M.J. Pullen's Blog, page 27

Only a Writer or Therapist Would Find the Junk Drawer Significant

“I knew you’d come back for me.”

Luckily for me, I’m both (or at least have been both in the recent past).

I was cleaning out our junk drawer the other day – because we’re getting ready to move, not because I was desperately looking for procrastination excuses – and near the end of my task I glanced down to find it just as it’s pictured here. It struck me as mildly poetic somehow, so I took a break and snapped a picture. Ordinary objects can be fertile ground for writing if you look with the right eye…

In our house, the junk drawer is the catch-all place, where for some reason we keep life’s everyday essentials (scissors and pens) buried alongside the crap we will never, ever use again under any circumstances (year-old soy sauce and manuals to phones I recycled years ago). It’s the one place in the house where hoarding is normal and accepted, even in the tidiest, most minimalist homes. And in my home, which is neither tidy nor minimalist, it’s a place where the crazy really shows. This picture is just the 10% that was left at the bottom.

The writer’s brain is a lot like a junk drawer. We stow things away — both purposefully and at whim — never really knowing if they will resurface, or if they do, if they’ll be useful. An idea that seems essential to our work one minute can become trite and irrelevant the next. Or we scribble something thoughtlessly, only to find it again months later with fresh eyes and find it’s exactly what we need at a crucial moment in a story. It’s a beautiful process of acquiring, storing, and finally (painfully) purging ideas until we have something inspiring or useful to share. It’s good to have a quantity of stuff to draw from, but only when we’re willing to take the time to filter through it will we have the opportunity to see things clearly.

So when was the last time you went through the clutter from your own junk drawer, literally or figuratively? What inspiration can you find at the bottom of your pile — or mine, for that matter? It could be an army guy next to a poignant Taco Bell sauce packet, a mystery key, or a bag of dice. Or maybe an idea that got shelved months ago because it wasn’t ready for the world. Inspiration for a brand new story, or simply texture for a work in progress. Either way, maybe it’s time to revisit something you’ve stashed away, so that you can either toss it aside forever or give it a new life in the light of day.

I’d love to read junk-drawer stories – please link in the comments if you write one!

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Anyone Else Suffering from Social Media Exhaustion?

I was cruising my social media universe the other day – it seems all I’ve been able to manage in 2013 is a little cruising – when I came across something that sort of disturbed me. I won’t link to it (a) because I can’t find it and (b) I don’t want to come across as critical of someone who has clearly mastered social media marketing in a way that is far beyond me.

This blogger/writer was touting the benefits of a particular social network site (it might have been Triberr or something, I truthfully can’t remember) and she was commenting that she really liked the auto-approval feature, which allowed her guest posters to post blogs, etc., during the week she was away for vacation or a conference and wouldn’t be available 24/7 to approve posts. Which sounds simply lovely, in terms of functionality. If you are a super-mega-blogger with tons of contributors and followers, I’m sure auto-approve is a convenient and helpful feature. In terms of scale, this person was sort of like the Emperor of Prussia, while I am more like the manager of a convenience store. And that’s all good.

What bothered me about the post was the next statement. It was something to the effect of, “I would hate for my social media venues to go silent for a week while I was away.” And I thought, REALLY? You can never just be ‘off’?

Wow.

For me, social media is all about genuine connection, learning something new, and having a venue to post ideas I find interesting or informative (mine or others). Yes, it’s about reaching readers and marketing as well, but as I’ve matured in my experience that has become less the focus for me.

Between the kids, non-writing work, managing a household, and everything else; just finding time to write is challenging. To have to be constantly “on” social media as well… wow. Just wow. Some people seem to do it — tweeting every few minutes, blogging three times a week, guest posting, reading and retweeting others. I just don’t know where they find the time. And I wonder (and maybe readers wonder too) how they can produce quality writing while they’re spending so much time being social.

In the end, it’s probably a matter of time, situation and personal style. I can’t tweet forty times a day and be genuine, the same way I can’t write a novel every six weeks and do my best work. But I have a one year old and a three year old, so maybe those who are super-present on social media have more time (and less yogurt smeared on their laptops) than I do. Or maybe they work harder. Maybe they simply want it more.

