L.E. Henderson's Blog, page 19

Are Atheists Real?

I sometimes imagine I have escaped my past.

Since moving to Florida from fundamentalist South Carolina, I have been an armchair agnostic. However, on occasion I see something that jolts me back to my childhood. This time it came from Facebook.

A relative from South Carolina had posted a photograph of a cute tow-headed toddler, his back turned toward the camera so that the viewer could see, over his shoulder, a message: “Dear Atheist, If you do not believe in God, why do you care that I pray to him?”

Usually I do not call myself an atheist; many assume that if you say you are an atheist you are claiming that you know, for sure, that God does not exist. I am a fan of owning my uncertainty. Besides, the truth, whatever it is, is unaffected by my subjective feelings about it. The idea that everyone should “make up their minds” about God comes from believers who think that beliefs determine eternal fate.

But I doubt the Biblical God exists as much as I doubt ghosts exist, although no one ever questions me about my level of certainty about ghosts. At one time in my life, I would not have predicted I would ever say that. I was taught that atheists were cruel and desperately unhappy people who sought to rob happiness from others and were dedicated to persecuting Christians.

Cruelty aside, they had made a decision not to believe; that is, they actually did believe and were just rebelling for other reasons, like hating to follow rules or loving to sin. Many pastors had drilled this idea into my head with stories of their personal encounters with atheists. “And he told me, pastor, I would believe in God, but I just hate having to follow so many rules.”

I remember another preacher saying something more liberal: that God respects honest doubt. At that time I was going through an adolescent depression and having many honest doubts. I liked to imagine that God would see how honest they were and respect them enough to make me not depressed. But the fact that the pastor would say there were “honest doubts” suggested that there could be dishonest doubts. How could a doubt not be honest?

Though I never verbalized it at that time, it was clear that many of my preachers did not believe atheists exist, at least not as the dictionary defines them. According to the preachers, it was not that atheists had real doubts, not that they noticed contradictions in the Bible or that empirical evidence was more effective than faith in predicting natural phenomena.

Instead, atheists were always painted as people who angrily shook their fists and said, “God, I do not like you and your rules. Therefore, I refuse to believe in you!”

From my personal transition from my belief to non-belief, I know that this characterization was false. My non-belief began with full religious immersion. As an adolescent, I prayed constantly and read the Bible all the way through. The Bible disturbed me deeply and fueled my existing depression. When my doubts began, I fought them with everything I had.

In the end, I was glad when they won. My transition from belief to non-belief was not a loss; it was a change from painful confusion to a love for life. Before, I had taken my life for granted, thinking that if I was going to have an eternal after-life full of bliss, who cared about the first? I just had to endure the inferior, short, mortal one in order to reach the next.

Now, suddenly, I became fascinated with the world around me. Without prepackaged answers to the questions of existence, I discovered a universe more mysterious, intricate, and beautiful than I had imagined. (See previous post “The Beauty of Uncertainty”)

Decades later, I found myself staring at a message that seemed plucked from my childhood, the old assumption of “dishonest doubt” embodied in the image of a little boy and his letter to all atheists everywhere. The post seemed to say, “See? You are trying to stop me from praying to God. Therefore, atheists, you must really believe he exists. Gotcha!”

The post got scores of Facebook likes, and I am sure the cute toddler did not hurt, perhaps evoking the response. “Look! This is so obvious  a toddler could figure it out.” I wonder if the child did write it; if so, it was not with the pencil he is holding. The letters, black and thick, indicate that the message was written with a felt-tipped marker.

Besides, the “premise” is untrue. It assumes that atheists are uniformly devoted to stripping Christians of their personal right to pray. I have no problem with Christians praying. At any rate the photograph called up a host of unpleasant childhood memories and felt personal. Even though I consider myself agnostic, on some days I am more atheist than agnostic; I could honestly call myself either and be telling the truth.

Atheism does not necessarily mean certainty. It means “not a theist.” It is the default position. Even Richard Dawkins has said he will change his mind if empirical evidence ever comes to light that proves his position wrong. On the other hand, Carl Sagan, who called himself an agnostic, wrote that the idea of a personal God who counts the fall of every sparrow is absurd. Although unwilling to deny there is a God, Sagan apparently did not find the Biblical version of God plausible.

I am explaining why, even though I consider myself agnostic, I took to heart a propaganda effort directed against atheists and why I am identifying myself with them. The accusation that nonbelievers are dishonest doubters concerns both agnostics and atheists. Why are some believers unable to to accept that atheists and agnostics have genuine doubts?

Maybe it is because the threat of hell and the promise of heaven rest of the premise that thoughts are decisions; if beliefs were not willed, then it would be unfair for God to punish or reward people for them. 

But belief is ultimately not a decision. In order to convert, a person has to already believe a God that requires belief exists, else there would be no basis for the decision to convert – or to embrace the taboo against doubting.

I could not believe through faith by choosing to because, for me, the basis for doing that, the idea that faith is a virtue required by God, was thoroughly debunked years ago. But am I sure? I spend all day with myself seven days a week; if my non-belief in a need for faith was false, I would surely know it by now. But in the end, I cannot prove it to anyone. Fortunately, there is no need to. Skeptical inquiry is not an immoral act, but a power for understanding reality that I treasure.

Of that, at least, I am certain.

Beyond Tolerance

As a writer, I am constantly reaching toward understanding other people, if only because creating convincing fictional characters depends on it.

I have to imagine what it would be like in their place, even if their perspectives, lifestyles, and backgrounds are not my own. But it is hard. The illusion that I am the center of everything is powerfully convincing; everything I experience comes through, well, me.

In the same way, the illusion of an earth-centered universe was convincing until some people decided to let the evidence speak for itself, even if it went against the “obvious.” They put aside the urge to view the universe in terms of its relationship to themselves; maybe the stars were not made to shine for them; maybe the stars had an existence apart from humans.

