Mike Jung's Blog, page 28

Friendship

I know there are people in this world for whom friendship and social interaction feel entirely natural and comfortable, but I’m not one of those people. I’ve felt massive gobs of envy for those people, but I’ve never been one of them. This is one of the multiple ways in which my still-new career as an author has radically changed my life for the better.

When it comes to friendship, I’m just not used to the feeling of abundance I currently have. It’s all relative, of course, and I’m sure there are people for whom my social existence would feel paltry – I still hardly ever crawl out from under my rock, after all. But it’s very, very good to have people who I trust enough to ask for help during anxiety-riddled moments, or join with in collective working/cheerleading sessions, or ask for opinions on work that feels emotionally exposing. And it’s remarkable to see friends who I cherish meet other friends who I cherish, then become friends who clearly cherish each other!

Things like that still feel new, and startling, and incredibly meaningful. I often still feel rather lost when navigating the seas of social interaction, but I do feel like I’m navigating them. In the past I usually felt like I was drifting aimlessly, or worse, sitting in dry dock, and I don’t feel that way anymore.

The First Nine Years

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley (which is actually located in Kensington) is always a lovely spot, but it was particularly lovely on this day in 2004. One reason was the weather, which was sunny and warm, with breezy blue skies. Another reason was the company, which included family, colleagues, and friends both old and new. The biggest reason was the fact that October 9, 2004 was the first day of my marriage and partnership with my wife Miranda.

It was not a drama-free day – wedding days rarely are, in my experience – but it was both moving and meaningful, and our partnership has continued on and evolved ever since. We’ve had our periods of tension and strife, of course. Neither of us is the world’s first-ever flawless human being, and we’ve had ample opportunity to prove it to each other.

We’ve persevered in the face of our inevitable differences, however, and we’ve also been able to reveal the better angels of our nature to each other. I know that committing to a life of partnership with Miranda has helped me to unearth personal qualities that I wasn’t even aware I possessed before we’d met.

I understand more about her needs with each passing year; equally important, I understand more about my own needs with each passing year. In recent years I’ve found the confidence and courage to pursue things that I’d never dared to pursue before, and a large measure of the credit for that goes to Miranda – her ability to perceive and then pursue her goals has been truly inspiring.

I’ve been through periods of crippling loneliness, as I know many of us have. So it would be easy to say “not lonely” is a low bar to clear, but I don’t actually think it is, because in my mind loneliness isn’t merely the absence of other people. For me, loneliness has always meant the absence of people, or even one person, who makes a profound, sustained effort to perceive me as the person I truly am, understand the complexities of my inner life to the best of their ability, and take the risk of being vulnerable enough to let me do the same in return.

I have that with Miranda, and a lot more. I have intimacy of a kind I’ve always wanted, but always felt out of reach. I have a partner who’s willing to take on the immense difficulties of bringing children into this world and raising them while also being present to share the startling, bottomless joys those children also provide. I have someone with whom I can explore the psychological complexities of life in this world in a way that I’ve never been able to do with anyone else.

We had fun on this date nine years ago. Friends and local acoustic music legends Mario Speedwagon performed; my brother took pictures; friends and family shared their thoughts and feelings with us; and when it was all over we went home, ordered a pizza, took a deep breath, and started life as a married couple. It was a very good day.

Dropping Off the 7.32 Year Old at School

When I took the 7.32 year old to school this morning her immediate circle of friends wasn’t there, and as a result she spent a decent chunk of time just wandering around the schoolyard, looking rather adrift, then climbing around the outside of the play structure alone, occasionally looking over, catching my eye, and giving me a smile, the “don’t make a big deal about this smile” version. She seemed glad to have me there.

She also seemed a bit lonely, which made me sad, and I was glad when her two best friends appeared at the far side of the yard and started wandering in her direction. They were delighted to see her, hollering her name in gleeful, unrestrained fashion. I gave the 7.32 year old a kiss, said goodbye, and watched her run across the yard toward her friends, but she unexpectedly dashed past them and headed for a small patch of flowering bushes next to the school building instead.

The 7.32 year old dashed back in my direction, smiling at her friends in greeting as she passed them, ran up to me, and gave me a flower bud that she’d taken off the bushes. She smiled, a bigger, less constrained smile, accepted another kiss, then skipped off with her posse, all three of them chattering a mile a minute.

I left the school and walked to my car, thinking about how hard it is to stop myself from mapping my own schoolyard heartaches onto my daughter, and how important it is to let her experience loneliness and other difficult feelings for herself. But I also thought about how sweet she is, and how one small gesture from her can instantly make me deliquesce into a burbling plash of gratitude and love, and how the many moments of parenting-related exhaustion and frustration feel like a more than worthwhile price to pay for the opportunity to have her in my life.

Uncontrollable Rage

A number of years ago I wrote a song called “Psychotherapy Blues” which was largely inspired by meeting my brilliant and gorgeous wife, who is in fact a psychotherapist. I wrote a line in there about “uncontrollable rage,” and while the song’s not necessarily autobiographical, it does reflect my own psychological reality to a significant degree.

I do possess a white-hot core of anger, partly rooted in my family life and partly rooted in my adolescence. I’ve spent a lot of time simmering in that anger, unsure how to deal with it, sometimes lashing out at people around me, and more often turning it on myself. It took me years and years, some of them spent in therapy, to realize that withdrawing from the world is the worst possible way for me to cope with that anger.

The best way has turned out to be forcing myself to engage with the world much more than I did during those years of adolescence and early adulthood; make the effort to see the good in people; be vulnerable, as risky as that is; and be as earnest and heartfelt as possible, despite living in a society that devalues that kind of expression.

