Things have a way of coming out, one way or another. Suppressed emotions manifest physically. I had started writing about my experiences with infertility a few years prior to my “stroke”. It was at about that same time that several women in my office (ten, to be exact) had babies within one year. That fact alone is enough to elicit an array of DSM-worthy of responses in someone like me.

I shut down, practically completely. All I could manage to do was drag myself to and through work, which used up most of my mental and emotional resources, and then sit on the couch watching Netflix until it was bed time. And so it went for the two-year-long stretch of pregnancies and births. Every day. Lather; rinse; repeat.

After my migraine incident, I decided it was time to do some things for myself. That’s often the way with such things, isn’t it? One of the things I decided to do was get serious about writing.

As I said in a previous post, I’ve always written. I had a couple of notebooks with a good amount of writing about my experiences as a Woman of a Certain Age surviving infertility. I never did anything with those notebooks, though; never organized them into coherence. So, for years they sat, a psychic purge–not helping me, and certainly not helping anybody else.

I had spent the night in the hospital in early November. A week later, I took a workshop at The Writers Place in Kansas City. I had actually signed up for the workshop a few weeks prior. The workshop was about submitting your work for publication. A tad cart-before-the-horse, as I didn’t yet have any pieces ready to submit for publication. I suppose I like to be forward-thinking.

Before the workshop even began, I introduced myself to some of the attendees, and said that I was looking for a writing group. Some of the others also were looking for a group. It was not ideal, but, doable: Kansas City is about an hour away from where I live.

Over the next few weeks, it was on my mind that I wanted a writing group here in Lawrence, where I live. I wasn’t going to let that stop me, though. I knew that most of my writing would be creative nonfiction and memoir, so in January, I signed up for a memoir workshop at The Writers Place. Soon after that, we found out that Stacy’s dad was going to be visiting from Florida the weekend of the memoir workshop. I reluctantly canceled my reservation.

A few days later, while pouring over my Facebook feed, there was some upcoming event — what it was, I can’t even remember now — but because I clicked that I was interested in that event, the little horizontal scrolly bar popped up under it with the suggestion, “If you’re interested in that event, you might be interested in these events.”

Ok, Facebook, I’ll spin your roulette wheel. I glanced at the first event on the scroll, and it was not, in fact, interesting to me. Then I saw the next event to the right started out “Memoi…” I swiped to the left to advance the scroll, and saw an event titled “Memoir Intensive with Molly Krause.” The group was to be a survey of memoir-writing, and would meet for eight weeks, on Thursday nights, the only night I’d be free during the week to meet.                 

I clicked on the event information, and my heart sank. The cost of the tuition for the course was more money than I had at my discretion at the moment, and the class size was limited. I texted a good friend about the class, and commented that I was a little down because I didn’t have the spare cash at the time to sign up for the class. I put the course out of my mind, and went about life. A few days later, I got a letter from my friend. In it was a brief note, and a check for the full price of the course tuition. 
I thoroughly enjoyed the class, and learned so much. It’s amazing what you can gain and discover in synergy with others. The networking that began in that class continues to be a valuable gift to me to this day. It’s amazing how things really work out sometimes.

Have you experienced any instances of synchronicity in your life?