Five Days Later: Learning to Write While Learning to Heal
It has been five days since my finger surgery.
Five days.
There is something strange about counting recovery in days.
Before surgery, everything was measured by the date.
September 11.
The appointment.
The operation.
The thing coming toward me.
Now I am on the other side of it, and time is measured differently.
Five days since surgery.
Five days of healing.
Five days of adjusting.
Five days of looking at my hand and knowing that something about it has permanently changed.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, while my body is slowly doing what bodies somehow know how to do, I purchased a book.
I haven't read it yet.
Not one chapter.
I haven't highlighted a sentence or underlined a paragraph. I haven't formed an opinion about King's philosophy of writing. I don't know which parts I will agree with, which parts will challenge me, or which parts might irritate me.
The book is simply waiting for me.
And strangely, that excites me.
Because while one part of my life is being forced to slow down, another part of me feels incredibly alive.
I want to learn.
I want to read.
I want to write.
I want to become better at something I have fallen deeply in love with.
And I want to see what one of the most prolific writers of my time has to say about the craft that has become such an important part of my own life.
Not because I want to write like Stephen King.
I don't.
I want to write like me.
But I am becoming increasingly interested in understanding why writing works.
Why does one sentence stay with us while another disappears?
Why does one story reach inside us?
Why do certain words feel alive?
Why can a paragraph written by somebody we have never met somehow describe something we have never been able to explain ourselves?
What makes a writer a writer?
And how much of it can be learned?
I am excited to find out.
Perhaps there is something fitting about beginning this book while I am healing.
Because right now I am learning about another kind of craft.
The strange craft of rebuilding.
My left pinky has been fused.
It is one of those clinical words that sounds almost detached from what it actually means when it happens to your own body.
A joint has been permanently fused.
Bone has been removed.
The finger has been shortened.
A screw now sits inside it.
The joint that once moved will no longer move.
There is finality in that.
I think that is the part I am beginning to grapple with now.
The surgery itself happened.
That part is finished.
The hospital visit is behind me.
The procedure has been performed.
Now comes the slower psychological process of understanding what permanent actually means.
I can be grateful for the surgery and still grieve what has changed.
Those things are not enemies.
I can be deeply thankful for the skill of the surgeon, for modern medicine, for the people who cared for me, for the fact that the wound is healing, and still look at my hand and think:
This is different now.
This will always be different.
I think sometimes we rush too quickly toward acceptance because we are uncomfortable with grief.
We want to turn everything into a lesson.
We want the inspirational ending.
We want to know what the experience taught us.
I have certainly done that throughout my life.
I am a meaning-maker.
Something happens and my mind immediately starts trying to understand it.
What does this mean?
What can I learn?
Where is God in this?
How will this change me?
What can I write about it?
But five days after surgery, I don't think I need to have all of those answers.
Some things need to be lived before they can be interpreted.
Right now my finger hurts.
My hand is limited.
Writing and typing are different.
Simple movements remind me that something has happened.
And I am slowly learning the shape of this new reality.
That is enough for today.
Perhaps that is why buying a book about writing has encouraged me so much.
It reminded me that while something has changed, everything has not changed.
One part of one hand has been altered.
My imagination has not been fused.
My curiosity has not been shortened.
My love of books has not been removed.
My desire to create is still here.
My faith is still here.
My ideas are still here.
Refined by Fire Press is still here.
The manuscripts waiting for me are still here.
The books I haven't written yet are still somewhere ahead of me.
And that matters.
Because physical change can play strange games with identity.
We use our bodies without thinking about them until suddenly we cannot use part of them in the way we once did.
Then the ordinary becomes noticeable.
Hands especially.
I have been thinking about hands a lot lately.
How could I not?
I have written with these hands.
Worked with them.
Cooked with them.
Made coffee with them.
Held books with them.
Turned pages with them.
Shaken hands with people.
Patting my cats.
Typed manuscripts.
Carried things.
Cleaned things.
Created things.
Held onto things.
Let go of things.
Our hands participate in our lives so quietly that we rarely stop to consider how much history they contain.
Then something happens to one of them and suddenly you notice.
My hand will never be exactly what it was.
I don't need to pretend otherwise.
But it will still be my hand.
And I am beginning to understand that adaptation is not the same thing as defeat.
I think writing has taught me something similar.
When I first started writing seriously, I didn't understand where it would lead.
I simply had things inside me that needed somewhere to go.
Memories.
Questions.
Faith.
Trauma.
Survival.
Things I understood.
Things I absolutely did not understand.
Writing became somewhere I could place them.
Over time, something changed.
Writing stopped being simply something I did.