The anger isn’t going away. It’s an indelible part of who I am, and always will be, but it’s good to fully grasp that it’s not the only part of who I am. There’s anger inside me, and sadness and grief and regret and all sorts of other difficult feelings, but there’s also joy, and gratitude, and love. The world is a bigger and better place than I once believed.

The Author/Parent Dream Scenario

Yesterday I attended Back to School Night, which I’ve discovered is a weird package of trauma reactivation for me – Finding a seat in the classroom! Alpha dog personalities! Unfathomable social dynamics! Being in the school building itself! Aack! – but of course I was there as a parent, and the 7.30 year old deserves to have a dad who’ll tolerate those emotional complexities in order to fully participate in her life.

She ended up paying me back in a retroactive kind of way, too. Her teacher (who is fabulous) told me that recently someone noticed a Todd Parr book in the classroom and said something about knowing him, which is pretty cool. The 7.30 year old piped up to announce that her daddy is an author, and apparently talked at some length about my book. Apparently she was just bursting with pride.

Every author/parent’s dream, am I right? If for some reason my writing career were to come screeching to a halt today, that little speech by the 7.30 year old would be enough to view my writing career as a success. I love my kid.

Self-perception

An evening of pontification: clear self-perception and compassionate self-understanding have not come easily to me. It took me a lot of time and often painful effort to untangle the Gordian knot of who I am, who I want to be, and who I thought the world wanted me to be. It’s taken pretty much my whole life up until now, in fact.

During my youth I often wished I could be the life of the party, the ladies’ man, the friend who always knew the right thing to say, the witty putdown artist, the star athlete – so many things that I’ve never been, and never will be. I didn’t try to be all of those things, but I tried to be some of them, and those experiences were…well, many things. Frustrating. Discouraging. Humiliating. It’s a relief to have finally arrived at a psychological place where I have this much clarity about who I am.

On a professional level, I’ve found my life’s work as a children’s author, and I’m phenomenally lucky to have done so. On a personal level, I’m a pretty good friend, at least to people who can accept my incomplete social skill set; a committed, future-minded spouse; and a devoted (if noticeably flawed) father. Those are worthwhile things to be. They’re not all exciting in a way that our often superficial society tends to value, but they’re valuable nevertheless. I can feel good about all of them.

The Damp Mossy Woods

Reblogged from Arthur A. Levine's Blog:

I promised myself that this year I would again, devote a portion of my two week vacation to being a writer. So here I am. Bluffing my way into productivity, I hope.

Last year I discovered that the only way I was ever going to FEEL like a writer would be to...um...WRITE. For me, I guess, the connection to my storytelling impulse is weak enough that I have to build it up like a camper builds a fire...hauling spindly sticks of inspiration out of the mossy, dark, unpromising woods of my imagination...then banging my head against a wall like stone on stone in the hopes that something will spark.  

Read more… 42 more words

Is it cheating to reblog my editor's blog post? I mean, come on, people do it on Tumblr all the time, so I'm really just taking part in the Tumblrfication of Wordpress, right? Anyway, yes, "bluffing my way into productivity" probably sums it up for a lot of us...

Distractions

Last night the 2.75 year old distracted me from my impending conference-related demise by demonstrating another of his increasingly numerous post-toddler mannerisms. We were picking books to read at bedtime, and at one point he said “Hey, Daddy, I have an idea!” He turned around, put his left hand on his hip, and in a show of deep contemplation, tapped his lips with the first two fingers on his right hand. He then said “How about we look for books in the living room?” This was a perfectly good, sensible request – we have more than one stash of picture books – but really, after all the “Hey!” and “How about this?” and tapping of lips with fingers, it would have sounded perfectly reasonable if he’d said “Let’s pour a fifth of tequila into the aquarium!” or “My penis can talk, and it says its name is Bobo!”

Tomorrow I leave for/arrive at the 2013 SCBWI Summer Conference, my first as a faculty member. I’m currently in a state of RAMPAGING TERROR about this, so if I see you there and vomit on any part of your body or any one of your possessions, err, I’m sorry?

LA13SCBWI

I’d like to say we’re in the midst of complicated times right now, but the truth is that we’re always in the midst of complicated times. Racism, misogyny, homophobia, and all the other manifestations of the hatred within us are always running amok in the world. Is it justified to indulge in thoughts and feelings that may seem trivial in comparison to the untimely death of our fellow human beings? Does a writing conference have meaning or substance in the face of tragedy?

I like to think so. I like to think our ability to experience and communicate things like hope, joy, and togetherness are just as important as the terrors we’re all too capable of inflicting upon each other. On the first weekend in August I’ll be at the 2013 Annual Summer Conference in Los Angeles, my fifth time as attendee, my first as faculty. This conference has been a mecca of good fortune and opportunity for me. I’ve developed truly meaningful friendships there; I’ve absorbed immense amounts of information and inspiration; and of course the single most important moment of my writing career took place there, the moment when I first met my beloved editor, Arthur A. Levine.

Hope, optimism, anticipation, and amazement have defined my experience at this conference, and those feelings are no less evergreen and essential than the pain and rage so many of us have experienced in recent days. I’ll be there in two and a half weeks, hoping to avoid stumbles during my sessions, dealing with the usual social anxiety, seeing new faces, celebrating the fact that I get to pursue a career that means so, so much to me. I hope you’ll be there too. It’ll be good to see you.

Here With Me

I’m in this band called Erin Murphy’s Dog – we’re the EMLA house band, and we play every year at the EMLA retreat. This is a solo number I wrote for my wife about, oh, 8 or 9 years ago, and performed during the 2013 EMD show. It’s called Here With Me.