Quotalicious ~ Anne Lamott

In this dark and wounding society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.”  And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing.  After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you've been avoiding all along - your wounds. ~ Anne Lamott

Exactly!

Amy Steinberg



EXACTLY!

Quotalicious

The wound is the place where the Light enters you. ~ Rumi

Overshare?

So it was Thursday (AGAIN), and therefore writer’s group day. 

Theme for the month:  When I was young…

Shortly after the theme was set, my mother (who I maintain a degree of contact with) made a comment about all the reading she did with us when we were little.

I don’t remember it.  Neither does my sister.

Unremarkable, except that I have very vivid memories of my young life, and they are perfectly carbon dated by the details of the house we moved out of when I was four.  I remember being a baby on my tummy, and being able to see the underside of the couch. That was when the floor was still sea-grass matting, and a long time before my mother went wild with the funky wallpaper and a can of lime green paint. 

I remember the morning of my 2^nd birthday, and my 3rd, and the desolate footage of Cyclone Tracy on our black and white telly on Christmas morning when I was three.  I remember the arrival and mysterious departure of various furred and feathered family members, and a million small details like the cupboard where Dad kept his liquorice, the pattern on the floor in the kitchen, the smell of the flowers along the side of the newly poured concrete driveway.  But I don’t remember her reading to me. 

I remember our books, and I remember sitting by myself trying to read them.  The day I started school, the teacher explained that you sound out the letters and run them together, and I remember my astonishment that it was so easy, and the anger that no one had explained the single crucial detail that meant I could now read.  But I don’t recall any moments of closeness, snuggled up, listening to my mother’s voice.

Interesting disconnect, don’t you think?

So I thought I would explore this more, by letting the books in my life tell a story.  I was interested in the device of writing about one thing (the books) to talk about something else (the real story).  I got to the point where, at age 10, I decided I was a writer.  Short of time, I finished it, gave it a quick edit, printed it off and headed out straightaway for the meeting. 

I prefaced my reading with a request for people to comment on the effectiveness of the device.  I thought I had achieved a fairly dispassionate telling of the details, without straying into the emotive.  I was wrong.

I read aloud ok right up until I got to this:

Then one day she buys me and my sister new zip-up cardigans and packs a pair of jeans that are too small into a Jetset overnight bag, and puts us on a plane.  I’m nine years old and clutching a soft toy dog.

The sobs rose up in me.  Someone offered to read on for me, but in that moment there was nothing more important than speaking the words myself.  I pulled out a tissue, took a deep breath, and continued reading with my voice and face contorted with emotion.  

 Without warning or even shoes, we are going to live at Nanna’s.  Mum doesn’t look sick at the airport, but it must be very bad because she doesn’t ring us or write any letters, except once, when she sends us a bookmark. Mine is a kitten sitting on a stack of books.  It is instantly my most treasured possession. I hold it while I read, and keep it inside its grubby yellow envelope until the edges are so worn they fall apart.  When the colour wears off, I carefully restore its tabby striped tail with coloured pencils.  I read a lot.

So, I guess this counts as a Public Ugly Cry.

Overshare?  Or free therapy?

I have lived with this experience for thirty years now, but never openly grieved it.  I guess it took looking at the stark, unadorned details through the eyes of someone else to realise the depth of the injury to the child who was me.  It’s only one paragraph in a long catalogue of displacement, disregard, and disempowerment.

The group was kind. Afterwards, one person said to me that I should always feel like I can read whatever I want to, and how important a process that was for her.  Another spoke to me of all the 9 year old children she had taught with stories like mine, and how powerful it was for her to hear mine and know something of the ending.  Maybe there are some in the group that resent me serving up another chunk of me-me-me, but there again, this may give them permission to reach a little deeper next time they sit down to write. 

The next meeting will be in a month’s time, and by then we’ll all have moved onto the next thing. 

Cake, Strawberries and a Thing

Warning:  soft underbelly exposed.

I’ve been having a hard time lately.

No surprises there.  The extended radio silence gives it away, doesn’t it?

Not that my life is bad, or even difficult.  I’m fully able to load up on the gratitude when I’m feeling down. (Feeling thankful helps enormously when you’re sitting in some vinyl chair while they prepare the sharp, pointy instruments they’re about to start poking in to you).

No, this distress is more of the lingering, mid-life, existential kind. 

