About a year ago, I was staring at my computer screen as the clock ticked. I had four days, including a weekend, to get sample chapters together for my editor. I clicked on email, which is a preferred type of procrastination for writers in pain. I had been struggling for almost four years trying to find the right “voice” for this story. There was a master’s thesis version and one for a book proposal coached by a literary agent, but all of it was now on the cutting room floor. Nothing seemed to fit.
I scanned my inbox and one subject line caught my attention. I clicked on it and saw a thread of emails saying terrible things about someone. Then suddenly, I realized they were talking about me.
Two people I had been working closely with for several years had accidentally copied me on their bantering back and forth, and I was now painfully aware of what they really thought of me. The comment that cut deepest had “MF” in it.
I stared at the screen and felt my heart start pounding – loud and hard. I’m an athlete, I know what an elevated heart rate feels like, but this was altogether different. It felt like my heart was going to heave right out of my chest. I wondered momentarily if I was going to have a heart attack. I read it again, but made myself look away.
Deadline, Julie. Focus. C’mon. Don’t let this derail you. Think deadline! But my heart wasn’t listening. I was shut down – physically, mentally, emotionally. I needed to process and I needed to do it now. I called a close friend of mine who has six kids. We often act as a sounding board for each other. We don’t give advice unless asked and we definitely don’t try to fix each other’s problems. We just listen and try to help the other person discern.
And I needed some serious discernment.
My friend homeschools, so I was worried about interrupting at that time of morning, but when she answered, I couldn’t hold back. I heard this little girl voice coming out in a “Mommy-those-kids-were-mean-to-me” kind of tone. She listened as I sobbed out the details. Finally, I was able to catch my breath and she said, “Julie, I know this is going to sound really weird, but I think you’re supposed to use this emotion for your story.”
The Rikki story. Yes. The one about a Hurricane Katrina rescue dog who comforts children when they have to testify against their sexual abuser. That one.
OK. This was something I could work with. Like the actress who has to get in touch with an emotion to make it real for her audience, maybe. I cleared my desktop, closed all the previous drafts and opened up a new one. I titled it “RikkiChapterVENT.”
I filled that page with stories about betrayal and broken trust. I vented about abandoned pets and talked about how I wanted this story to capture the plight of rescues. It would be about that swirl of chaos that surrounds them, as they are shuffled from place to place with nowhere to call home.
On that page, I also recalled my experience of meeting abused children and hearing their stories – what it felt like as I listened to details about betrayal by stepfathers, big brothers and babysitters. These victims had been too young to understand and too innocent to comprehend the crime.
Then I connected those two worlds. In the eyes of a child, the only one who would understand is someone who has felt what they’d felt and survived, a good listener who communicates with her own special language of love – a soft, whiskered nuzzle or swish of her tail. She too had been abandoned, betrayed and separated from the ones she thought she could trust. And she was also given over to the cold, faceless system to sort things out in her life.
Yes, that was the story I was writing. It was a story about rescue, redemption and salvation all in one. Through that one page of venting, I finally found my voice to tell how a Hurricane Katrina rescue dog spends her life rescuing others.
I bowed my head in a prayer of gratitude.
“Encounters with Rikki: from Hurricane Katrina rescue to exceptional Therapy Dog” will be published by Inkshares in January of 2016.