This attitude was objectivity, which applies not only to stars, but to people. To understand others, I have to be able to realize that they have an existence outside of their relationship to me. That others are real, that they have dreams and concerns just as I do, and that like me they suffer is easy to know, yet hard to realize. Maybe that is why objectivity is far too rare.

Often, irrational cruelty results from an unwillingness or inability to see reality as it is, and to see people as they truly are. Some religious dogma encourages the devout to see outsiders as wicked, leading followers to conclude that any abuse of them must be pleasing to God.

The offenders lack empathy for their targets and view them as objects to get rid of rather than people. This attitude of contempt comes through in words that are chosen to describe them: “infidels,” “queers,” “psychos,” “sluts,” or any number of racial or ethnic epithets.

The suggested cure for this contempt is tolerance. Tolerance is not a bad thing as long as it encourages empathy and understanding. Instead, it has come to mean political correctness. Tolerance is about choosing non-offensive language and being super-careful around minorities so as not to “set them off.”

It also means respecting all religious belief systems equally even if they contradict each other or include “intolerance” of nonparticipants as a core part of their dogma. Tolerance means showing “maturity” with a kind of polite and uncritical agreeability.

This kind of “tolerance” is based on fear. It requires no understanding, compassion, or empathy, only an obedience to social norms. And maybe that is why it has failed.

It makes no effort to see the world as it really is; it only asks for going along with the current speech etiquette. In addition, the push for “tolerance” creates resentment in those who dislike being told what to think and say; meanwhile their true feelings go underground and fester.

I see this when I return to my home town in South Carolina where racist or homophobic comments are exchanged like secret handshakes; many feel persecuted by the demand for tolerance prescribed by the “liberal media” and feel relieved when they meet like-minded people.

That is one reason why socially prescribed “sensitivity” that bans the use of certain words is no match for irrational cruelty. More is needed. A respect for truth is needed.

But in politics and religion, team loyalty trumps truth-seeking. Most any reality distortion is acceptable as long as it hurts the other side. Too often, reality distortions are met with more reality distortions.

Sweeping labels are applied, where terrible attributes are used to describe every member of an opposing group. Fundamentalist Christians accuse non-believers of monstrous immorality. Some nonbelievers dismiss believers as being dumb.

Meanwhile, tolerance is preached and goes largely unheeded. The tolerance solution seems more concerned about the impoliteness of slanderous remarks than whether or not they are true.

But if tolerance is not the answer, what is? What about objectivity? If people made a real effort to see the world as it is and people as they are, perhaps there would be no need for tolerance.

Granted, in most any group, cruel, dishonest, stupid, or manipulative people exist. Someone who is looking to validate their opinion that members of a group are all “bad” can always find someone who seems to confirm it. But does it require a giant intellectual feat to understand why labeling an entire group based on the behavior of one person is faulty thinking?

The need to compartmentalize people in columns of good or bad blinds people to the complex realities that exist beneath the neat labels.

Any effort to solve problems has to begin with a respect for truth and a means of discovering it that is independent of the fears, needs, or desires of the observer.

Tolerance as it is normally practiced is a socially prescribed attitude that exists only on the surface. For it to exist, no real knowledge or understanding is needed.

Tolerance is unambitious. It is not always honest. And it is not enough. Religious violence is rampant. Racism has never gone away. The U.S. government is driven more by team loyalty than an interest in discovering reality. Even on an interpersonal level, empathy and compassion are reserved for team members or family while strangers are viewed as less than human.

Put into action, this attitude creates pointless suffering, while the tolerance “cure” leads to confusion. Moving toward reason lies in a willingness to reach beyond tolerance in search of the truth.

What Kinds of Experiences Does a Writer Need?

Shortly after college I read an article about how a hopeful graduate of a creative writing program had sent a manuscript to an editor. The editor responded that, although the writer had followed the technical rules of fiction writing, his prose suffered from a lack of “life experiences.”

Her advice to him and all writers like him was to go out and get some life experiences and then go back and try again. After I read this, my mood nosedived. I had lived my whole life in one small town. I was painfully aware that I had experienced only a narrow slice of what life was or could be.

I wondered what kind of experiences the editor had meant exactly. If an editor was going to make such a glib statement, she should have been more specific. Should I move to another country? Have children? See the Grand Canyon? Join the army? Or what?

The kind of tortured confusion I had after reading the article was the reason I eventually stopped reading magazine articles about writing. I took them personally, and I tended to take seriously anything a professional in the writing industry said.

There seemed to be enough truth in the advice that I had to consider that maybe I was not ready to be a writer yet, even though I had been told throughout my life that I wrote well. Experiences were the stuff writing was made of, so it seemed to follow that the more of them you had, the better your writing was likely to be.

But the editor seemed to have a bias about what kinds of experiences mattered for writing, although she failed to specify them. She did not apparently have the experience of breathing in mind, for example; or going to school for the first time; or tasting ice cream; or getting jealous.

After all, every moment of being alive and aware is an experience: sipping coffee by the fire, getting a crush, watching the rain, stroking the cat, or having a bad cold. Those kinds of experiences were common to most people I knew. Why were they not enough?

Years later I read a book on writing by John Gardner, author of Grendel, that made me feel better. I found a passage where he said that all anyone needs to have experienced to write fiction are the human emotions: fear, sadness, joy, envy, or anger. It was nice to encounter a renowned writer who confirmed that ordinary experiences could be profound.

When I thought about it, most of my life experiences worth writing about were not the kind I “went out and got.” Living with bipolar disorder, grieving over the loss of my grandparents, shedding my belief in God – all of those were experiences that affected me in profound ways. They were not exotic like hang-gliding, spending a year living in Africa, or climbing Everest. But they mattered.