It will be interesting to see, if we have a way of measuring such things in the long run, whether authors who are ultra-active on social media have more success than those who post less frequently or those who abstain entirely. Certainly it seems unwise to stay away altogether (unless you’re J.K. Rowling, and then you can do whatever you want), but I have to feel there must be diminishing return for time spent posting and re-posting, especially instead of writing and revising, past a certain point.

Could it be that in our frantic race to get noticed by readers and other writers, we are creating expectations for online activity that are completely unsustainable over the long run? Are we watering down the tools we love, and our communal dialogue, through ever-increasing quantity and ever-thinning quality? Could it be that we are contributing to information overload, flooding our followers with information that is often repetitive and only marginally useful or entertaining?

Or maybe I’m just rationalizing my own laziness. It could totally be that, too.

{By the way, happy new year, everyone!}

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Darkness and Light: The Suicide Blog

My mother, who died in 2001, would have been 65 years old this past Sunday. I say died because that’s what happened to her. She didn’t ‘pass away’ as people are so fond of saying, as when an elderly person drifts off to peaceful sleep and simply doesn’t awaken. Most people in my life know already that my mother took her own life. They may or may not know that in our last conversation she was angry and disappointed with me, and that I was the one to find her body the following day.

I’ve come to understand that this is a more common experience than many people realize. I’ve never been a part of a suicide survivors group or anything like it, but I’ve still had two girlfriends who lost their mothers this way and several acquaintances who have lost loved ones to self-harm as well.

Homecoming Queen, 1965

When I was young and my mother (who battled her whole life with trauma and mental illness) would threaten or attempt to kill herself, I would run a gamut of emotional reactions, ranging from absolute desperation to keep her alive, all the way to a self-protecting cold acceptance. The first was totally unlivable; the latter became a hardness within me that I have both battled against and called upon for strength in later years.

Even now, I cannot imagine the kind of pain she must have been in: how desperate she must have felt herself, or how in her calmer moments she must have regretted the behaviors that put such a distance between us. In my calmer moments, the naive writer inside me thought suicide was sort of a romantic, noble end. I thought of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf and their tortured beauty. Buddhist monks burning themselves to death in protest of the Vietnam War. Romeo and Juliet.

The reality, when it came years later, felt both shocking and inevitable. I was stunned and saddened by her death, but also ashamed that I felt something else on both our behalf: relief.  After years of threats and attempts and close calls, decades of walking on eggshells and bending myself into impossible knots trying to avoid this very thing… the thing had happened. It could never be undone, and it could never happen again. As we said goodbye and scattered her ashes in a garden, I could not hold back the thought: It’s done. She can never hurt me like this again.

It does hurt again, though. Over and over. I’ve written before about the longing I feel almost daily for my mother – whether it’s the mother she was or the mother I wished for, I will never be sure. When I first heard my sons’ cries in the delivery room, they echoed with her absence. She missed comforting me through a painful divorce, she missed meeting the true love of my life and father of my children, she missed my journey to Judaism and all the richness that has come with it. She has missed about a thousand nights or days when I have wanted to pick up the phone to call her: for advice, for comfort, for a laugh, for the gossip she was always willing to relate (with her own peppering of outrage, of course).

My parents, Huntsville, AL 1973

She missed the death of my father, with whom I firmly believe she was always in love and vice versa, even years after their divorce. I like to think they’re together now, watching our kids and laughing at our trials. These things could be any story of a parent lost early, except there is an additional and painful element: choice. She chose to miss these things. At least, that’s how it feels in my moments of anger.

Survivors of suicide are entitled to our anger. Nothing hurts quite so much as being left voluntarily by someone who was supposed to love you forever. You find yourself constantly wondering what you could have done differently, how you might have saved the person from their pain. You wonder what you did wrong. And all the platitudes and kind voices and “there, there, it wasn’t about you,” in the world don’t make that feeling go away. At least not entirely.

Thirteen years later, and after working in a profession in which part of my job was to prevent people harming themselves, I have come to realize something else about my mother and others like her. It’s almost ironic that my mother had Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder) because in her true self state, she had almost no filter, no ability to be disingenuous. Maybe her brain needed to allow her to be more than one person because she had no ability to be anyone other than herself on purpose.

