On New Year’s Eve I rode along with my sister as she made the long drive to the Anchorage airport to pick up her boyfriend.  The drive usually takes about an hour and a half, give or take, but because we weren’t sure of the road conditions we left ourselves plenty of extra time to get there.

As it turned out, we needed every last bit of it.  The roads were good, but there was a heavy fog for virtually all of the journey, so thick in places that cars seemed to vanish if they moved a length in front of us, and guard rails turned invisible.  Driving slowly was a must, and that, too, was a good thing.  The night’s fireworks had roused and unsettled plenty of area moose.  We came within inches of hitting one shortly after we left the house, and saw ten more along the way.

It was a strange night, the kind of scene you see depicted in movies just before Something Big.  With the fog there was no guessing what might come in the next moment, and moose, other cars, and pedestrians left no question that there would be something, at some point.  My sister’s hands were frozen into frightened claws on the steering wheel, and every mile offered several options for an injurious if not deadly accident, but we couldn’t turn back – someone had to pick Jay up.

In the very few moments where my eyes and attention weren’t absolutely imperitive to Moosewatch ‘09, I thought about my writing.  I seem to be having this transformative period, where I’m suddenly willing to charge foolishly ahead to face all the writing challenges I’ve carefully avoided in order to get to the good stuff that I know is there somewhere.  For two years I’ve been avoiding writing something because it’s very personal and very uncomfortable for me to focus on.  TWO YEARS.  And it’s just words.  I might never even show it to anyone, and I’m okay with that, and I’ve still managed to put off writing it for two years.  It makes me that uncomfortable.

About a week ago, I somehow mustered the fortitude to sit my butt down in my chair, turn off the computer, and write it down.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that I spent the next hour and a half fighting off the urge to find something, anything, else to do.  A horrible wriggly tension wormed its way up and down my spine, my back tensed up, my stomach turned to a bile bowl-o-rama.  My face contorted into the expression of extreme displeasure usually reserved for blood, vomit, and dog doo, and it stayed that way the entire time my pen was in contact with paper.  As I wrote, the picture in my head became clearer and more details returned to me, making the tightness in my back crawl ever more fervently.  Every negative emotion I’d used to avoid the subject circled round to gnaw and claw at me, every secret fear crawling along my veins, looking for a crack to ooze into.

It sucked.  It sucked so much.  Right up to the last sentence, my fingers itched to put down the pen and push me away from the desk.  I had walked up to one of my secret dragons and said “Do your worst,” and it did, even more than I’d feared.

And you know what?  I lived.  As I finally wrote the closing to the remembered scene, I drew a deep breath that reached far into the claw marks, and I felt a sense of awed victory.  I had conquered that sucker, a big fat, ugly, smelly firebreathing thing that had held my writing hostage for two whole years.  I’d looked it in its smug and bloodshot eyes and faced it down, and when the dust settled I was left with a deep and thorough sureness:  I had slain my biggest and baddest monster.  Whatever else might come, I’d conquer it, too.  I was freed.  My writing was freed.

When my sister peeled her worry-frozen fingers from the wheel that New Year’s Eve, she leaned back against the headrest and blew a raspberry at the ceiling.  Under the orangey glow of airport parking lights, we did a hokey-pokey-esque dance of joy at just being alive and in one piece.  We’d made it.  Holy shit, we’d made it.

Seeing Heather and Jay together made all the stopped breathing and skipped heartbeats of the trip make sense.  She’d finished the drive.  Because she had to, and because there was the promise of something good at the end.

Conquering dragons isn’t easy.  There will be murky places along your journey, and wild beasts will come at you from places unseen.  It will be worse than you feared.  But sometimes you just have to do it.

And in the end you will be your own hero.  And it will be worth it.