Over time I have had more of those kinds of experiences. For the most part, I did not ask for them; they came to me and forced me into a struggle to understand them. The insights I gained from it found their way into my writing.

Which makes me wonder: are experiences alone enough to give depth to writing, or does it matter how I take in those experiences? If I rush through my vacation, frantically going from one “fun” activity from the next, never appreciating the one I am having but always eager to get to the next point, will that enrich my writing as much as if I slow down in my mind, take in the sounds, scents, and smaller details; observe; wonder; and think about them?

What if I notice not just the thrill of a roller-coaster ride but the kinds of people who ride them with their styles of dress, mannerisms, and the way they respond to the stress of being slowly lifted and then tipped over into a breath-taking drop?

What a writer pays attention to matters, along with the ability to put details into context. The ability to imagine what they might look like from another viewpoint also adds interest to writing.

At the moment I read the comment from the editor, I had not viewed my previous experiences as important because they were not exotic; they were not flashy enough for me to take impressive photographs of them and brag about them to relatives and friends.

I was blind to the strangeness of my own background with all the cultural quirks that those from other countries might find fascinating. What would someone from Afghanistan make of my upbringing in the U.S.? What would those from a liberal state like Oregon think about my conservative home state of South Carolina?

I must admit that living in other states has changed my perspective, allowing me to view the place of my childhood as being far stranger than I ever knew.

But I was a writer even before I moved. Experiences are essential to writing, but they are happening to everyone all the time. Even the deprivation of experience is an experience. Helen Keller, who was deaf, blind, and unable to speak, nonetheless wrote an excellent book about what her life was like coming to her mainly from her sense of touch.

The observation the editor may have had some truth in it, but it was shallow. I suspect that the writer who sent her the manuscript had weaknesses other than a “life experience” deficit.

Thin writing has many possible causes. The offending writer might have had poor insight into the experiences he did have; or he might not have had a strong point of view, or the skill to translate the experiences he had onto the page in vivid detail.

But he had life experience. Every moment experience is unavoidable, which is why even children can write compelling stories, provided that the content matters to them. They do not need to “go out and get life experiences” before beginning to write. No one does.

Writing is a way of life. It is ongoing, and I can only begin at the place in time where I am. The editor was right to think experiences give depth to writing, but she was wrong to assume that they must be “big” to matter.

Writing From The World Beneath Sight

I like to imagine a hidden world that I can enter whenever I am standing in a long line, waiting out a traffic jam, or any situation where I feel trapped.

If I close my eyes, unseen layers of experience become apparent: birds chirping, clocks ticking, motors rumbling, or the drone of a distant jet, sounds that usually get lost in the visual glare.

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Other senses like touch, smell, and taste are with me all the time, but I only seem to notice them when they grab attention, when they delight or offend. I am aware of the scent of cookies baking because I want cookies. And I notice pungent mopping fluid because it is unpleasantly sharp. Subtler scents get ignored.

Or if they are unpleasant, I may even try to block them out. Wailing babies, strident laughter, and squeaky shopping carts make me tense; desperate to get away, I mentally “fight” the noise.

But when I turn my full attention to them, something changes; they stop being irritating as I try to pick out all the sounds I was missing before.

Listening becomes a kind of game: Where is the rustling noise coming from? How many sounds can I identify? Did that person really just say that? The game has made me aware that fighting the sounds is far more stressful than the sounds themselves. Listening relaxes me; even better, it enriches my writing.

Whether or not I notice scents or sounds, they are part of what make up the fabric of my life. If I leave them out of my writing, my fictional renderings of experience seem flat. Imagery is powerful, yet vision is only a skin of reality. When vision falls away, soundscapes, touchscapes, and scentscapes rise to replace it.

I first had that thought during a traffic jam while I was in the passenger seat. Imagining my car sprouting wings and flying over the other cars was not working, so instead I closed my eyes and listened. Sounds drifted to me from below and above. It was like a shroud had been pulled away, revealing a hidden layer of experience.

No longer impatient for the moment to end, I relaxed. I became aware of the steady one-two beat of the windshield wiper, the hum of the car motor, the sloshing sounds of tires, and the murmur of the stereo, all merging to form an accidental melody.

Focusing on listening banished my boredom; impatience yielded to calm interest. And by becoming aware of sounds and feelings beyond the reach of vision, I make it more likely that the next time I sat down to write, those details will return to me.

Aside from enjoying writing benefits, I like visiting my hidden place full of textures, scents, and sounds. I can go there any time, the humming, rattling, cookie-scented World Beneath Sight; all I need to do is close my eyes.

I just released “Becoming the Story and Other Tales” for the Kindle

What if you could write your way into a better life? What if you could invent yourself as you would a fictional character? In my new e-book released on Amazon, one of my characters does.

My short story collection,  Becoming the Story and Other Tales, is a mix of science fiction, fantasy, and personal prose. The book mostly grew from many weekends of short story writing. Those who have been following my blog will see stories familiar to them, but I have also added new ones.

In one of them a cat who has mysteriously turned human becomes even more confused when she runs into a Christian determined to save her soul. In another, two fifth grade girls forced to play kickball begin to challenge the rules and take control of the game, which they view as a deplorable metaphor for life.

To check out my new collection, go to http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Story-Other-Tales-Henderson-ebook/dp/B00QG5Y5JU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418658328&sr=8-1&keywords=Becoming+the+Story+and+Other+Tales

Confessions of a Bad Monkey Part III of III

To return to Part I click here

To return to Part II click here

Last sentences from Part II: I was alarmed at how callously the students and even established employees treated some of the patients, especially the ones who were least able to defend themselves. One incident in particular still haunts me.

