L.E. Henderson's Blog, page 22

How My Religious Doubts Inspired Wonder

Note: Though this piece stands alone, it follows and relates to a previous post, "How I Became an Agnostic." 

At 15 I no longer believed in God, but almost everything else in my life remained the same. 
No one knew and there was no one I could tell. I still went to church because my parents made me. The sun rose and set. My shaggy dog continued to greet me at the gate when I came home. My brother continued to joke and tease. But I was restless. My world and my perspective had been flipped upside down. 
I wanted to change something on the outside to reflect the changes within. So for the tenth grade I transferred from my strict religious school to a public school, which was considered a hothouse of iniquity by the school I was leaving behind. 
I no longer cared what my religious school thought. I had read the Bible through, taken religion seriously, thinking it was the meaning of life. It had disappointed me, fueled my depression, and confused me. Shedding my faith had ended a nightmarish three year depression and replaced it with uncertainty, leaving me feeling excited, alone, adrift, and strangely hopeful.
I also had regrets. I believed I had tragically wasted my whole life. It went beyond years of prayers wasted on a probably nonexistent deity. I had watched too much television, fretted too much over my hair, and spent too much time thinking about boys. 
I decided to let go of it all. I would study. Maybe someday I would do something important. I decided I would make an “A” in every subject. I would study each subject until I knew it well enough to teach it. I was a little worried though. I had always struggled with listening in class due to poor concentration.
I decided that this time I would ask the teachers questions after class if I had to, even if I felt shy and even if I annoyed them so much they hated me. I would sit on the front row and focus as much as my brain allowed. 
I was worried about my upcoming biology class though. I had sailed through my previous science classes with rote memorization as a “B” student. None of the teachers at my religious school seemed to expect anyone to understand science, but the grade of “A” was reserved for the enterprising individuals who tried. 
I was not one of them. I had always secretly suspected that none of the ponderous scientific terms made any sense, and that people only pretended to understand them. Now I was willing to reconsider.
On the first day of my biology class I sat on the front row, tense in my chair. My teacher instructed everyone to open their textbooks. When I opened mine to the first page I saw a definition that on the surface seemed like nothing special. “Biology  is the study of life.” They were simple words but I stared at them and could not look away. The study of life.
Why would anyone study life? And an answer came to me: I no longer knew what life was or what it meant. If God had not created it, what had? What was life? Where did it come from? 
I looked for answers in the reading assignments. Nowhere in the pages of my textbook was there any mention of a soul or the infallibility of the Bible. Instead, it said that living creatures were made of cells.
I knew something about cells. My textbook at my Christian school had mentioned them, but there they had seemed like nothing more than mechanical explanations for what God had created, a peek beneath the hood of a cosmic car. Now they seemed like a mystery. 
I soon learned that science had a way of dealing with mysteries, one that did not require unconditional belief: the scientific method. The scientific method was everything faith was not. It encouraged rather than forbade doubts. Instead of being in competition with observable reality, it sought to discover the universe as it was, not how people wanted it to be.
During the next few weeks, I heard an echo of it in a word I had never heard used at my religious school: critical thinking. For the first time I had a few teachers who encouraged students to question and challenge them. Since I was already questioning everything, I was a fan of this teaching method. But I was also stunned. Being encouraged to think critically was like being given official permission to rebel. 
At my previous school rebellion against authority, especially God, was considered the ultimate sin. Certain thoughts, especially religious doubt, were forbidden. It was hard for me to see how students could sit at their desks and look bored while hearing that any idea could be challenged. It was like ignoring an earthquake.
While fascinating, the class was demanding. The teacher taught from the book and gave standardized tests, which most of the class failed. Memorizing was not enough and I made a poor grade on the first test. 
After that I asked questions and looked up any terms I did not understand. When a new chapter was assigned, I found myself looking forward to reading it. I soon became thrilled that I was understanding photosynthesis, mitosis, and genetics, and I was constantly seeking personal frames of reference. 
My imagination became engaged. Mitosis, a form of cell division, mattered because without it I would not be alive to study it. The theory of evolution, which I had been taught to hate, provided an explanation of life that replaced the creationist view I had lost. 
Biology filled the void that religion had left behind, and I read it with the same reverence with which I had once read the Bible.
Most of the students and even the teacher were Christians and never seemed to see anything subversive about biology. I cannot imagine that anyone else in my class experienced biology the way I did that year.
That is because I had entered it feeling like an alien who had been dropped on a strange planet with no explanation of how I had gotten there. And though I had signed up for biology only because it was required, it became ground zero for my quest to understand the world as it really was.
I became the most interested and attentive student in the class. I went to after-school teacher-led study sessions even of I already understood the material. I read and reread and paraphrased every paragraph in my textbook. I even did some reading on my own. I began to break curves. My teacher loved me.
Aside from appreciating the “answers” science gave, I was enjoying the experience of being in an environment where uncertainty was allowed to exist, and where there was no rush to fill the most basic questions of existence with rigid answers. 
Science represented a mindset of openness that the absence of my belief had made possible. The question “why,” which I had lost in childhood, had returned. Science encouraged asking why, doubting, and discerning. And because biology encompassed everything alive, once it began to matter to me, everything else did too. 
My interest in biology seemed to expand outward to include the whole universe. I liked to imagine concentric circles radiating from my single point of view, up and past the stratosphere, sweeping past Pluto and beyond, and onto the edge of the known universe and back again.
I played with the idea of getting a Ph.D in biology though I never did. But I remember my tenth grade biology intro class with a kind of longing. I remember it as a time when I relearned how to be mystified. 
Some accuse science of stripping the world of “magic,” but nothing could be more wrong. The surest way to remove mystery and wonder from the world is remove the power to doubt. 
Studying tenth grade biology was more powerful, more ineffable, and even more “spiritual” than anything I had ever read in the Bible. This was true not just because of its answers but because of the questions it permitted asking.
And if I had continued to hold onto my religious beliefs, I would have never have known that because I never would have cared.

Do introverts have the secret ability to be the “life of the party"?

Many of my blogs have been silly and whimsical, and for that reason, someone recently told me that, if I could be the same person around strangers as I am when I write, I could be “the life of the party.”
Maybe long ago I could have been. When I was little, my dad used to call me “Bubbles.” Though considered shy at school, at home I was chronically excited. I could be silly and even rowdy at times. I had a friend who went into fits of laughter whenever I said the word "hot dog," which at the time was an expression of excitement. And I always had a project of some sort, a song I was making up on the piano, a drawing, or a “novel” I was working on. 
By adolescence, all my bubbles had popped. Maybe it was the bullying or only the dampening influence of hormones.
But I remember a distinct moment, when I was twelve years old, in which I became aware that my inner world had split off from the rest of me, become vibrantly distinct from my outer world. Maybe the bubbles had never popped but had only gone underground, where they felt safer from the perils of pins and ceilings.
If I had an “underground” it was my writing. While I presented a serious and polite facade to the world, much of my writing remained playful, and at times silly, even during times of depression.
And maybe that is why I have been accused of not being the “life of the party” when I could be. A couple of months ago, my visible discomfort at a group event prompted the comment. I had been mostly silent the whole time, focusing on my dinner plate and speaking only when addressed.
I was even less of a social butterfly than usual because right before the event I had been writing a short story. My accuser had dragged me away from my world of words and interrupted my characters in mid-sentence. 
According to all the handbooks, pulling an author away from writing-in-progress is a dangerous thing to do and should be attempted only in dire emergencies.
The group was composed of nice people; I might have enjoyed speaking to any one of them individually. However, when a group of strangers exceeds two people, a shift sometimes occurs.
Individuals merge into a kind of ad hoc “mini-culture,” with norms, rules and expectations. A group leader sometimes emerges, which is invariably an extrovert, and never me.
Once I was eating lunch with some teenage girls at school. They were all talking about times they had fallen in a public situation and gotten embarrassed. Each girl animatedly shared their own story, which culminated in sympathetic laughter. 
Soon, everyone had shared their falling experience and began to look at me since I had not “taken my turn.” Why was I not playing along? Someone even asked me: Did I not want to share a story about a time that I fell? 
I honestly told them I could not think of a story, but I could sense their disapproval. I had not told a story. I was not one of them. Why was I there? Even if I could have remembered I time that I had fallen, why tell it? It has no meaning for me.
The more a group outnumbers me, the more likely it is that arbitrary rules and expectations will spring up without warning. In order to be polite I want to go along, but at the same time I chafe at group pressure. Just let me eat my cookie.
Even if “rules” or impromptu public speaking events never arise, I am always uncomfortably aware of the possibility. I smile and nod and do my best to act happy, but I am always desperate to get away. When I finally do, I am euphoric. 
My relief is not necessarily due to disliking anyone. What grates most is the sense of protocol. Must act polite.  Must smile appropriately. Must rave over food an pretend to enjoy experience. Must listen. Must not reveal scandal that I would rather be home.
To make matters worse, I have trouble concentrating to listen in groups. When I am dining with someone one on one, the conversation has focus. There is a possibility of connecting with someone in a non-superficial way. In a group of five or more, multiple “light” conversations spring up. Which do I focus on? 
For example, at the group dinner, I tried to listen, to find order in the jumble of syllables being tossed around the table like juggling pins. Amid the chatter of several unrelated conversations, I tried to pick one and focus on it. 
That never works, not for long. My story characters, which I had been torn from, were making more sense than anyone. I “listened” to them instead. It was more fun and less confusing. 
Nevertheless, people who urge me to be "more confident" in group situations apparently assume that I am boiling over with appropriate things to say about the conversation-in-progress, but that, due to self-doubt, I am not brave enough to say them. 
They are wrong.
Other than writing stories in my head, what am I really thinking? Sometimes I am marveling at how comfortable everyone else seems to be with taking the floor and telling stories. But sometimes I notice details I can use in writing: mannerisms, gestures, the kinds of material I can use in writing fiction. Instead of comprehending the content of conversations, I notice tone, facial expressions, or the slope of a nose. 
If I broke up a conversation-in-progress about cell phone plans to discuss the slope of a nose, I doubt that my observation would be well-received. Better to observe noses quietly.
What else am I thinking? Sometimes my mind likes to play a game called, “What is the most awful, socially offensive thing I could do in this situation?” My mind does not play this game with my permission, and it quadruples my anxiety.
What if I repeated the last word that every speaker said? What if I insulted the waitress? What if I screamed “Allahu Akbar”? I tense, just in case I lose control of my body and it does those very things. It is as if my mind is exploring the limits of the situation and attempting to reach beyond them.
The feeling of being “limited” in groups can translate into detached behavior that seems antisocial. It is hard to explain to people that I can hate being in a group they are part of, but not hate them individually. But a lifetime of unpleasant group experiences, going back to childhood bullying, has reinforced my dislike of group situations.
I am told that to succeed as a writer, I must change; that writing is an industry for uninhibited, group-loving go-getters; and that it does not tolerate social anxiety, shyness or signs of “under-confidence.” What I heard was, "You must have ‘confidence,’ which you must earn by becoming more like everyone else.” But real confidence is self-acceptance, not apologetic conformity to a group norm.
What I really need is more anger. I have never had enough of it, but at times ire is the most sensible response. It would give me the energy to say: “Pratfall stories bore me to tears and I refuse to inflict them on anyone.” Or “I have nothing to add about the subject hairspray. The topic is ludicrous, dull, and beneath me. However, I find the slope of your nose amusing. There. I am confident enough for you?”
Who knows? Maybe my listeners would find my honesty charming. In any case, I reserve the right to eat my cookies in peace and withhold my thoughts whenever I choose.
Whatever “bubbles” may rise in my writing, they come from a silent and forbidden place, a sanctuary where I go to clear my mind from the confusing chatter of a crowd. The writing self that would make me the “life of the party” comes from a place of solitude.
And inside it, I have learned that I want to stay who I am.

Can Writing Change You?

There are writers who say writing is not therapy; that it may express but it will not change you. For me, that has been entirely untrue. Writing has cut a path through depressions and creative drought, spurred insights, and promoted struggles which led to solving real and pressing problems.
Some people meditate for similar reasons, but I have never gotten much out of traditional meditation. For me, writing does a better job. Writing is a place where I go to think alone, where petty concerns fall away, where routine loses its hold over me.
In personal journals, I even forget about being “good.” Their purpose is to help me “discover” what I really think, and sometimes I find that my thoughts, reflected back to me in print, are irrational. Writing is a mirror that exposes when I am not being honest with myself, when I am distorting details to support my anger, or when I am guilty of wishful thinking. 
Though my writing may be technically correct, sometimes something seems “off,” a glitch, a sort of mental hiccup. When I ask myself what is wrong, I realize that I am not thinking clearly. When I adjust my writing to correct my prejudices or unclear thinking, not only does my writing change; I change with it. 
Writing is more than an expression of existing ideas; it is a conversation, a process of discovery. For that reason, writing sometimes alters how I perceive my memories and myself.
A few years ago I wrote for the first time the story of my sixth grade bullying experience. In writing it, in my effort to think clearly about it, I moved beyond the sense of having been a passive victim. 
For too many years my memory had focused only on the details that supported my initial anger. Writing about it many years later altered my perspective, pushed me to realize what the experience was really like. For my story to be cohesive, for it to have context, for it to be honest, I had to probe my memories and when I did, I dug up lost details. 
I could see that there was a lot that was good about that year. My writing, for example, had flourished that year, perhaps because I needed so much to escape, to make sense of what was happening.
As I wrote about bullying, I remembered that, despite all the humiliation, I had had a friend at the end of the year, a new girl who was shy like me but that, at the time, I had taken for granted. I also realized that even though I was shocked into paralysis at the time, I learned from the experience and applied my insights later in ways that were far from passive.
Anyone can look back to a former time and reinterpret their memories, but for me writing focused the activity, and I was not exactly the same person after writing about bullying as I had been before I began. 
While writing supports my tendency to look inward, at other times it pushes me beyond my comfort zone. It has led me to make friends with people who are different from me, encouraged me to do things I was afraid to do, such as riding a Segway in the Bahamas down a rocky dirt path, or sharing my agnosticism, or telling what it feels like to be manic.
But no matter how far writing pushes me into the outside world, I always come back home again to to the writing itself. 
Beyond learning from the act of writing, I also learn from what I have already written. In 2002 when I had my second manic episode, I wrote through the whole experience and I still have my journals. They are hard for me to read. They reflect someone who is broken, who cannot compose a clear thought yet thinks she is being articulate. 
The journals are still fascinating to read. I remember something of what I felt when I was writing them and my inflated view of myself. But from a more sober perspective, I can see how I must have seemed to others.
After my mania ended, I fell into a depression, which I have mentioned many times in my blog and chronicled in my book, A Trail of Crumbs to Creative Freedom. During that time, writing seemed like my worst enemy and I desperately wanted to make friends with it again. Writing seemed punishing, remote, inaccessible. 
But in my struggle to reach it despite the emotional barriers, I reconnected with my creativity, found my perspective, and discovered a writing process that worked well for me.
Against my inclination, writing has also motivated me to look outside myself and observe people. When I started keeping a character observation notebook, I began to notice loud hats, unusual postures, facial tics, and styles of dress. 
I learned that people were stranger than I had ever realized.
Writing also pushed me to do work on freelancing websites like Elance. At first I was terrified to communicate with clients on-line, but in the end I emerged with greater confidence in my writing.
Writing is not, as some people may imagine, a passive, sedate, or safe endeavor. It has challenged and pushed me, even when I pushed back. And in my effort to find meaning in it all, writing is always there, providing a way to frame and reframe my experiences. 
Writing has changed me. And as long as I accept its challenges and never sink into a complacent rut, I cannot assume that it has finished changing me or that it will ever end as long as I am alive. If it ever does, I will stop doing it. 
And that is not an option.

Why I Have a Problem with the Word "Humility"

My social media friends have advised me that, in order to be a successful writer I must glow with self-confidence, yet maintain the appearance of monkish humility. 
This confuses me. But over the years I have noticed a lot of actresses and writers who carry themselves with an imperial bearing, yet are constantly trumpeting their humility to the world. The more awards they receive and the more effusive the praise, the lower their opinion of themselves seems to get.
This is also true of non-famous writers. I was doing research on query letters and a woman who had written a letter and gotten a positive response from an agent said that she was “deeply humbled," even though she was not even published yet.
What is going on? Maybe I am silly to take these kinds of statements literally but since I have been told that achieving a proper “balance” is vital to my literary career, I need to understand.
My thought when I hear these kinds of statements is, “I do not believe you,” or “If praise is diminishing your self-esteem, then your emotional wiring is faulty.” But I have to wonder if I am only skeptical because I lack the virtue that these successful professionals possess in such profusion.
When I receive praise, my experience is different. My mood soars. During that moment I feel anything but humble. My opinion of myself does not diminish with accolades. On the contrary, it temporarily rises, sometimes toward the point of grandiosity. Usually it snaps back into place by morning. 
But sometimes not.
I wonder: Is there something wrong with me? Should praise be lowering my self-esteem instead of elevating it? Why do I seem to lack the vital professional virtue that so many successful writers have?
Are they lying?
In that case I wonder: Is there something wrong with being proud of accomplishments you have worked hard to achieve so that you must: A) hide it from the world or B) claim that the opposite is true? 
Maybe it all comes down to not being rude or making anyone jealous. A close relative once told me, “Your writing is good, but don’t let it go to your head. I can say it, but I don’t want to ever hear you say it. As soon as you start to know it, I will stop saying it.” To be clear, this statement was not prompted by bragging. 
It was a warning, maybe said partly in jest, but it illustrates why I am confused about social messages regarding how people should or should not feel about themselves. 
The social rule against “knowing” if I am successful presents a problem for me. A big motivator for me to succeed, whether in grades or writing, has always been imagining how proud of myself I would feel if I accomplished my goals. It has never been the only motivator, but during times when things got difficult, it was my ego that ultimately stepped in and carried me to the end. What fun is it to struggle and work hard to be good at something if I am not allowed to ever know it?
True, some people who brag constantly, take no interest in others, and only talk about themselves can be tedious company. But I wonder if that is a real sign of people liking themselves, or only of a need to bolster themselves from a position of insecurity. 
If so, is the solution for that a need to like themselves less?
To complicate everything, people are constantly told that they need confidence if they want to succeed in a competitive job market. In an interview situation, applicants are supposed to say only good things about themselves, to make a strong impression: “I am active, driven, hard-working, and a team player.”
Weaknesses should be underemphasized and admitted only to convey to the employer “positive” traits such as, “Sometimes I am just too focused on my work; I become so driven I forget to stop and smell the roses,” or “I am a terrible perfectionist.”
In a competitive marketplace, most seem to agree that people need confidence to succeed. Books are written on how to have more of it. Some parents tell children, “If you don’t like yourself, no one else will either” and they discourage children from being shy. I was told, "If you have something you want to say, speak up. Show that you think a lot of yourself.”
So which is it? I cannot be supremely confident and supremely humble both. Where is this “balance” I have been told that I need? And is it something that can be achieved honestly or can it only be feigned?
As usual, I have had to go inside my head to find an answer. What I remember is a time during my childhood when I disliked myself. I had been bullied relentlessly, and I was chronically confused about what made people like other people.
One day when I was 15 years old, I made a decision: I was going to like myself unconditionally, whether anyone else did or not. I studied and made high grades, and my accomplishments supported my belief in myself. My decision turned out to be a good one. 
I was able to compare, side by side, how it felt to not like myself and how it felt to like myself. By far, I preferred the latter. If I am going spend 24 hours a day with myself, my whole life, and never get a break, it is a good thing if I enjoy my company.
Since then, I have disliked the word "humility." It seemed to mean that I should push my opinion of myself back down to where it was before my adolescent resolution.
Plus, the word at my strict religious school meant making yourself small and helpless in order to please God, a way to say, “I am nothing. I deserve nothing.” After I became agnostic, this kind of humility seemed not virtuous, but masochistic.
I had a religious grandmother who was devoutly humble. Once when she visited, she was deciding which peach to take from a bowl on the dining counter. She withdrew the sickliest-looking  peach, worm-ravaged, scrawny, and bruised. “This peach doesn’t look so good,” she frowned. “I guess I’ll take this one.”
Even when I was a believer, her reasoning seemed strange to me. But if I am going to reject the whole idea of humility, maybe I need a more thorough understanding of what it really is.
There is a sense in which the word humility is used that makes me want to like the word. An example is the humility of a scientist who is willing to accept the findings of an experiment, even if it means admitting his favorite hypothesis is wrong. Or a willingness to put away the comfort of false “certainty” and allow unanswered questions to exist rather than trying to force answers.
The universe is always presenting new challenges to human self-importance, such as the inconceivable number of “suns” in the universe or the evidence that human existence is not the center of everything as was once thought.
But the kind of humility I was taught to believe in has little to do with the kind I just described. And, from what I have observed, the kinds of people who practice one are not the same kinds of people who practice the other. 
But how does any of this apply to writers? Maybe humility is what Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Franklin described as his epiphany that he was not “special.” By this he meant, not that he was not unique or that he did not matter, but that uniqueness is not unique, and that his point of view was not the only one that was compelling.
Sometimes when I write I have a sense that this is true. It is not a low self-esteem. I still like myself. 
But I become aware that I am only one writer, and that I will never be able to encompass the whole of human experience. Every one of my readers know and have experienced things I never will. The world is full of people, billions of them, from varied backgrounds. But anything I write is from only one perspective; my point of view really is only a point.
But a reader with a drastically different background from my own is sometimes able to read my blog and find something in it that they can relate to. This astounds me. And because my knowledge and experience are so limited, I find myself far more impressed with the power of language than I am with my skill.
Whenever this happens I am sometimes tempted to reach for that word: humility. But I always hold back. 
And I think: That word is awful. I wish there was a better one.