Basically the things I want to do are clashing with the Thing I really want to do.  I have the opportunity to complete a degree in my chosen field, with excellent advanced standing points and tax deductions.  But at the same time I’m on fire with the notion of embracing my writerness, which I have always suspected was my Thing.  And it’s more urgently my Thing, now that I’ve faced off the biological mutiny of cancer and am now staring down (or flinching at) my 40^th birthday.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for having my cake and eating it too.  A healthily functioning person should be able to work part-time, study a single subject, and squeeze in a number of hours pursuing their Thing each week, while still maintaining a small amount of social contact. 

But I struggle. 

Sadly, it’s not about how many hours there are in a day, but when my brain function will give out.  Some days my stupified brain is so tired from my short day at work, I collapse in the early evening.  I make short term goals and then forget what they were.  Hell, sometimes I even forget what day it is. 

This makes time management an ongoing nightmare. Let alone when you can’t decide what your top priority is or even remember what it was you were doing.

Right now in fact, I should be feverishly reading and scribbling notes, in an effort not to fail not one but two uni subjects.  And yet…

And yet, here I am.  Doing this self-indulgent, possibly not-completely-mentally-healthy Thing.  Looking within.  Writing.  Sometimes I believe this is the best possible Thing I can be doing, and other times I fear that maybe it’s a sign of the pathological in me.  Particularly since I haven’t yet organised myself to write fiction.

See, I’m afraid to admit to the world the extent to which I really, really do not have it together.  While I appear to function on the outside, really I’m quite unstable.  I require a lot of shoring up.  For a long time that illusion was easier to create.  But now, with my cracked brain and my tired body, it requires a greater investment of time and energy.  I’m not able to shore myself up quite so flawlessly as I have in the past. I’m afraid of leakage, most especially in my writing.

But if I don’t write, I’m afraid the whole dam will break open.

It’s a risky business.  If I were to wade out past my psychological untidiness and write, I might find out that I’m terrible at it.  Or worse than terrible, mediocre.  And publicly so.

I tried this writing Thing once before.  I got as far as the third semester in a professional writing course, and faltered.  Part of that falter was the pressing need for a more practical income stream.  And part of it was that I caught the first glimpse that maybe I’m not as smart/talented/imaginative as everyone thought I was.  There needs to be a painful stage of being not-very-good but persisting anyway until I’ve clocked up some real skill.  This means sucking up the hideous embarrassment of exposing my soft not-perfectness, and just doing it.

So I didn’t.  I didn’t do it.  I wriggled away and found something else that would earn me money and allow me to shine, in tiny safe amounts.  But writing didn’t stop being my Thing.  It quietly gnawed away at my insides for nearly a decade, and finally clawed its way out again, probably through one of the holes made by surgical steel.

So here I am again.  Tired, and with a brain and body full of holes, wrestling with a Thing that surprises me with deep joy and even deeper struggle, that won’t go away.  And the Thing is competing with that other part of my life, the moving-forward with the tidy plans I made before cancer came along and fucked it all up.  Throw in some semi-menopausal mood swings, and I’m a joy to live with.

So, this is the hard time I’m been having.  Stuck.  Blocked.  Avoidant.  Bleak.  Resentful of the work needed for the choice that I’ve made and the energy that it consumes. 

On Friday, I was having a particularly bad day, vacillating between I’ll never be a real writer and I’ll just have to drop out of Uni, then.  While ruminating on the nature of success and failure, something twigged.  I realised it’s all in your state of mind.  OK, so maybe I don’t have the time and capacity right now to launch my entire psyche into the deep end of a novel while cranking out High Distinctions each semester, but I can – and I have in the past – find that still spot right in the middle where everything balances.

I can chew that particular cake, and still have it.  And the secret?  A willingness to boldly allow my imperfection, to let the cake to sit lopsided on the plate while it makes room for the strawberries.  Suddenly I can see a path through, one that will allow me to plod along and complete what is needed, but still give my Thing room to breathe and sometimes even dance.

And, at that very moment of decision, of inner shift, I look up.  A rainbow.  And not just any rainbow. It’s searing against the dusk tinged sky, a wide arc of intense light reaching from one side of the sky all the way to the other.  As I drive home, it continues to dazzle in the north east, in the direction I am travelling.

I know it’s only an accident of light and water vapour.  But it seems like a promise.  A reassurance that there will be illumination along the path, if I let my true colours shine, reach wide for what is beautiful, and steer towards my goals with clarity.