My mother didn’t tell little conversational white lies or make small talk like the rest of us do. She didn’t pretend to be interested when she wasn’t, and she could not turn off the caring and empathic part of herself that reached out to all those in pain. If she asked “how are you?” it’s because she really wanted to know. She could not walk away from a homeless person with a story to tell. She could not watch her poor neighbors go hungry even when she could barely feed herself. Until my father insisted that she stop, she picked up hitchhikers in our family van, even with my brother and me in the backseat.

For Mom, there was nothing about herself that was better or higher than anyone else, nothing that could be kept separate from the injustice she saw in the world. In the psychology realm, we would label this as a ‘boundary issue.’ That is true in terms of her own mental health, but it’s also true that the world needs people like my mother. In many ways, her giving of her whole self to the world around her was the living example of the human spirit. She was the embodiment of the Jewish concept of Tzedakah, which means both ‘charity’ and ‘justice.’

We need her and others like her, even though they wound us so deeply by not caring enough for themselves. My mother gave herself over to pain because that was her experience of reality, and yet she kept her faith in God, the world, my brother and others (and, I hope, in me).

I believe there are people in this world who feel things more deeply, more personally, than most of us can bear to do. Whatever the reasons, whatever the causes, they carry with them a kindness and vulnerability so deep that it is both a treasure and a burden. They either don’t have or don’t use the protective filter that “healthy” people use to turn off pain and heartache so that we can function. (Don’t get me wrong, the world needs us, too — someone has to keep things working and stay strong for those who are not strong themselves).

I believe we have to learn from those among us like my mother, those who might be labeled as ‘too sensitive,’ ‘impractical’ or even ‘crazy.’ We can learn from their artistic talents, unbridled empathy and sense of justice, because we need those to maintain our basic humanity. We also have to help ground them and keep them safe and strong when we can.

But we can’t always.

Sometimes their burden is simply too much to bear. Sometimes the depth of their feelings becomes an abyss from which they cannot return, even though they might desperately want to come back to us. Sometimes we must stand at the edge and say goodbye, realizing that we cannot change who they are, nor can we alter or even fully understand their fate. We have to bear our own burden of their loss, with as much grace and genuineness as we can muster.

When my mom died, the world truly lost a light of love. It was extinguished in the darkness of her own personal torment, gone to a place I cannot know or understand. As for me, I will keep my filters and boundaries and “healthy” mental state – such as it is. I will stay strong for my family for as long as I am able, because hers will not be my fate. But I will think of Mom when we put coins in our Tzedakah box, and whenever I have an opportunity to create justice in my own little corner of the world.

I cannot bring her light back to our lives, but I can try to rekindle it in the family she never got to know. We can build on her legacy, and in that sense, the light will never really go out.

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What to Get your Favorite Writer for the Holidays

If you have a writer in your life — and really, who doesn’t? — you may be wondering what to get for him or her this holiday season. Naturally, I have some helpful suggestions, sure to bring a smile to the wordsmith in your life.

An autographed copy of his favorite book by his favorite author. If you’re considering this option, you’re either very thoughtful or very wealthy. Or both. Good for you. That being the case, you have already probably bought your writer friend countless dinners when he was short on cash, and maybe even filled his decade-old Honda Civic with gas once or twice. So this is that extra-mile gift, the one that says “Dude, enjoy this, because it’s the last thing you are getting from me until you can start paying for your share of the pizza.” The nice thing about this gift is that the scrawled inscription of his hero will inspire and encourage him when he’s feeling positive, and shame him mercilessly when he’s flailing around in self-doubt and indecision. Just like you would do if you could be there. Awww.

