Wednesday - 03/03/2021 — Years ago, when I had to undergo a fairly extensive surgery, a friend made me this “dammit doll.”
“When you’re maybe not healing quite as fast as you want to,” he explained, “just bang the dammit doll as hard as you want to against the wall or the table or the floor and yell whatever you want to.”
The artificial feathers, he explained, were much more durable than real feathers and were sewn in with extra heavy thread, so they could resist any sort of pounding.
Did I use the dammit doll a lot? The funny thing is that I don’t remember one way or the other. I do know that it was during my convalescence that I began to write the mystery I’d always wanted to write, and once I started writing—I started healing (and my first book was published less than a year later). So, maybe I didn’t need the dammit doll as much as I simply needed to tap into my creative spirit.
Still, I keep the little doll around just in case.