How I Became an Agnostic

At what point do you say, “Everything I have been taught is a lie, and the framework I have been given to make sense of my life, the world, and my place in it, is wrong?” And what does it take for that to happen?
For me it happened when I was 15. And it took a lot.
I grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist family in a SC town where anyone who did not exude evil was assumed to be a Christian. I was taught to fear atheists, which was easy to do, since I had never met any. But from the stories I was told, I gathered that they were cruel unhappy people with contempt for morality and a hatred of life. 
To me they were villains on par with “The Joker” on Batman, or worse. It was hard for me to believe such people existed.
Examples of atheists I was given were murderous villains like Stalin, and Christian literature was full of saintly heroes who stood up to the kinds of tyrants who tortured Christians for their beliefs. I was always inspired by those heroes, who were always clear victims and responded to ill treatment with forgiveness, love, and courage.
In the seventh grade, I enrolled in a strict fundamentalist Christian school where the first words in my physical science textbook were: “The Bible is the infallible word of God.” I learned a lot of other interesting things that year such as: it is a sin for girls to wear jeans; rock music is evil; and Care Bears are Satanic.”
At first I accepted most of what I was told, entranced by the novelty. The church I went to as a child let you wear jeans to church at night and had never preached against rock music. Apparently, it had been unaware of the threats to Christianity and common decency that besieged the devout on every side. 
I immersed myself in religion that year; prayed often; read the Bible all the way through; filled my head with Bible verses which I memorized. I dreamed of one day becoming one of the brave saints in the books I read, like Corrie Ten Boom, who risked her life to hide oppressed Jews during the Holocaust.
It was my full-scale immersion in my faith ultimately led to its downfall; that and a severe depression that struck as soon as I turned 13. Having bipolar disorder, I have experienced many depressions throughout my life. Nothing has ever come close to the three year nightmare that began when I was 13. 
My teachers did not help matters. They taught that in heaven all Christians would have their lives reviewed by God on a giant celestial screen, and that Christians who lived ungodly lives or had forbidden thoughts would weep with remorse, even though they would be spared from hell. 
I was a self-conscious 13 year old girl who was terrified to even present a book report to the class. The idea of my thoughts being on display before the world was horrifying.
I became paranoid about having “wrong” thoughts, which led to a kind of mental Turrets syndrome in which my mind furiously conjured the most depraved thoughts it was capable of having. I imagined God staring down at me in stern disapproval. I prayed for the offending thoughts to go away and got no results. 
I thought God was ignoring my prayers because he hated me for having "wrong" thoughts or that he was shocked by them. My shame was unbearable. For the first and only time in my life, I considered suicide.
I had nightmares and woke up in cold sweats, gasping. I lost my appetite and had to go to a psychiatrist because my dad was worried I had anorexia. As I fell asleep at night I envisioned how it would feel to be engulfed by the flames. I thought about how excruciating it was to touch a hot stove, even for a second. 
I did not necessarily think I was going to hell. But the horror that most of humanity was going there had worked itself inside me. I could almost feel the burn working its way beneath my skin. No hope, no escape, forever. And a God unwilling to reconsider, deaf to all screams and pleas for mercy.
Desperate for understanding, I was reading the Bible through and instead of finding the comfort many promised, I became more and more disturbed. The picture of God that materialized from my reading was not the loving God I had been taught to envision. 
I was particularly disturbed by a passage that said God pre-selects which people will become saved, removing free will from the picture entirely.
My beliefs ruptured. The ground buckled. The face of God warped. And no one else seemed to be having my problem.
Lost, unbalanced, desperate, I turned to the only thing that seemed stable: reason. For the first time, I began to question what I had been taught. The parts of the Bible that contradicted each other, which I had tried not to think about, now came into light. 
This finally led to my questioning the cornerstone of my belief system: faith. Why was it a virtue? Why did God care about it so much? Why did he not like reason, if he had created brains capable of using it?
What remained of the believer in me was stunned by the thoughts I was having. The stories I was fed always portrayed atheists as people who secretly suspected God existed but who had nefarious ulterior motives for doubting him: foolish arrogance; a dislike for following rules; addiction to cruelty; or a disdain for all things good.
The word "atheist" had a hard edge, and I did not want to become cruel, arrogant, or hostile. In the end, the summer after I completed the ninth grade, I became an agnostic, even though I had never heard the word. 
I reasoned that if there was a God, there was no way to know it, since belief rested on faith. I was convinced that faith was not knowledge. If it was, why did the faith-based revelations of all religions not agree?
Considering that, how could a fair God, if he existed, expect baseless belief and damn someone to eternal torture for not having it? Especially when reason was the best tool people had to discern truth from non-truth. Within a week after asking this question, I encountered the word “agnostic” and made it my own.
My depression had been deeply intermeshed with my religious confusion. Now it lifted. The world became new and frightening and full of mystery. The biggest questions no longer had easy answers. The world had become too fascinating for me to be depressed. I felt like I had been dropped on an alien planet with no knowledge of how I had gotten there. I liked the feeling.
I transferred to a public school in the tenth grade. Taking a biology class, I became excited about science, which celebrated reason and gave me a way to rebuild my understanding of the world.
I kept my doubts a secret. I went to church, wrapping myself in layers of isolation. The idea of telling anyone was unthinkable.
I was cursed with a kind of double vision. I could see myself from within, and I knew that I had done what I had to do to preserve my mind and sanity. But I also remembered how nonbelievers like me had looked through my Christian lens.
There would be no point in trying to explain my new insights to my family, because it would be like trying to trying to argue with my old self. Years later, after I revealed my doubts, I learned that this was true. 
When I had my manic episode my senior year of high school, I admitted my skepticism to my parents. After it was all over, I confirmed to them that my doubts, confessed in a state of lowered inhibitions, were real.
My parents were baffled; saddened; disappointed. And now, decades later, they still are.
As long as I avoid the topic of religion, I  get along with them. On some level I think they understand that I am the person they have always known, yet they still worry that I am playing a dangerous game with my eternal fate.
I love my family and appreciate their many admirable qualities, their kindness; their humor; and their nonreligious insights. 
But there will always be an unspoken tension and distance between me and them. There is no way to reverse what I understand, and I would not want to if I could. And there is no way for them to seriously consider my point of view without putting their own faith in jeopardy.
Since agreement seems to be impossible, I can still reach across the barrier against understanding by loving them, and I do love them, as much as I always have.
But I sometimes have trouble understanding how so many people can continue to hold onto beliefs that are based on a text full of inconsistencies; or how they cannot see that faith is a way that religion protects itself from scrutiny. I wonder how all of my friends I grew up with continue to hold onto their beliefs, while mine did not survive my adolescence.
But then I ask: At what point does anyone drop a framework for viewing the world that has been built over a lifetime; or ask questions that could ultimately lead to alienation from family and friends? At what point does anyone decide to give up the promise of an afterlife in exchange for uncertainty? What does it take for that to happen? And then I remember: 
For me, it took a lot.

What Does it Mean to be a Real Writer?

When I was a kid, I was dazzled by writers and obsessed with becoming one. I attributed all sorts of glowing qualities to them. They were sensitive, intelligent people who had special insights. They possessed uncommon empathy. They knew how to sketch minds and create worlds.
When I got into high school I began to read the writing magazines and I learned a different definition: a writer was someone who knew how to make publishers like them. Of course, you had to have skill and some kind of magical spark, but they were only important as a way to please the publishers.
You did not even have to read the magazines to understand this. On the cover of almost every issue were the words “Get Published Now.” Of course, there were variations: there was “Get Published in Three Easy Steps," "What Publishers Want," or “Get Published: Learn the Top Five Things Editors Hate.”
I wanted to be happy that I had discovered the magazines. If you wanted to be a professional at anything, you had to have a magazine subscription for it, or you would forever be a dilettante.
But instead of being thrilled with my induction into industry knowledge, I always felt depressed when I read the magazines. The definition of a writer as someone who could give publishers what they wanted was so far removed from the original impulses that made me want to write.
I tried to reconcile the two definitions in my mind. Maybe Real Writers were everything I had once thought: empathetic, sensitive, kind, and talented. But the measure of being a Real Writer was how much the publishers liked you. 
It was easy to latch onto this idea, because I had spent most of my life being blocked. I was not confident in my creativity. But even though I disliked my new definition of a writer, it was nice to know there was a definite measure of talent, a way to know I had arrived: getting published.
After I graduated from college, I spent a year sending my stories and essays to magazines and ended up with a bulging envelope full of form rejection letters. I finally did get published, but overall the experiment was discouraging.
I read widely and scanned the bookstore shelves in search for the magic ingredient that made publishers like you, the rows of bestsellers with their golden award stickers and effusive blurbs of praise.
But as this years progressed, I began to notice something else. A lot of books were not about the writing at all. The books were objects like Christmas ornaments wrapped in words to be sold. There were “gift books” with a single line of wisdom on each page. There were ghost-written books about celebrities, in which case, the writing was not the product; the celebrity was.
And there were whole aisles dedicated to belief confirmation. There were books on spiritual healing, astrology, or the magic of crystals. For every political point of view, there was a book to validate it. For every religious persuasion there were books to tell the reader why they were right and everyone else wrong.
And there were the books that indulged wishful thinking: how to lose 50 pounds a month or become spiritually fulfilled or beat depression with aromatherapy or get someone to fall in love with you. 
What I realized was that selling books had little to do with writing. What mattered was the promise of a reward inside. Sometimes the reward was the depth of the writing, the introduction of an unusual point of view, or a story well told. 
But sometimes the reward was telling people what they wanted to hear. 
All of these books were published. But none of the books represented any ideal I had ever had of being a writer. If these writers had been published, it meant that publication could not be the ideal I cared about.
Every illusion about real writers I had ever had evaporated, and I began to see more things I had missed before. I noticed how even in fiction, popular but dubious themes were dressed up in a neat editorial package to seem valid.
There was no single, ideal writer profile. Being a published professional was not the grand achievement I had once thought.
And maybe being a writer was not either. Maybe a writer was just anyone who wrote. Beyond assembling letters into sentences, there seemed to be no common tie.
There were brilliant writers and honest writers. There were irrational, pandering, and dishonest writers. There were superficial writers and thoughtful writers. There were, it seemed, as many kinds of writers as there were people. Even mass-murdering tyrants, such as romance novelist Saddam Hussein, could be writers. And they had all been what most considered to be the true definition of a real writer: they had been published.
The more I learned about “real writers,” the less I wanted to become one. I gave up trying to become anything and I began to write.
Meanwhile, I stopped reading the magazines that said “Get Published Now” or “Three Surefire Ways to Impress an Editor.” 
I was more confident in my writing by that time. I had self-published a novel in 2002, entering the first wave of the self-publishing revolution that began around the turn of the millennium. 
But I had never marketed it much or sold many copies. I had longed for the authenticating stamp of traditional publishing.
Now, whenever I looked over the shelves of books on astrology and fad diets, I found myself without a definition of a real writer, other than the austere one: a writer is someone who writes. From the classics I loved to the trolls who prowled the internet to bully other writers, anyone who could use the alphabet was now a writer.
I told myself it did not matter. What mattered was only that I was doing what I loved. I was writing. I was no longer blocked. Writing was about process, not identity.
I started my blog. Writing in it was an awesome experience because for the first time, I had an audience to react to what I wrote, and that made me all the more motivated to do it well. 
Beyond that, there was no one I had to imitate. I could share my thoughts about the world as I saw it. I could fill in the gaps I thought were lacking in the books I read, the things which I had never seen expressed anywhere.
And as I wrote I continued to ask myself the question, “What is a writer?” I knew there was no set-in-stone definition that everyone would agree upon. Besides, it seemed less important that I define a writer than to decide what kind of writer I wanted to be.
I tried to remember all the writers I loved and why I liked them. I thought about Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, Ray Bradbury, and Carl Sagan. And, beyond their skill and talent, the writers I most admired all had one thing in common: they were honest. 
They said the things I was afraid to say. Many risked ridicule, opposition, or censorship in order to mirror life as they honestly saw it. The best fiction writers might have been “making up stories,” but their details felt authentic, because they were keen observers who were willing to say what they saw, and not what they were supposed to see.
The product they offered was not belief confirmation or celebrity gossip or thrills or the pseudo-inspiration of “gift books,” but something more valuable.  
I had been wrong to try to determine who writers were as a group and be like them: to create a mold and slip myself inside; or conform to a checklist of traits that editors liked. 
I could make choices. 
And I thought the description from my childhood was not a bad one: people with empathy who could sketch minds and create worlds. I liked that. I added a few traits. The writers I most admired were purveyors of honesty. Though they might have never been able to perfectly convey life exactly as they saw it, they worked toward that end, using all the skills and talent that they had. 
For me "Real Writers," the ones that had eased my loneliness in high school, were those who were skilled at being honest. The more skilled they were and the clearer their thoughts, the more honest they could be.
Like most ideals, mine may be ones to strive for but never completely reach. Or I may meet them, but not all of the time.
But it is a new world. And there is nothing to stop me from trying.