It became part of how I understand the world.
And somewhere along that road came Refined by Fire Press.
Even writing those words still means something to me.
Refined by Fire Press.
It isn't simply a business name.
It represents something I care deeply about.
Books.
History.
Restoration.
Faith.
Words worth preserving.
Stories worth telling.
Voices from previous generations that should not disappear simply because the paper they were printed on became old.
My own writing.
My own books.
The possibility of building something that might remain after I am gone.
I don't know exactly what Refined by Fire Press will become.
And strangely, I am becoming increasingly comfortable saying that.
I have dreams for it.
Large ones.
I have projects I care about deeply.
I have books I want to restore.
Books I want to write.
Writers from the past whose voices I want to help carry into another generation.
But I don't need to know the entire future of the press today.
I simply need to keep building faithfully.
One book.
One restoration.
One manuscript.
One decision.
One page at a time.
Maybe that is craft too.
There is something humbling about becoming serious about writing.
The more I write, the more I realise how much there is to learn.
That doesn't discourage me.
It excites me.
I don't want to reach the point where I think I have mastered language.
What a terrible place for a writer to arrive.
I want books to challenge me.
I want sentences to make me stop.
I want to discover techniques I have been using instinctively without knowing their names.
I want to discover weaknesses in my writing that I haven't noticed yet.
I want someone else's experience to make me reconsider my own habits.
I want to learn when to cut.
When to stay.
When to explain.
When to trust silence.
When a sentence needs another sentence beside it.
And when the strongest thing I can possibly do is leave it alone.
That is part of why I purchased On Writing.
Stephen King has written at a level of productivity and cultural reach that very few writers ever experience.
His world is very different from mine.
His subjects are different.
His career is different.
His audience is different.
His voice is his.
Mine is mine.
But craft can cross those boundaries.
A carpenter can learn from another carpenter without building the same table.
A musician can study another musician without playing the same song.
A writer can sit with another writer's experience without surrendering his own voice.
That is how I want to approach this book.
Curiously.
Slowly.
With a pencil nearby.
Not looking for commandments.
Looking for craft.
Maybe that word means more to me right now than it normally would.
Craft.
There is patience inside that word.
Nobody becomes skilled at something because they desperately want to be skilled.
You practise.
You fail.
You repeat yourself.
You overwrite.
You cut.
You produce something beautiful.
Then something terrible.
Then something somewhere between the two.
You learn.
You read.
You listen.
You keep going.
Eventually, your hands begin to understand things your mind once had to consciously think about.
That is true of so much in life.
Writing.
Cooking.
Work.
Publishing.
Relationships.
Faith.
Perhaps even healing.
There is no shortcut through five days after surgery.
I cannot force my body to be six weeks healed because I am impatient.
Healing does not care about my schedule.
Bone does not respond to ambition.
The wound does not become less real because I have things I would rather be doing.
My body has its own work to do.
And my responsibility is partly to let it.
That is difficult for me.
I like movement.
I like projects.
I like creating.
I like looking ahead.
I like feeling as though something is progressing.
Recovery has a different rhythm.
Sometimes progress looks like doing less.
Sometimes progress is resting.
Sometimes the most productive thing I can do is allow my body to spend its energy repairing something I cannot see.
There is humility in that.
And perhaps there is a lesson for Refined by Fire Press somewhere in there.
Not everything needs to happen immediately.
I have ideas that could keep me busy for years.
That is a gift.
It is also a temptation.
Because when you can see what something might become, you can start trying to drag the future into the present.
I don't want to do that.
I want to build this properly.
I want the press to have substance.
I want the books carrying its name to mean something.
I want restoration work to be careful.
I want my original writing to become stronger.
I want to read widely.
I want to learn.
I want to respect the craft enough not to assume enthusiasm is the same thing as mastery.
Passion can start something.
Craft helps sustain it.
That thought excites me.
Because I have passion in abundance.
Now I want to continue developing the tools to carry it.
Five days after surgery, I am also realising that writing may become part of how I process the finality of what has happened to my finger.
I don't know yet.
I don't want to manufacture meaning.
There is something about the word permanent that I am still sitting with.
Permanent.
The joint isn't resting.
It isn't temporarily immobilised.
It isn't waiting to return to its old movement.
It has been fused.
That chapter of its physical life has closed.
I find that confronting.
Not catastrophic.
Not the end of my world.
But confronting.
Perspective matters.
There are people living through physical changes far beyond what I am experiencing.
I know that.
But perspective doesn't require me to pretend my own experience means nothing.
This is my hand.
I live inside this body.
I write with it.
I work with it.
I experience the world through it.
I am allowed to notice what has changed.
