossible to fill. Or the\u00a0opposite. But as an author, it’s all grist for the mill. When I sent my second husband\u00a0packing, I was devastated. I took to my bed for days and grieved my loss while\u00a0the author in me was noticing and sorting everything I was feeling into stories.\u00a0With no effort on my part, life was showing me some remarkable things. The
holistic healer who was all about \u201cnatural this\u201d and \u201corganic that\u201d brought me\u00a0Xanax. Two friends had an argument at the foot of my bed while I was crying. My\u00a0Italian hair colorist came over and said. \u201cDon\u2019t worry. We\u2019ll make-a you\u00a0blond.\u201d I already was blonde.<\/p>\n
I got conflicting advice from everyone. \u201cChange the locks.\u00a0Unfriend him. Call the INS and get him deported. Watch him come crawling back.\u00a0Forgive him. Burn his clothes.\u201d When I finally got up, I threw the clothes he\u00a0had left behind in a black Hefty trash bag, left them for the garbage truck and\u00a0went back to my life. I was minus a husband but I had more closet space and a\u00a0great screenplay.<\/p>\n
Author and satirist, Terry Pratchett, who sold\u00a0over 85 million books in his lifetime, said, \u201cI\u2019ve lost both parents in the last\u00a0two years and you pick up on stuff. That\u2019s the most terrible thing about being
an author \u2013 standing at your mother\u2019s funeral, but you don\u2019t switch the author\u00a0off. So your innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.\u201d<\/p>\n
When life throws things at you that you weren\u2019t\u00a0expecting, good or bad, think of them as grist, the separate parts that define\u00a0the path of a human being. Each story exists on its own, but when you put them
all together and blend them seamlessly into each other, that\u2019s the mill, the\u00a0foundation that will grind and mesh your story into a whole. One event folds\u00a0into the next. One story picks up where the last one left off. Nothing stands\u00a0alone even if it looks that way. When you take everything in your life and mix\u00a0it all together, elegance, imperfections and all, you are left with one perfect\u00a0human life, the only one that is completely and authentically your own.<\/p>\n
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Some years ago, I was in a relationship that wasn\u2019t working.He resented my immersion in my writing as I often chose it over being with him.\u00a0My consistency and dedication to my career made him feel envious since he had\u00a0nothing similar in his life and he felt ignored, neglected and uninspired. I felt smothered and one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2195,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions\/2195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}