The Intrinsic Value of Twitter

No way was I doing Twitter. Twitter was a spam-fest. A cross-hatched mess. It went against my whole philosophy. Except…
“Reddit killed your blog,” my husband said. “Why would you not want to rebuild your readership? It might help you promote your new novel.”
The words “killed your blog” cut deep, though they were only partly true. The media hub Reddit had sent my blog views into the stratosphere for a short time. Each post had attracted thousands of views and heaps of praise. 
Reveling in my 15 minutes of fame, I had almost forgotten the original purpose of my blog: to sell my books; to build interest in my new but, as yet, unpublished novel. 
The fun ended abruptly. I was expelled from Reddit for posting only my own work, an unwritten crime I had not known about, and now only had about 20 regular readers for my blog, instead of the thousands per post I was used to.  “Ten tweets a day, more is better,” my social media friends advised. “If you want to build a platform and impress an agent to publish your novel, and get people reading your blog again, you need to tweet, tons of tweets, every day.”
Not fair. Writing was what I loved, and how I wanted to spend most of my time. Real writing, not spam. If I had any talent for advertising, I would have gone into sales. Whatever happened to writers writing? 
Or – for that matter –  the days when “social media” was just “media?” 
But I did miss the Reddit traffic, the encouragement, the swooning bliss of being told I had inspired readers. I took a cautious peek at my Twitter feed, composed of about 20 people, from an account I had started a couple of years back. 
I found a jumbled mess of mental jetsam crammed with pound symbols, nothing like the idealistic descriptions of Twitter as “micro-blogging,” in which writers who had things to say said them. 
As I often do when feeling snarky, I wrote a comic strip in my head: “Young Shakespeare in the year 2013.” It went like this: 
Shakespeare at eight: “But Mum! I want to write couplets and quatrains about the majesty of love, the power of desire, and the doleful brevity of life.” 
Mother: “Eat your cabbage and shush! What do you think writing is, a game of tiddlywinks? Do you want to be a no-account loser all your life? You do your Twitter, and you do your Twitter now! I want to see hashtags. Mountains of hashtags!”
“I hate Twitter,” I complained to my husband.
“Everyone hates Twitter,” he said.
“Then why does anyone do it?”
He took a deep breath. “Twitter is meaningless. A video game, really. But if you have lots of followers, that will impress agents who think Twitter means something.”
It seemed wrong, all wrong. I had spent most of my life getting to the point where I loved to write and no longer had to force myself to do it. I wanted to write novels.
But my blog readership was standing still. I spent as much as 8 hours on some posts, sometimes more, to get them right. I wanted to share them. My expulsion from Reddit made me feel like I had been exiled to a remote and uninhabited island. 
I needed a boat, a raft, a hot air balloon. Something. But, for now, there was Twitter. Even if it was only driftwood.
Okay. I would do it. But if Twitter was going to take time away from my writing, I had to first find its intrinsic value.
I was all about intrinsic value. Whenever I had been really successful at anything, it was because I found a way to enjoy doing it. In school I could make an A in a subject only if I became genuinely interested in it. Nothing was boring. I only had to find a personal frame of reference, a connection to make it relevant.
But what was relevant about Twitter? I looked at my Twitter feed again, the nonsensical fragments, along with ads for breast enlargement supplements and promises of “spiritual healing.” Some tweets were nothing but hashtags. Twitter appeared to be a strike against my “nothing is boring” theory. 
After a long struggle, I made a decision. I would treat tweeting as a writing challenge, as an exercise in brevity. Succinctness was a good writing habit in both poetry and prose, yielding bromides such as “brevity is the soul of wit.” 
Rather than erect virtual billboards, I would treat Twitter as a mini-journal. I would record observations: how the rain puddles looked outside my window, musings, dreams, wishes, or observations of absurdity.
I began filling the small boxes of space, carefully editing my text and rearranging words. At first, no one responded, my thoughts dissipating in the airless void of cyberspace. But that was okay. I was writing. I was having fun. Which meant that, intrinsically at least, Twitter was not a waste of time. 
Meanwhile, I followed scores of people. I got addicted to the sound of my Android phone chirping with follow-backs. Within 4 weeks I had more than 1000 followers. A chorus of exclamations erupted from my social media friends: “Crazy, unheard of, amazing.”
Even my husband was impressed with how quickly I was gaining followers. However, he insisted that my success had nothing to do with me.  “You’re doing so well because you actually listened to the social media advice and followed it. Not many people do.”
I wanted to think my success was due to my clever tweets or captivating bio – or at the very least, my use of coherent sentences. But a lot of people who wrote gibberish had legions of followers. And Twitter is crawling with people who “sell” followers. It would be unwise to base my self-worth on Twitter stats. 
I experimented with hashtags and hated how they disrupted the flow of text. I dropped them. I began getting responses to my tweets. I soared when I got “favorites” and retweets. Basking in a warm glow of validation, I had to remind myself that I was only collecting names for an agent so I could publish my novel. 
But I still thought there had to be more to Twitter than was evident at first glance, some intrinsic meaning beneath the chatter, so I sometimes looked at my followers to see who they were.
It was hard to see real people behind the list of names. When I did I was rarely impressed. Most tweets were boastful, scheming, incoherent, pornographic, trite, or pious.
But when intelligent followers began to communicate with me, I began to appreciate that behind the names were real people. I began to make a few friends. 
And an awesome discovery: Twitter was an oasis for introverts, a place where they could congregate and discuss meaningful things, and share their dislike of being social in a judgmental, extroverted world. My mega-talented friends Carrie Rubin and Dyane Harwood have both blogged about being introverted. Reading their posts, I felt wonderfully validated and understood.
It was a revelation. In the real world introverts sometimes avoid each other for the same reasons extroverts avoid them: because introverts wrongly judge each other as cold and unapproachable. 
But the friends I have met online were thoughtful, extraordinarily talented, and interesting. I started telling anyone who would listen how awesome my Twitter friends were. I read their blogs and books, and I was happy.
I even started letting others on my Twitter page. When I first went on Twitter, I rarely retweeted. But now I started to retweet what others had written that deserved to be read. 
I thought I had found it, the intrinsic value of Twitter: other introverts (i.e. sensible, charming people with interesting things to say).
But I have not forgotten my original goal. In the 8 months since I began tweeting, I now have over 10 thousand followers, which has slightly increased my blog traffic and led to a few sales of my self-published books.
I am about to start sending out my query letters for my novel this week. Maybe the number of Twitter followers, along with almost 40 thousand blog views, will capture the attention of an agent. But I am in no hurry to abandon Twitter. 
Twitter is not boring after all. Beneath the rippling surface of mental effluvia are people with dreams, personal histories, memories, and feelings which all converged to a point that led them to Twitter. 
That is why, despite all the insanity, digital graffiti, porn, and intellectual snake oil, Twitter is rewarding. Intrinsically rewarding. 
And I am glad I gave it a chance.

Writing Like Hemingway for Sweatshop Wages and Loving It

For a writer, being a professional is considered the highest distinction. If someone is paid, and especially if he is published traditionally, well, he must be really good.

And if paid writers are the best, then it is easy to assume that those who write only for the love of it are the worst. This assumption is built into the word “amateur,” which means “dabbler.” Yet the word amateur originates from the Latin word “amare,” meaning “to love.”

Does that mean that doing something “only” for the love of it is likely to be frivolous, inept, or casual?

Many, if not most, professional writers began writing because they loved doing it. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov began his career as a hobbyist. He began writing stories on his own, and although he eventually made a career of writing, his love for it endured throughout his life, making him one of the most prolific writers in the world.

Ray Bradbury loved writing so much that, near the end of his career, he proclaimed that he had never worked in his life.

When I was in college, I was speechless with admiration for these writers. So many professional writers were cynical about writing, calling it “torture” or a form of insanity.

It seemed that a rite of passage for all writers was to suffer horribly until they reached a jaded dislike for the profession they had chosen. But here were two authors who managed to get paid for their writing while retaining the passion of a hobbyist.

Unlikely many writers, they avoided drug abuse and alcoholism. For them writing was euphoric. They were “amateurs” in the original sense of the word: as those who love what they do. But they were also excellent writers.

I wanted to be a writer like that. I wanted to have a career in writing and be paid, yet not hate writing. How did they do it?

Some professionals advise beginners to forget about having fun. Writing, they say, is grueling labor analogous to coal mining. They insist that the promise of a paycheck, not love of writing, produces excellence.

My experience has led me to a different perspective. Until a couple of years ago, I had never been paid much for my writing, aside from a published article on girls in video games.

Most all of the writing I had done was for myself, because I loved doing it. I wanted to be paid, but I was willing to write for the intrinsic reward of creating. I could not see myself ever being happy without writing.

By the time I started to freelance, I had recently recovered from a three year period of depression and block, in which I was fully convinced I could never enjoy writing again. When I rediscovered how to enjoy writing, my ability to write freely became my touchstone for happiness. I distilled my new understanding into a simple formulation: Writing equals happiness. Not writing equals unhappiness.

Based on these tenets, I could have written for myself forever. But due to a rocky financial situation a couple of years ago, I ventured into the world of on-line freelancing, using websites where jobs were posted and anyone could bid on them. One of the most popular websites for this is Elance.

Clients who turn to Elance usually have big dreams and low budgets. It is a virtual flea market where the rule is that performance will match pay. If a client pays 20 dollars for 50 pages of text, they can expect drivel or plagiarism.

Most jobs pay higher but Elance is no path to wealth. Still, writers with impressive-sounding credentials compete hard for Elance jobs, so even bad jobs are hard to get. Thus, it is always tempting to bid low in order to get a response at all. And it is hard to know what to bid, because until you land a job and get into it, you cannot know what all is involved.