I am allowed to feel frustrated.
I am allowed to grieve.
I am allowed to be grateful.
I am allowed to adapt.
All of those things can occupy the same room.
Maybe maturity is learning that contradictory emotions don't always need to be separated.
Sometimes they simply need somewhere to sit.
Writing gives them a chair.
I wonder what I will think when I eventually open King's book.
Maybe the first chapter will surprise me.
Maybe something will annoy me.
Maybe I'll underline half the book.
Maybe I'll barely mark anything.
Maybe one sentence will follow me around for the next ten years.
That's the wonderful thing about beginning a book.
You don't know yet.
The relationship hasn't happened.
The pages are still unopened territory.
And perhaps that's another reason I'm excited.
So much of my attention lately has understandably been directed toward something that has ended.
The movement in my finger.
The old shape of my hand.
What existed before surgery.
But this book represents something beginning.
A new conversation.
New ideas.
New questions.
New techniques.
New possibilities.
It reminds me that finality and beginning can exist at exactly the same time.
Something can end without everything ending.
Maybe that sounds obvious.
But some truths become different when your body teaches them to you.
My finger has reached a kind of finality.
My writing hasn't.
Not even close.
Refined by Fire Press hasn't.
My books haven't.
My learning hasn't.
My curiosity hasn't.
My faith hasn't.
My life hasn't.
There are still pages ahead of me.
I find enormous comfort in that.
And maybe there is something wonderfully ordinary about the whole scene.
Five days after surgery.
A healing hand.
A new book waiting to be opened.
Ideas moving through my mind.
Refined by Fire Press sitting somewhere in the background of all of it, still growing quietly.
No dramatic revelation.
No need to force one.
Just a man recovering from surgery who happens to be incredibly excited about reading a book about writing.
I like that.
I like that life can contain both things.
Pain and excitement.
Loss and curiosity.
Finality and possibility.
A fused joint and an unwritten page.
My faith teaches me that human limitation is not something I have to hide from God.
I don't have to turn this recovery into a performance of strength.
I don't have to demonstrate that I am spiritually unaffected by physical change.
I can simply bring the reality of it to Christ.
The frustration.
The gratitude.
The questions.
The impatience.
The strange moments when I look at my hand and remember that this is permanent.
The excitement I feel about the future.
All of it.
Grace doesn't require me to arrive with everything neatly organised.
That matters to me.
Because perhaps healing isn't about becoming untouched by what happened.
Perhaps healing is learning how to carry what happened without allowing it to become the definition of everything that follows.
My finger will carry evidence of this surgery.
That's real.
But I don't want the story of my hand to become only the story of what it lost.
These hands still have work to do.
Different work perhaps.
Adapted work.
But work.
There are pages to write.
Books to hold.
Meals to cook.
People to embrace.
Cats to pat.
Coffee to make.
Manuscripts to edit.
Old books to restore.
New books to create.
Life remains remarkably full.
So sometime soon, when the moment feels right, I will open On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
I will meet Stephen King on the page.
Not as a disciple looking for rules.
As a writer listening to another writer.
I will read.
I will think.
I will probably disagree sometimes.
I will probably learn.
And then I will return to my own page.
Because ultimately that is where the learning has to go.
Into the work.
Into the sentence.
Into the next paragraph.
Into the next book.
Into Refined by Fire Press.
Into whatever kind of writer I am still becoming.
And I love that I can say still becoming.
Five days ago, something in my body became final.
That is something I am going to need time to understand.
But today I am reminded that finality in one place does not mean finality everywhere.
There are still doors I haven't opened.
Books I haven't read.
Things I haven't learned.
Sentences I haven't written.
Stories I haven't told.
And versions of myself I haven't met yet.
For now, I don't need to rush toward any of them.
My hand needs time.
My mind probably does too.
The book can wait beside me until I am ready to open it.
Refined by Fire Press can continue becoming what it is meant to become one faithful project at a time.
And I can sit here, five days after surgery, feeling the strange weight of what has changed while also feeling genuinely excited about what hasn't happened yet.
Maybe that is where I am today.
Somewhere between healing and creating.
Between finality and possibility.
Between the hand I knew and the hand I am learning.
Between the books I have already written and the books I cannot yet see.
I don't know exactly what Stephen King is going to teach me.
I haven't read the book yet.
And that is precisely what makes me excited to open it.
There is something ahead of me that I do not know.
For once, I don't need to control that.
I can simply turn the page.
About the Author
Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 6.1 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.
- Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
- Explore the Journey: Follow Dylan on Google Maps
- Connect on Instagram: @porkysparadise
Comments
Post a Comment