When the man first came in, the technologists would not speak to him or make eye contact, even though everything about him spelled agony. His face was contorted. Wide-eyed, he looked like someone witnessing a nightmare. His volley of groans ricocheted off the walls. He was sweating profusely.

When they moved him from the gurney to the examination table, a series of full-bodied screams broke from him. Alarmed, I wondered: why was his Level 10 pain not being acknowledged? To make matters worse, my role models would still barely look at him or offer any reassuring words.

Then, as they were moving him, his catheter became dislodged and urine escaped. Anything that prolonged the nightmare seemed disastrous, but the techs stopped everything and fell into fits of giggles as they joked about spilled “pee-pee.” The more they laughed, the funnier the incident seemed to become. Their giggles got worse as the man continued to gasp and scream.

I was only supposed to observe, but I thought someone could at least speak to him. I stood behind the examination table and said the only thing I knew to say. “Take a deep breath,” I said. “Take a deep breath, okay? And try to relax.”

Even as I said the words, I was already losing my belief in the power of deep breathing. But, to my surprise, the moaning actually stopped for a moment, and I saw his chest rise slowly and fall. But the words were unable to dam the tidal waves of pain, and the groaning began again, rising toward a new scream.

Meanwhile, the techs were still going out of their way not to look at him. I made a mental note to never let any family members be alone, when vulnerable, with hospital employees administering care.

After it was all over I wondered if the childish giggling was an emotional defense. Maybe seeing someone in pain secretly upset the employees so much that they could not look at the sufferer. Maybe emotional detachment was needed  to perform the job correctly.

But I kept imagining what it must have been like from the point of view of the patient. Had I been in physical agony, the total absence of professional concern and an atmosphere of giggling revelry could have only made the experience worse. Many other, similar incidents unsettled me; it seemed that the more vulnerable and alone the patients were, the more likely they were to be treated badly.

The contempt some workers held for the patients astonished me. Once, I was instructed to follow two second year students to the ICU ward to observe what they did. A comatose girl in her early twenties lay behind one of the curtains. I overheard someone say she had been in a traffic accident and her odds of living were slim.

The second year students, both girls, took images. Afterward, they rolled the cart away and entered the main hall. As I followed, one of the girls leaned toward the other and said: “Did you notice? That girl, she is a skank. Did you see all that makeup she was wearing?” The other girl agreed that the unconscious girl must be a slut.

A slut. I was glad she could not hear what they said. But still, where was the concern I had been taught to expect from those were were charged with administering patient care to those undergoing trauma? Whatever my assumptions about professional concern had been were shattered by my behind-the-scenes look at what some who worked in the medical industry were actually thinking.

Not everyone I met in the RT program was cruel, stupid, or insensitive. There were friendly, mature, and even admirable people who managed to win the acceptance of their peers without participating in abuse. But maybe unfairly, it is the worst that I remember best.

Amid my 101 intro to suffering and callousness, I was still struggling with the problem of being accepted, which was complicated by my thinking less and less of my classmates as the days went by. Aside from their rudeness, their behavior was becoming more synchronized.

One day I returned to the classroom from a break to see a cluster of girls in the back of the room eating sundaes they had taken from the lunchroom. My impression was that they were all eating their sundaes as a synchronized unit. As far as I could tell, they were scooping at the same time and in the same way as if in a well-rehearsed choreography. They were like “the Borg” from Star Trek, I decided.

Meanwhile, my own aversion to the “Borgishness” caused problems. I was constantly chastised for “going off” by myself. Most of my classmates had stopped speaking to or making eye contact with me. I had not eaten a sundae after all; I was more of a cake person.

As much as I hated “group think,” I learned that it did have advantages. One day I was scheduled for E.R. time. I was supposed to observe and assist one of the second year students. She would speak in curt one or two word sentences. Her directions to me were “Get that” or “Close that.”

When I asked her to be more specific, she would not explain; instead, she would glower, huff, and do the things she had asked me to do: jerk a curtain closed or snatch a towel. It seemed that mind-reading was expected. I could not understand her hostility at being asked to define her pronouns.

But, observing the other students, I discovered that many of them were mind-readers. It was like they were attuned to some beat I could not hear. They anticipated and scurried and retrieved. They grasped the clinical choreography in a way I did not. They administered medical care the way they ate their sundaes: in synchronicity.

It was hard to admit my weakness; I had graduated college with honors and swept up a number of department awards. I was not accustomed to failure. But the clinical experience was becoming a nightmare; I was not cut out for it. My brain was not wired for it.If I had been skilled in clinical practice, I could have endured the social rejection. I had learned long ago that I did not need for people to like me in order for me to like myself. But the whole environment worked against my natural inclinations.

This job was not me. Even if I graduated, did I want this life to be my future? I tried to picture myself staying and defying obstacles and adopting ant-like efficiency and being detached around suffering patients, and learning to get along with students who slandered dying girls. But was becoming more like my classmates the struggle I wanted? I decided to talk to the teacher who headed the training program and tell her my problems before I quit.

“If you stay,” she said, “you will contribute a lot to this department. After you graduate, you will probably become a supervisor with a much higher salary than any of your classmates here. But to survive you will have to change. Your personality is not typical of the profession. To succeed you will have to become more like your classmates. You may have to do things you consider mean. But should you try to change your personality? That is up to you.

“Your greatest strength is your academic performance. But the focus here is not the academic side of radiology. Most of what we do here is monkey-see, monkey do. If you go I will miss you sitting on the front row and nodding at me when all the rest are giving me blank stares. No question: you are a brilliant student. But,” she gave me a pointed stare, “you are a bad monkey.”