An office supply store gift card. It sounds trite, but if the writer in your life is anything like me, there is no place she would rather kill writing time than an office supply store. Leather bound journals with blank pages we can stare at for hours. Planners, calendars, list-makers, and grid paper — all suitable for outlining complex plots and ingenious ways of tricking ourselves into writing on a regular schedule. Folders, binders, notebooks. And color coding — oh my goodness. Innumerable tools — maps, software packages, reference guides — that we can use for “research.” And the pens. Dear God, the pens. It’s all such a turn-on. Not a figurative turn-on, either, but a serious, heavy-breathing, inky-fingered sexual thrill. Your writer will open that envelope, give an involuntary gasp, and whisper “I am going to procrastinate. I am going to procrastinate so damn hard.” And you thought this would be impersonal.

A free pass to use something from your life in her novel. This is kind of like the coupons that lovers give one another for free shoulder rubs or a night of doing the dishes. Except you’re giving over a part of yourself. It could be something quirky about you, like the fact that you have to line your food up alphabetically in the pantry before you can make dinner (which will make her hard-as-nails feminist detective seem more human and approachable) or something deeply personal, like your history of dating jerks who look suspiciously like your father. You don’t really get to choose, actually, but one day you’ll be reading your friend’s novel and come across a bit of you, right there in black and white for the whole world to read. Your cheeks will flush with embarrassment and anger. You will confront your friend, and she’ll give you a sheepish grin and the coupon you gave her in December 2012. Voila! Friendship saved. Not to mention you don’t have to spend a dime on her for the holidays this year. Lord knows she won’t be spending much on you.

A crappy childhood. Every writer needs a suffocatingly boring, chronically strained or downright traumatic childhood he can draw from in his writing. To be effective, a childhood must be happy enough to produce a semi-stable human being, and yet awful enough to provide the rich experience (and perpetual ennui) needed to be a successful writer. Now, unless you are the parent of an adolescent novelist, it may be too late to give your writer the crappy childhood he really needs. But what you can do is sort of a reverse Pollyanna: ask your writer to talk about his life, and point out the terrible side of everything he says. Grew up middle-class in a suburban home with unassuming parents who stayed together and loved him? Sounds like a bunch of vanilla, Stepford, cultural fascists to me… You get the idea.

A Kindle, nook, or iPad, pre-loaded with her favorite authors and the MLA style guide. There’s no snarky explanation for this one. That’s a damn nice gift. Need another writer friend? I’m available!

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November Lessons

November was a wild month at M.J.’s playhouse, and I’m still playing catch-up, so this month’s lessons will be short and sweet:

1. When you’re faced with doing unpleasant ‘business’ involving close friends or family, sometimes the less said, the better. Stick to the facts and give everyone space to process emotionality elsewhere (maybe not in a blog, either!) Things often find a way of working out without a war of words.

2. Murphy’s Law of Parenting: If you have a month during which you need every spare minute to get work done, your kids will be throwing up, feverish and/or wheezing during at least 80% of those minutes.

3. Being sick on Thanksgiving makes you appreciate turkey, dressing and canned cranberry sauce even more. It also makes you think of those who are hungry and lonely even more, too.

4. I learned this month that I’m a Sh*tty Mom, and so are some of the best moms I know. It’s very liberating to know our kids will have each other to lean on in group therapy later on.

5. Try as I might, I think I am just not a NaNoWriMo girl. I love trying. I love failing at it. And then everything works out better. I can’t decide if this is a fun annual project or a very specific mental illness. I’ll keep you posted.

Many, many people are kind enough to ask me if I’m working on the next book, and the short answer is “yes.” The long answer is “yes, yes, and yes,” which means that I’m working on several projects at once. In addition to the NaNoWriMo project I have temporarily shelved, I have three other projects running actively. I work on them whenever I can for as long as I can, in turn, until one gathers enough momentum to warrant my obsessive attention. I’m aware it would be faster to write one book all at once, but that just wouldn’t be me. I’m also aware that you guys are waiting patiently, and I thank you. My goal every day is to try to make something worth waiting for!

In the meantime, if you’d like to get an autographed copy (paperback) of one of my current books for yourself or someone else, you can now do that here. Since I don’t yet have a fancy publishing house to help me with these things, I am offering these on a limited basis only. The really good news, though, is that if you order one in December, I’ll donate $3 to an amazing organization that is truly close to my heart.

So, add it to your Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice wish list. (Sorry, they may not be delivered in time for actual Hanukkah). Have a great December, everyone!

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