Keep Going
by Vivi Sojorhn
I am inspired by so many women friends on-line and women writers to keep writing. writing is truly women’s processing. Our lives are our philosophy and the most important phrase may be — “Keep going!” — because we are survivors. I see that in every piece of women’s writing that I read. I just read my old friend, Rachel Powell’s dive into Medium, entitled, “Too Old To Earn?” and there it was as a foundation of her philosophy, though I have known that of her for years. She is a go-getter.
Do I keep going, I wondered? I haven’t written much since February, ironically in a bad way. I haven’t painted more than two canvases. I haven’t even finished decluttering our home, but that is a constant. Isn’t it? Do people finish decluttering?
I am one of the lucky ones, married to a man who knows and loves me and supports me. But, it isn’t because I am lazy, I promise. I started working to buy my own life at 15 years-old, and was so proud to support myself. (Just like my friend Rachel, and so many women I know! Keep going!)
This fading away all started to happen more than 25 years ago, the most successful time of my life. I was exhausted working online with overseas publishing companies and a Hollywood studio as a publishing consultant for licensed materials, subjects. I loved it! I had hit my stride. I also had a newborn and I loved her! I also had a psychologically challenged, chemically challenged, abusive husband, and he refused to work in Hollywood anymore. What to do? It is so obvious now, but then I was in a Stockholm Syndrome state of mind so I quit my wonderful work and started over with him in Oregon. Keep going?
My story adds a song — sometimes freelance work to keep going on, but mainly I focused on being a mom for my little peanuts, being involved with her co-op preschool, Montessori preschool, and nursing, always nursing, and being abused and hated in large part by him. Apologies came with camping trips in the beautiful Cascades, or on the Coast with stands of freshly caught, freshly boiled crab, and long walks through endlessly green places with 6 months of flowers in Spring and 4 months of fall leaves. A solid month of summer taking the children to the swimming pool, and a solid month of possible snow. We went bankrupt after 3 years, the Dot.com bust. A writer seems to be a canary in the mine. I realized I could not be supported in Motherhood, but what to do? Keep going.
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Moving back to Colorado was not my first choice, but his mother pitched in help. I started writing again in earnest hope that someone would see my brilliance and I could catch another star back in my childhood state. I found myself writing things I had never thought I would write. second home real estate brochures and websites were my favorite, after my own writing, after I kept after mothering with all of my keep going.
However I finally saw that I could not keep going with a man who clearly resented me, lied about me, was angry and abusive to me. We had started a non-profit event and I wrote the grants to raise money for it. I wrote classes to inspire students. I bothered through the end of our marriage working with him. I even wrote my last script for his dream of producing and directing. Keep going…
In the end I was ill. There’s no other way to put it. I didn’t know it but I had been growing a benign meningioma for my entire 20- year marriage and it affected everything I did including mothering. I only kept going on my own for 9 months before the kids, my kids, and I literally moved back home to live with my dad and step-mom, when I was 42 years-old. 2006 was a hard year to keep going. The economy looked very much like it does today in 2025. A dark cloud over the world was looming in a bull market. Writers, freelance writers, especially with brain tumors pressing on their left temporal lobes are the canaries in the coal mine of life, and driving past droves of foreclosures had me wondering how I was going to survive the times, much less survive myself with migraines.
I kept applying, putting myself out there, taught writing classes to 4–6 students. I drove my kids 45 minutes to and from school thanks to child-custody “agreements”. We got caught in a few blizzards. Thanks for library books on tape. Really that saved our butts big time! The Written Word saved us. My kids were in the throws of separation and divorce and I worried about the consequences of putting myself first, so I could keep going.
To relieve my stress, I learned to Tango, and learned what I wanted in a partner through the symbology of the dance and how much my first husband fell short. I belonged to an Order of Freemasonry, yes there are a few Orders that are accepting, and are run by women to keep going. I processed as much as I thought I could process and met a man who lived in another state and we fell in love. He didn’t physically enjoy dancing Tango, but symbolically he was my Partner. After long-distance dating for a year and him moving here and living together another year through the Great Recession, we married in 2009. My kids fell in love with him too, and vice versa. (In fact, they credit him with their thriving.) He loves them. We survived so much. We all kept going together.
Except that tumor…remember? It affected my abilities as it got bigger. Leading up to my first partial aphasic seizure I had to turn my back on my writing students more and more often because I lost my words, more than a train of thought, my WORDS. I couldn’t even joke about it…
Part 2 of “Keep Going” to follow later