The words dug in. They left me stunned. A bad monkey. No truer words were ever spoken. I was indeed a bad monkey. I had been since the day in the first grade, when I looked up to find myself in a vacant lunchroom. I did not function well in groups. I was not a good imitator. But did I want to be? I remembered my adolescent rebellion when I decided that being normal was boring; that I would be weird and do whatever I wanted and where off brand shoes and listen to unpopular music and learn for the sake of learning.

I went back to class for one more day to decide if there was anything about the program that was worth the struggle. But as soon as I got to class and saw my classmates, I knew I was not going to continue. Becoming a “good monkey” was out of the question. I had never been a good monkey and I was not about to start. In fact, I was warming to that phrase, “bad monkey.” Maybe I would have it printed on a t-shirt and wear it to some super-formal event.

I could have gone home early, but I decided to stay for the rest of the day. I thought I would look around and make note of all the things I would not miss. In fact, if I was going to leave, why not go out in a blaze of infamy?

That afternoon, when I set my tray down at the lunch table, there were the usual questions: Why was I late? Was I with my lover? I answered. “No, I had to skip the sex today because I was dying for a smoke. Chain-smoking helps stem the tide of my raging alcohol addiction.” I studied the girls to see if they believed me.

Silence. Blinks of confusion. They looked at each other. A few murmured questions. They were confused? Good. Let them be.

I worked to maintain a serious expression until a boy from a nearby table broke the silence. He looked at me with extreme interest and said, “You? Really? You are an alcoholic?” I looked him in the eyes and nodded gravely. His gaze settled on me for a moment, then he shrugged. “Join the club,” he said.

The following day, I turned in my badge to the head of the department. As I walked down the hallway toward the exit, I saw the future, like the path ahead, clear into a free and uncertain space. Somewhere out there, there had to be good jobs for bad monkeys. I wondered what they were.

My mind raced with possibilities. Maybe I could join a circus or become a graffiti artist or a freelance clown. Maybe I would invent a new kind of water or chase tornadoes. Or maybe I would do something crazier – the craziest thing of all.

Maybe I would become a writer.

Confessions of a Bad Monkey (Part II of III)

Click here to view Part 1.

Final sentences from Part I: When I graduated I had no idea what I was going to do with my art degree, so I enrolled in a two-year training program at my local hospital to become a radiologic technologist. Bad idea.

I found myself in a class full of mostly girls who had just graduated from high school. I was the only student there with a college degree, which meant that I could become a supervisor if I finished the program.

But I was out of my element. I was in a heavily structured environment where obedience was the rule and conformity was a virtue. It was not just that I had to follow official rules. It was considered odd for me to even walk down the hall alone unless I had an official reason.

One teacher said she was worried whenever she saw me walking down the hall alone, unlike my classmates who traveled in giggling flocks.

The pressure to stay with the group at all times went against my natural tendencies, so I took a lot of deep breaths that year. I had always been afflicted with social anxiety, and deep breaths were supposed to be a simple, drug free way to relax; at R.T. school I needed all the help with that I could get.

By the time each class ended, my anxiety had reached a fever pitch, fueled by classmates who were loud, militantly opinionated, and short-tempered.

They called Shannon Faulkner, the first girl to enter the Citadel, a bitch for “messing with” long-standing traditions. While I admired her courage, they were convinced that she deserved any amount of abuse that she received. Some declared that if they ever encountered her in person, they would abuse her themselves.

Many of them met the world with self-righteous hostility. One girl, Carol, was vocally opposed to the “patient bill of rights” which was outlined as part of hospital policy, such as the right to refuse treatment. “Patients ought not to have those rights!” she said.

When in class, I reminded myself to take deep breaths to clear my mind but even the deepest of breaths could only go so far. Being around my classmates for more than an hour was unendurable. I desperately needed to get away from them.

On breaks I would go to a restroom as far away as possible from the ones the other girls went to. But since none of them had the same need to recharge that I did, my behavior was viewed as untrustworthy.

Meanwhile, the other girls went to the restroom in the lunchroom lobby, and always in giggling flocks. My detour meant that I arrived later to the lunchroom than the other girls did, and some badgering began.

The patient rights opponent Carol said, “Why are you always late for lunch?” There were no rules about what time anyone had to arrive at lunch, but I had broken the cardinal rule of consensus which was “Never do anything different from the group.”

In my absence, the girls had speculated that I was having a torrid affair with an orderly in a broom closet. It sounds funny now, and if I had thought they were only joking, maybe I would have shrugged and laughed. But suspicion, gossip, and fear of being gossiped about fueled the environment.

I learned that in every class, there was a scapegoat. In the class of second year students there was a bullying victim, a pretty and thoughtful girl who was not as outspoken as the others. They put her down, made fun of her behind her back, and were rude to her, saying her name with an exaggerated drawl to show their contempt for her.

Every student was terrified of becoming the class scapegoat. In the classroom, talking to only one person without the entire group being able to hear was deemed rude. Everything spoken was to be spoken loudly. Otherwise, the girls worried that they were being talked about. “What are you saying? Is it about me? Can you talk louder?”

Everything that was said set off reactions from the girls in the surrounding desks, fanning outward until the entire class had heard and had a chance to respond to everything anyone had to say.

The hive behavior went beyond speech. Once, I had taken out my billfold and a girl next to me saw a photograph of me with my boyfriend, and she asked to see it. I passed it to her. She took a long look at it and passed it to the girl behind her, and that girl did the same, until the photograph had made an entire circuit.

Later on a girl said, “You are so quiet, what do you and your boyfriend do, just sit around and not ever say anything to each other? Seems like that would be boring.”

I had not heard those kinds of comments since I was bullied in the sixth grade. In high school and college, I had gotten along with most students.

But the RT students were a radical contrast to my college classmates. I had been a hippyish art major. The art department was a fitting place for a girl who had decided early in her adolescence that weirdness was a virtue and not a flaw.

