L.E. Henderson's Blog, page 23

The Atavist (Continued) Part 2 of 3

To go back to the beginning of the story, click here.
  Last paragraph:The nurse withdrew a syringe and plunged it into the skin on one side of the baby’s pale tender neck; the infant screamed and kicked her pajama-clad feet. Max lifted himself a little from his seat and looked on with horror as the audience burst into applause.
“Pain,” the host said. “Thatis what real pain looks like. Fascinating, is it not? And it was born to one of us. It should be impossible, but it happened, and we all want answers. Give a warm round of applause to the parents of Baby Josephine, who have allowed us to conduct these experiments which should shed some light on this mystery.” The parents nodded to the camera, and stood smiling and proud.
“And to anyone concerned, our experts warned us to sterilize the needle since pre-immortals have incredibly delicate immune systems. An examination by our geneticists has verified that this infant’s cells will one day begin to die more quickly that they can be reproduced. As you know, this is a phenomenon called aging, which will generally limit its life span to less than 100 years. And unlike us, she is biologically equipped to shed tears.”
“But enough about Baby Josie for now.” Lenny turned back to Max. “Maxwell, these concerned parents are anxious to hear from a real mortal, a living fossil, to ask questions about what kind of life they can expect for their infant.
“This is educational for all of us and we are all wondering, if I may be so blunt, how could you endure it? The disease of mortality. Knowing you would die within a span of mere decades, yet going about your daily tasks as if that day would never come? Mind you, I have only admiration for your effort to find meaning in your – if I may say so – insignificant lives. How did you go on?”
Max frowned. “Before I answer, I want you to know that I am only answering your questions so that you will treat Baby Josie with the respect and tenderness due to her. Otherwise, I would prefer that you had left me where I was.”
“Quite alright,” Lenny raised his eyebrows. “Please proceed.”
“We went about our lives as if we would never die.” Maxwell shook his head. “We thought about death only when it happened. We loved our families and most of us spent our time working to cover living costs. None of us saw being human as a terminal disease.”
“Please forgive me,” Lenny said, “but it sounds like you were all in terrible denial. How is mortality not a terminal disease?”
“When we were healthy, we enjoyed our lives. There was music and beauty and something called ice cream. When someone was terminally ill, we pitied them, not ourselves.”
Lenny gave the audience a droll expression. “Did you hear that, Ladies and Gentlemen? They pitiedthose diagnosed to have only a few years lessto live than they had. Absolutely fascinating.” He looked out over the silent audience and then back at Maxwell. “But did you not pity all of your fellow humans? The undiagnosed? After all, you were all in the same deplorable situation. You all suffered, knowing that your lives, so important to you, would end. Did you treat each other with compassion?”
“I wish I could say we did,” Max said. “There were compassionate people. But not all.”
“One thing that fascinates me,” Lenny said, “is the phenomenon of war. Your lives were already so short. Yet you took the lives of your own species. Why were you so angry? Why were you constantly killing each other?”
“Not everyone killed.” Max sighed and squirmed. “But when we did, it was over a lot of different things: land, power, wealth, and even religion. Sometimes we killed each other over beliefs. Beliefs about what life meant, or who God was, or what happened after you died.”
Lenny made a “tsk” sound with his mouth. “Cutting life even shorter than it already was,” He shook his head, “and over arguments over death itself. So terribly ironic. Where was your compassion for each other? You were all doomed, all on the same sinking ship.”
“We were not all murderers. There were many good people, wise people, and even heroic people.” Max fought to steady the quaver rising in his voice. “But they are gone now, all gone. I wish I could show them to you, how good they were, how much I loved them.”
“I understand,” Lenny nodded. “You are entitled, in fact, to believe anything you wish. You have earned that right, and we are tolerant here. Are we not?” Lenny waved beckoning hands at the audience, which burst into dramatic applause.
“What is thatsupposed to mean?”
“Well, it is all a little alien to us. In our millennium we are always kind to each other. When someone, for example, complains of ennui, we try to comfort and entertain them as best we can. This show, for example, is therapeutic because it is entertaining. And funded by a non-profit organization dedicated to combatting ennui, “EES” or “The Ennui Eradication Society.”  Why do you think our chairs are so high? Studies have shown that frequently changing perspectives amuses people. They are also a bit wobbly to evoke the primitive emotion of fear, even though falling is no real threat to us. And the chairs in the audience – as you can see – are arranged in a lovely spiral.”
“So boredom is your worst problem? No wars? No one disagrees? