When I was in 6th grade, I planted a discovery. That’s how I think of it when something significant happens that I don’t fully understand until years later.
My friends and I were running headlong around an auditorium, and I tripped and slid headlong through several rows of chairs. (Yes, I had been warned not to run. No, I did not listen. It was not the last time.)
I broke off most of a front tooth and bit through my lip, but was otherwise no worse for wear. The tooth was reconstructed, and outwardly I looked perfectly normal. (A common error people make when they meet me.) There was just a faint scar on my lower lip and a little knot of scar tissue. (However, under blacklights at a club, with missing teeth and scars, I look like an extra from The Hills Have Eyes.)
I didn’t learn my lesson—I kept running, kept falling, and I kept getting back up.
Then a decade later, without any warning, something fell out of my lip. That knot of scar tissue was actually a shard of tooth that had been embedded on the night of the accident. It had remained there all those years until it finally worked its way to the surface.
And that’s what writing is often like. You were a witness to, or victim of, something shocking. You encased it in your mind, sealing it away because it’s simply too difficult to believe or understand. But when enough time passes, just as you’ve forgotten about it, the truth emerges on your page—not as a bloody wound, but a bright, shining discovery you planted within yourself years ago.
Don’t stop running.