College had been a place where girls dyed their hair Easter egg pink and chalked animal rights messages on sidewalks. In the art department there was no greater compliment than for someone to call you “weird.”

I had gone from that to this: a place where even going to the restroom alone was considered a subversive act punishable by rumor-mongering and interrogation. How had I gotten to this point?

I had been indecisive in college about how I was going to make a living. I had always wanted to be a writer, but writing professionally seemed to be the equivalent of being a starving street side musician begging for coins with the strumming pleas of a guitar.

A few years after college, RT school had seemed like occupational salvation, and at the time I had no backup plan. I decided that maybe I needed to take in more deep breaths, many more – more and deeper, or I would suffocate.

During the first part of the day, classroom lectures were given until lunchtime. Afterward was clinical training. I loved the lectures. I had never taken a survey physics course before, and physics was part of the coursework. I was excited to get a glimpse of what I had missed in college. I absorbed the lectures and made a hundred on almost every test.

But in clinical practice, I felt lost. There was a pattern of expected behavior, of buzzing purposeful movement. The other girls seemed to know what to do by instinct. When not working, they gathered into gossipy huddles and whispered among themselves. I was no fan of gossipy huddles, which fueled my social anxiety.

Socially befuddled, I had to constantly ask myself what I needed to do next. The machines were daunting metal behemoths, heavy, full of tubes and wires. I have never been mechanically inclined, and the instructions on how to use them were always delivered rapid-fire, and only once.

I got lost in the maze of hallways, was never quite sure where to go next, felt disoriented by the flux of white clad bodies traversing the hallways and behind me, the sounds of giggling and rustling fabric.

In the clinical area, the greater the number students were around me, the more I felt drawn to the empty examination rooms, anxious for a place where I could be alone and gather my thoughts and have peace from the gabbling voices, rising and falling, all around me.

Meanwhile, I was seen as too isolated and quiet to be trusted. When I appeared at the lunch table, sudden silences fell, glances were exchanged, and then the questions came: Where have you been? Who are you having an affair with? What shady thing have you been doing rather than going to the bathroom with us and giggling and worrying about your hair like everyone else?

But my problems went beyond social rejection and mechanical ineptitude. I was alarmed at how callously the students and even established employees treated some of the patients, especially the ones who were the least able to defend themselves.

One incident in particular still haunts me.

(To be continued)

Confessions of a Bad Monkey (Part I of III)

Note to readers: I have gotten a response from a publisher who has asked me to make changes to my novel and resubmit it. I am very excited and for the next few weeks I will be busy revising my novel, so I am spreading out this post into three parts. Enjoy.

In the first grade, something strange happened. As I was eating my lunch at school, I raised my head to find the entire cafeteria quiet and empty. Only a moment ago, it had been buzzing with talking students. Now it was just me and two of my classmates, girls who were wiping down the table with rags.

One of them asked me why I was still there. I did not know. I walked back to class with them where my teacher asked me what I had been thinking. When I could not explain, she yelled at me and made me stand in a corner. I had never stood in a corner before.

Usually when I was spanked or yelled at, I understood why. But what had I done wrong? One minute the lunchroom had been crowded and the next minute, empty. It had been a little scary.

Throughout school, similar but milder incidents were always happening. I was inattentive at all the wrong times. At Vacation Bible school, I would sometimes get confused about where I was supposed to go and end up in the wrong class. I was always missing instructions and announcements. I had trouble concentrating on lectures. I daydreamed. While the teacher was talking, I drew pictures of my dog .

I could focus to read but when I was really interested in a story, the rest of the world disappeared, and pulling me out of my altered state required force.

I was not disobedient. I never misbehaved, at least not on purpose. I was a thwarted conformist. I desperately wanted not to call attention to myself. I wanted to be like everyone else.

My saving virtue was that I was creative. In almost every class I was considered The Artist. I drew. I wrote stories. I had a box of art supplies that I kept under my bed.

Socially I had always lived on the margins of acceptance, never a pariah but nowhere near popular either.

But in the sixth grade, it got worse: I was bullied. Afterward I decided not to try to be like everyone else anymore. I decided that I did not like the bullies anyway; why should I try to be like them? I decided to go ahead and be weird. Weird kids were more interesting anyway. Being normal was stupid.

In grammar school everything had been determined by other kids: what to wear, what to be interested in, what music to like, what sports teams to love or hate. Now I refused to wear brand name shoes.

I stopped sunbathing, which I had always hated. Whereas in elementary school my grades had been awful, I now immersed myself in studying. I was just waiting for someone to call me a nerd so that I could direct my scorn at them. I made an A in every subject. Afterward, I decided at 15 years old that I had found my true calling: I would devote my life to the pursuit of knowledge.

I imagined my adult self living in a quaint cabin in the mountains on a precipice overlooking a rolling ocean. I would have an office lined with bookshelves and a giant picture window overlooking the sea. I would read and write and lead a reclusive lifestyle with my dog. In the fantasy there was always a dog

I had a different fantasy, in case the first one did not work out. I would have a coterie of intellectual friends. We could all sit around sipping Earl Grey and making fun of the kinds of people who had bullied me in the sixth grade, and I would not be lonely anymore.

But the new obsession with learning made the loneliness the least of my worries. I had fallen in love with biology. At the same time my belief in God had fallen away, leaving me with a ton of questions. The universe was more of a mystery than I ever knew. I was curious. I was learning. I was happier than I had ever been.

Everything was going great until my bipolar disorder knocked me out of school during my senior year, forcing me to spend the last part of that year on a home-bound program. I graduated from high school but I never attended the ceremony.

I graduated from college with a major in art, after changing my major in the middle of my junior year. When I graduated, I had no idea what I was going to do with my art degree, so I enrolled in a two-year training program at my local hospital to become a radiologic technologist.

