Breaking Pig Cup
I spent three years toiling over my labor of love, my book My Soul to Keep. What I toiled over was what will you think of me. Will you think I am deranged, mentally ill? I was afraid to put the book out, what will they think when my character is put on a bed of broken glass tied and bound. They will think I have lost my mind. Sweet ole me was writing about a serial killer and how my main character Carolina Stronghill would survive. In the process of wringing my hands and pouring my soul on the page for the world to see, I wrote about my character’s enduring fascination with animal coffee cups. I have no idea why I put that in there and for a long time, I thought I would erase it out. I was writing about torture, pain, and guilt and there in the midst of chaos is a coffee cup shaped like a pig. Who in the world was going to take me seriously as a writer? So the book came out and I waited for rocks to be thrown, pitched forks, and anything else that you throw at monsters in the night and here is what I got. A friend of mine texted me: “She broke pig cup!?” She was outraged, another one offered to buy me a pig cup at a thrift store, and yet another wrote to tell me that she was sad that I broke the pig cup in the book.
Nobody has said anything about what I put my character through or what was I hoping they would feel, emotion and raw pain. Instead, I have more responses to that enduring cup. I asked my therapist about that, here I was writing about survival, resiliency and I was getting people upset about a ceramic cup. Her answer, because we can identify with the small things in life, we can identify with the things that brings us the most comfort in times of crisis. When the world is crashing down, sometimes a warm cup of coffee or tea brings us back to the present from sadness and pain and for a few moments we live moments of comfort. We all have something in life that brings us a small amount of joy; a token from the past, a teddy bear we saved from long ago, a picture that reminds of a time our hearts smiled and for others the simple connection of a coffee cup.