I landed a job from an estate attorney. I bid around 130.00 to write some text on his website. My bid turned out to be way too low, even though I only had to write part of the web text. The client had selected two other contractors to handle different aspects of estate law.

Still, I was responsible for about 15 pages of densely technical text that I was supposed to make “accessible” to everyone. The lawyer sent me reams of source material about trusts. It took time to learn the material. That was not so bad. I welcomed the opportunity to learn something new. I began the writing, and when the lawyer asked to see my progress, he was impressed with my work.

But I was spending too many hours on it. Per hour my wages would have been better suited to a sweat shop.

Was I allowing myself to be exploited? The “sane” thing to do seemed to be to rush through the project and match my work to meet the low pay. But I was not used to thinking that way, and did not want to start.

The idea of allowing myself to write drivel depressed me. I was convinced that it would hurt me more than being underpaid.

I was used to blogging for free, and I had never minded. I was so happy that I could write at all that I even welcomed the painstaking revision at the end. I would spend however long I needed to get my point across in exactly the way that I imagined it.

But now that I was getting paid, the rules of the game had changed, and the new rules upset me. Putting them out of my mind, I slipped into my blogging mode. I became obsessed with seeing if I could write in the authoritative voice of an attorney while making the abstract content as interesting as possible.

When my husband saw how much time I was devoting to the project, he shook his head. “This lawyer is getting $1000.00 worth of work for $130.00,” he said. “He is paying you practically nothing, and getting Hemingway to write his text for him.”

Though flattered about the Hemingway part, I could not help but feel depressed when he said that, but I was almost done. Besides, if I wrote badly, I would not enjoy the writing. As long as I did my best, I would not be bored and I would be increasing my skills. Writing garbage would have been the real work.

I modified my original tenet of “Writing equals happiness” to “Writing well equals happiness.”

Aside from accepting a task created by someone else, I reached a point where I was no longer writing for my client but for myself. When communicating with him online, I was aware of his expectations and was friendly. But when I sat down with the text, I saw only words. And I loved words.

When I finally turned it the finished product, the lawyer applauded my work and thought I had gone out of my way just to please him. “The voice sounds just like me,” he said. I was paid and thought I would never hear from him again.

But months later the lawyer invited me to bid on a new job. He said that, on the previous job, my contribution was the best. The goal was to rewrite, in my own style, all of the web text written for the last job by the other two contractors.

I still needed money so I accepted his invitation but bid higher. The lawyer accepted my proposal and sent me the text written by the other contractors.

When I looked at the text, I was stunned. The text was written in the dull, self-conscious style of a fifth grade book report. The text was full of inaccuracies, and some of it was lifted directly from the source material. The writers clearly had no interest in the content and saw no relevance in it that they could communicate to the readers.

I went on the Elance website to see who these awful writers were. They both had five star ratings and their credentials were glowingly impressive. They had both been paid over twice what I had bid.

Their writing was a revelation. The contractors either lacked the skills they boasted or they had done what I had not: scaled down the quality of their work to match the low pay.

Though I took responsibility for underbidding, I was annoyed. I wished I had known about the awful writing the other contractors had produced before I bid for the new job; I would have bid much higher.

I had always dreamed of being paid for my writing. I had never expected pressure to scale down my efforts to match payment. Apparently the game was to bid as high as possible while working as little as I could. But there was no way to do that without losing the aesthetic rewards of writing that made me love doing it.

The other contractors fit the popular definition of the word “amateurish,” as meaning inept and careless, but they were not the kind of amateurs who loved writing. I thought that, while they had spent less time on their work, I had enjoyed mine more. Yet the pay discrepancy, though my fault, created a feeling of unfairness.

It would be reaching to say that being paid hurts writing. After all, it was the inadequacy of the pay that created the pressure to under-perform. If I had been paid higher, maybe there would have been no conflict.

But even highly paid writers are routinely pressured to make artistic compromises that leech quality from writing. Writing well and making money are two entirely separate aims. They do not always converge.

I still look to my heroes Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury as beacons, as writers who made careers of writing but were still mainly driven by their love for the art of writing. Their motivation went beyond the shallow curiosity that the word “amateur” suggests, the “love” that pursues an art only out of boredom, as a way to pass the time.

But in my opinion, the love of a dabbler is no love at all. Someone who loves an art will go to any length to learn everything about it and strive for mastery, whether money is present or not. But for most writers, including me, making money is a practical necessity.

For that reason, I am always asking myself ironic questions such as: How can I get paid for writing and still love it? How can I be a professional yet retain the passion of an amateur?

How can I write for money, and still be happy?

Conclusion of "The Atavist" Part 3

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Previous Paragraph:
Maxwell was standing, legs apart and shoulders hunched, as the nurse headed toward the bassinet with her needle primed. He marched toward the bassinet until the stage hand blocked his progress. Max stopped, turned his head, and set his gaze on the laddered chair in the front of the stage, the one where Lenny sat.
“Wait.” Max strolled back to his seat beside Lenny. “I answered your questions. Now I have a few for you.”
“Questions?” Lenny turned toward Max with an amused expression. “Why of course. Hold off a moment Nurse. Our recently exhumed artifact is curious about us.” He chuckled and stared down at Max. “Curiosity is celebrated here. But time is running out, so ask quickly.”
Max circled the chair slowly as he spoke. “How can you endure a life so vacant, you are compelled to jab a baby with needles to distract yourselves from it? How can you endure each other? How can you love? How can you bondover your mutual boredom?”
“Fair questions,” Lenny frowned. “Indeed, the ennui epidemic is a terrible scourge. I am afraid I have no good answers for you, other than the spectacle of Baby Josie and the warmth her beautiful tears has brought into our lives. What else do you wonder?”
“I wonder why your intelligence never made you wise or good, and why you thought you knew so much, you stopped asking questions. I wonder why you are wasting your immortality on silly talk shows. And I wonder,” he looked down, “how such an advanced species could build such a poorly designed chair,” Maxwell said. He rattled one of the wooden supports. “And,” Maxwell lowered his voice, “I wonder if you are as immortal as you say.” Max grabbed hold of two of the legs that supported the tall chair and, leaning forward, he shoved them and the chair toward the audience.
“Hey, wait, no,” Lenny said. “Max. This is highly inappropriate.” The chair wobbled and bucked as it slid and screeched along the stage, with Max moving one side forward, then the other. It scratched the stage with the resistance of wood against wood, and squeaked in places as Max fought its weight. Max stood back, then leaned in and pushed the full force of his heft against the chair.
The chair went over. As it toppled, Lenny flung out his arms in unbalanced circles and tumbled out of his seat into the crowd, a complex blur of flailing limbs, knocking against one of the chairs in the audience.
The chair that Lenny fell on toppled too, and the one behind it teetered and collapsed, setting off a magnificent clattering procession of chairs knocking over chairs. A chorus of gasps and screams erupted. Movement passed through the audience in a great spiraling wave that was almost beautiful.
But Max did not stay to see. He grabbed his office chair by an arm rest and, pushing it, rolled it toward the back of the stage. Behind him the stage hand and nurse were still staring, dazed, at the debacle, but when the stage hand saw where Max was headed, he unfroze and his eyes became wide.
The stage hand put his massive bulk between Max and the bassinet, and as Max went forward, the man grabbed Max by his shirt.
Max wrenched away, lifted his chair, pulled it back, and swung it as hard as he could at the stage hand, knocking him backward and into the gasping nurse. The stage hand did not cry out but, struggling to regain balance, stared at Max in amazement.
Before the stage hand could fully recover his senses, Max gathered the bundle of baby from the bassinet, her weight warm and soft. He pulled her close against his chest as her fists latched onto his shirt.
“Come on,” he whispered as he headed toward the door. “No more needles.” The down of her hair felt soft against his chin.
The baby babbled as he moved behind the curtain toward the doors in the dressing room that led outside. As he made his way into the alien streets he could hear, behind him, a terrified cry, “The atavist is gone!”
In the darkness Max hurried as fast as he could without dropping Josie. There were no streetlights to guide him, but the full moon cast a silvery haze into the mist. The white, luminous particles reminded him of falling snow.
 As he ran, he remembered the day he lost his trail and could imagine that his new life had picked up where his old one left off. Once more, he had to find a way to safety. But this time he would not fail. Before, he had no purpose, no path.
But he was on a road this time, and roads led places, even dark ones.
He knew there would be many more to cross. But he would cross them, all of them, no matter how dark or treacherous, to keep Josie safe, the hopeful, squirming weight of her, the whole of humanity vibrant, warm inside his arms.