Bad idea.

(To be continued)

Why I Said No to NanoWriMo

Every November a fervor sweeps writerdom, an evangelical commitment to write fast and write more. This effort is called NanoWrimo or “National Novel Writing Month.”

The objective is to write a novel in a month, or at least the rough draft of one. For many it is a way to end procrastination, cut through resistance, and overcome stymieing perfectionism – to just get the words down.

The idea is radical, especially for writers who tend to fuss over every sentence as they are writing it. When I was writing for the web-based freelancing service Elance, I would see many jobs posted by writers who were 50 pages into a novel and wanted a professional to revise it before they moved on.

This is silly. Until you have your whole first draft written, you cannot know what the novel is going to need. The first 50 pages might need to be cut, depending on whatever surprising turns the novel takes during the course of writing it. Writers who are fussy about their first drafts tend to be under-confident and are eager for their words to flatter them even in the earliest stages of creation.

I used to be like that. As a result, I rarely finished stories. I was too caught up in the belief that writing should come out perfect on the first try, or I was not doing it properly. I felt dependent on a fleeting creative mood to fuel my effort, and If the initial mood of inspiration left me, I folded.

I know better now, so what is my problem with NanoWriMo? Doesn’t it discourage depending on inspiration? Or resorting to irrational perfectionism? Someone who is forcing herself to write quickly will be unable to fuss much over her original sentences, and being part of a group effort is motivating for some people.

So why not for me? I do have a novel-in-progress that I have neglected, not because I was blocked but because other activities commanded my attention. Recently I have begun writing on it again, but it is a challenge to bring my original vision back to life. NanoWriMo seems to offer a quick fix. Why not go for it? Because NanoWriMo seems like a diet to me.

I dislike the idea of NanoWriMo because I love writing. The finished product is important to me, but the process is what I treasure and enjoy most.

NanoWriMo only honors one stage of the process: the rough draft. I enjoy the rough draft stage, but I love the others, too. For me, revising is usually the point where time seems suspended and I cease to be aware of my surroundings because I am so absorbed by what I am doing.

Rough drafts are just raw material. Revision is when I get to shape them into something that resembles my ultimate vision. That is often where the real creativity occurs.

So many writing problems come from seeing writing as a linear one-step process. If a movie portrays a writer writing, he is always sitting at her keyboard pattering away, presumably generating new content.

Real writing is so much more than that. It is planning, revising, rewriting, editing, and polishing. Novels are designs. The best ones are too complex to emerge from an assembly line obsession with quantity.

When I accepted that writing had multiple stages, the quality of my writing improved dramatically. In fact, I believe that whenever, during reading, I become awed by something a writer has done, it is probably due to a hidden process that is layered beneath the visible text.

Rarely does magic “just happen.”

But NanoWriMo emphasizes word count to the point where some writers feel guilty if they go back and rewrite rather than adding to the overall volume of text. Which is another thing I dislike about NanoWriMo.

The emphasis on quantity takes away the fun. In my twenties, whenever I would sit down to write, I would be flooded with anxiety and self-doubt. I did not enjoy it.

Even when I told myself, “Write however you want,” I would find myself squirming in my chair, thinking about doing other things, and glancing at the clock. To discipline myself I would set hourly goals and limit my breaks severely. If I took too long, I would accuse myself of “cheating.”

I was forcing myself to write. I pretended that a teacher was standing over me, ready to give me a bad grade if I quit or reward me for continuing. The model of someone controlling me was one that I was used to, and it had usually worked, driving me to exercise or make good grades. But when it came to writing for myself, force seemed to oppose, rather than further, my creative efforts.

For me, forcing creates massive internal resistance. Anyone who has read my book “A Trail of Crumbs to Creative Freedom” knows that I suffered from severe depression lasting several years and that with it, I was creatively blocked. I would only write in my journal, and even that was hard.

The turning point was when I relearned how to want to write, rather than imagining myself as being obedient to an authority. The shift occurred with a kind of rebellion. I thought, “No more rules, no more pleasing imaginary critics. I am going to go back to how I wrote when I was a kid, before anyone started telling me I should do it.”

To banish the idea that I “should” write, I used a strategy that is opposite of NanoWriMo. I limited how long or how much I wrote. Sometimes I limited it to 15 minutes. Or sometimes I even set a one sentence goal, so that afterward I was left wanting to write more. If I wanted to change my limit later, I could. These changes made the difference between writing because I “should” write and writing because I loved it.

But why does it matter why I write, as long as I write? Because writing because I wanted to meant no more fighting myself. It meant no longer needing motivational speeches to drive myself to the computer. It meant no more staring at the clock, since I was fully engaged with what I was doing. It meant that my imagination no longer ran away and hid as soon as I sat down to write, but instead peeked behind the sofa and made creative suggestions.

I dislike the idea of NanoWriMo because it would turn something I love doing back into a drudgery. The concentrated activity of writing is what I enjoy and why I keep returning to it again and again, even on weekends and during holidays.

NanoWriMo is all about word count. Group pressure takes the place of a boss or teacher. But letting others determine how I write would be a big step backward for me. I am able to write for long periods because I want to write. I love the process even more than exhilaration of delivering a finished product.

Not everyone agrees. I saw where someone on Reddit said that he considered NanoWriMo good for him because it turned him into a “serious” writer. I am so glad I never let anyone turn me into a “serious” writer. I would rather be a playful one who enjoys what she is doing.

If I enjoy what I do, I am far more likely to do it well. That does not mean writing is never hard. Sometimes writing is exceedingly painstakings, especially right before I share it with others. But I will go to any length to get it right, because my vision, desire, and process are my own.

Writing and the Risk of Offending

As an adolescent I was obsessively polite. I had learned that people were less likely to hate me if I never contradicted them, and I tried desperately not to offend anyone. As a result, I had few enemies but not many friends either.

Writing was the place where I went in order to say what I really thought. It was where I could express and explore the things that mattered most to me without fear of being unfairly judged.

I was afraid of being judged because I had a big secret: at fifteen, I did not believe in God anymore. This was a big deal in the conservative and religious South Carolina town where I grew up. I never confessed it to anyone because I was afraid of being hated.

My writing was my only confidante. Beyond being a forum for religious doubts, writing has been my “underground” for anything that was hard to express to others, a place where my real personality could emerge.

But since the fearful days of my adolescence, something has changed. Instead of writing all my thoughts in private journals, I now have a blog. I share my writing. Readers are able to react to the things I say.

Not everyone approves of them, which is something I learned painfully last week. The kerfuffle went like this: My brother called and told me that many of my conservative and religious family members from South Carolina were upset. They were baffled, offended, and disturbed.

This was because last week I presented a post called “The Final Word.” It was meant to be humorous, but it was also personal and touched on topics I care about deeply.

It was a pretend journal entry written by an Future Me right after my death. It dealt with the fears that haunt me in my effort to grapple with the brevity of life and what it really means to be human. For that reason, I loved my story, and many readers told me that they did too.

But there was a part in the story where Future Me had called God “a coy bastard” for not showing up at my death. Incidentally, the piece was my first foray into on-line profanity. Normally, I avoid it, not because I think profanity is wrong, but because the times I have used it, it seemed inconsistent with my natural “voice.”

But since Future Me was dead, I thought the occasion called for a special vernacular. I was happy when a friend I consider a master in the art of cussing told me that I had pulled it off like a pro.

I had made the “coy bastard” remark in jest and my intentions were harmless, but my family failed to see the humor and apparently viewed what I wrote as a vicious attack against that which they held sacred.

In many ways, this response was my worst fear come true, but I had known that at some point, it was bound to happen, although the adolescent in me that wants to be liked by all, or at least not hated, is still there.

But I remembered that Stephen King wrote that any writer who was unwilling to offend is in the wrong profession. He said that if you begin to write honestly, you are bound to offend at some point.

I agreed with him, which is why I have made no secret of my agnosticism in this blog. I have written about my personal experience of becoming agnostic several times, particularly in the posts “The Beauty of Uncertainty” and “How I Became an Agnostic.” Every time I posted an agnostic blog, I tensed, prepared for a coming firestorm of disapproval.

But it never happened, at least as far as I knew. Until last week.

After all of my nonfiction confessions, for some reason, it was my fictional piece that struck a nerve. At first, I was disturbed that my family was disturbed. Upsetting anyone had been far from my purpose in writing my story. If anything, I thought the story was comforting; I think the ability to laugh at death is the most powerful tonic against the fear of it that we have.

But my family apparently thought I had said “coy bastard” in a fit of meanness.

Meanness, no. I had certainly never meant to hurt anyone. But I have to admit there was a moment of catharsis. I have often felt frustrated by the unquestioning acceptance of the idea that God must remain remote and hidden, leaving people with the burden of “faith” to follow the command of believing, which goes against how our brains are wired to know things.

The faith command is terribly confusing; it leads people to wildly different conclusions which become “convictions.” Since the convictions contradict each other, many believers “solve” the conflict by censoring and repressing opposing views or attacking those who hold them.

If there is a God who has chosen to remove himself from the grasp of reason or sensory perception, then it has been a brutal decision. Considering the many irrational wars and executions over religion, there have been few things more divisive, and more hampering to empathy, love, and communication than the imperative to have “faith.”

No one ever explains why God needs to be so remote or why, whenever he performs a miracle, he will only do it in such a way that it can be explained in other ways. There is a tacit understanding that God needs to stay hidden in the spirit world, so that people are forced into the supreme virtue of “faith.” Why?

I answered that question in my own mind when I was 15. Early I had to deal with the loss of my belief in an afterlife. Death became a reality that I faced alone because I could not talk to anyone. It was frightening at first, but it made me love, even more, the life that I had.

Even though I share my writing now more than I used to, it is still the place I go to in order to say things that are hard to say in person.

There is no avoiding my non-theistic understanding of the world in my writing. The transition from belief to non-belief was formative and profound, which is why I refuse to leave it out of my writing in an effort not to disturb anyone.

I hate for my writing to have anything less than a positive effect on anyone, but life can be scary and being human is hard. I am going to say what I think about it. If my perspective grinds against what someone else thinks, I will accept that as the price of writing honestly. If I lose readers because of it, then I will have to lose them.

That being said, I have no particular want to convert family and friends to my way of thinking. At the same time, I want to be understood, and there seems to be no way to do that without explaining, at least to some degree, my train of thought.

To do that, I use words. I care about words, even naughty ones, because I care about writing.

That is one reason I have trouble with the conception of a God who is obsessed with censoring words and the thoughts that underly them; or that he cares more about belief and image control than love or the problem of human suffering.

I would expect so much more of a creator who spun gas into galaxies of stars, laid out the laws of the universe, and breathed life into inert atoms.

I would like to think that if an infinitely powerful and wise God did exist, he would be strong enough to meet scrutiny head-on and even welcome skepticism, secure in the conviction of his own reality.

It is hard for me to imagine that such a creator would take offense at my story in which I called him a “bad word,” especially if he, as an an omniscient being, knew billions of years in advance that I was going to write it.

I like to imagine that, instead of raging at me or being “hurt” by being called a coy bastard, he might instead laugh and say, “Yeah. I can see how you might think that. Would you like to talk about it over donuts and coffee?”

And if he ever did, I would probably say yes. I might even spring for the donuts, because I think that maybe I could love a God like that.