Cyber Shyness

Stupid finger. Press publish already.

Right before I post a tweet, a blog entry, or a Facebook comment, my finger stalls at the publish button and I have this conversation. In the world of emotion, I am standing on a promontory, the wind in my face, looking down into a valley thousands of feet below. Soon, I know, I will have to jump, hoping for a net at the bottom. I have jumped before and lived. Why does it never get easier?

I consider myself confident, so why all the hesitation?

After all, introverts are supposed to thrive on computers. Everyone knows that shyness curls up and goes to sleep at the edge of cyberspace.

My mind cycles through a list of possible causes: bipolar disorder; bullies; genetics; repressed alien abduction.

No matter. I need to deal with this.I already have dealt with it, in part. I am better at sharing my ideas than I used to be. I began writing another blog years ago, inspired by the idea of writing an on-line journal.

But a conflict arose when I went for a visit with a friend and I found out that he had been reading it. I was not mad exactly. Just stunned. I had no idea he even knew about my blog.

I knew that, in theory, faceless cyber-people might stumble onto my blog and take a look. But this was a realperson. It was one thing for me to write a blog, but for a person, a real person, to read it? What madness was that?I asked my husband why he was so eager to tell all his friends about my blog, and why he had never told me he told them.

When the friend overheard the tense tone of the conversation, he apologized for reading my blog and promised never to do it again.At that point I realized how silly I was being. The whole point of a blog was for people to read it. If I wanted to record my thoughts privately, I could, but I had chosen to blog.

Thus, I gathered courage and continued bravely to blog with full knowledge that someone might actually read my writing, until my brother said to me, “I like you blog,” he laughed, “but you only write about yourself. You are so self-indulgent.”I remembered then why I had been afraid for people to read my blog in the first place: critical commentary.

In my next blog post, I penned a devastating diatribe, defending the right of those who wrote journals to include the word “I” in their entries, and denouncing the sorts of people who disapproved. But afterwards, I felt spent. The word “self-indulgent” had sunk its tentacles into my brain. And my brother, failing to recognize that he was the subject of my rant, thought it was my best post yet.My first blog sank into a remote nebula of cyberspace and vanished.

But fear of criticism is common, so I wonder how many others suffer from anxiety over on-line self-revelation and how many have used the term “cyber-shyness.” I was using it in my mind and, as far as I knew, I had invented it. For fun I Googled the term. As I suspected, others are using it. It may not have made it to Miriam-Webster yet, but it is a useful word that lets me know I am not alone. Shyness apparently does not stop at on-line interactions. Shyness is democratic and egalitarian, and will thrive anywhere. Embracing all genders and ethnicities, it does not discriminate. A shy person can be shy around a cat. In fact, at one time, long ago, I was shy around computers.

It started in early childhood when I watched a Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk foiled a dangerous robot by presenting it with a logical contradiction. The robot was so confused, its head exploded.

This made a strong impression on me. It taught me that computers were fragile creatures that could not handle illogic in any form. The slightest logical contradiction could trigger one into hysterical cries of “Does not compute! Does not compute!” and there would be no way to calm it down, except to maybe throw logically consistent syllogisms at it, and I knew from Star Trek where failure to do that could lead.

Of course, the robot in Star Trek was a bad computer, but I was sure that there must be many nice ones that did not deserve to explode. As a result, I always felt shy around my personal computer when we finally got one.Playing video games familiarized me with computers and eased my anxieties, although sometimes I played games where you entered words to tell the avatar what to do, such as “Climb tree” or “Look apple.” Now and then the program would fail to understand a command and present me with “???”. 

I always had the impulse to apologize.But since I never confused any of my computers enough to explode them, my comfort with them increased, at least until “World of Warcraft.”

I had friends who were heavily into the game and were eager to share its wonders with me. They knew I loved video games, so I should naturally love "World of Warcraft." It was like a real world with real people, a daring and highly acclaimed massively multiplayer adventure. What was not to love?

When I first played the game, I did like it. The graphics were colorful and engaging. I enjoyed exploring the pretty landscape and was warming toward the game until a sword-bearing warrior challenged me to a duel.I froze. The pressure. I worried that saying no might seem rude, but did I really want to duel? I was at level one, and even the bunnies were pinning me to the ground. Besides, I was a pacifist, at least when it came to real people. But this was not a real person. Except he kind of was.

A quandary. My ethical code was not made to bend to this situation. But I could worry about that later.For now I had to deal with the reality that a real person, armed and hostile, was romping around in my virtual playground; if I stuck around, he might want to discuss sports or cell phone plans. I looked around for virtual furniture to hide behind but, finding none, I decided to end my experiment with W.O.W. and sought solace in my new Zelda game, Twilight Princess.

When my baffled friends asked why I had abandoned W.O.W. I searched myself for an answer that would make sense to them, but the only one that came to mind was the truth: “World of Warcraft” was too socially intense.A lot has changed since. I started my current blog and stayed with it. My blog has been rewarding, and I love talking to my friends on-line. I think that shyness never fully goes away, but my gratitude toward all those who have encouraged me outweighs it. I want people to read my blog now and, rather than swatting them away, I do everything I can to encourage it.

I remember my fears like snapshots; there was the time I avoided opening a personal Facebook account for fear of exposure, a time when Twitter seemed daunting; a time when web-based freelancing was unthinkable.From the time I was afraid for anyone to read my blog, I have come a long way.

But right before I post anything, there is still always that moment where I freeze. I wonder why, after over 60 blog posts and almost 35,000 views, my feeling of jumping off a precipice never goes away.

I have no perfect answer, but I take comfort in the thought that, although I might be unable to control how I feel, I can control what I do. Every time I have been afraid to post. And every time I have posted anyway.Maybe the anxiety will always be there. Maybe there will always be a moment where I freeze. And maybe that will be okay.

Or maybe one day I will become so enlightened, I can post a blog without enduring an hour of anxious misery as I wait for someone to “like” it on Facebook. Maybe one day I will even summon the considerable social graces needed to play “World of Warcraft.”Until then, I shall accept my fate with stoic dignity, as I sit here with my hand poised above the “publish” button having weird conversations with my finger.

Stupid finger. Press publish. What are you waiting for?The moon to fall. The earth to wrench itself from orbit. The terraforming of Mars.

Dispense with the poetry already. Be a nice finger and just hit ‘publish,’ why don’t you?

<Stubborn noncompliance.>

Hit publish now. Before your illogic destroys me. Before I become  so confused, I explode.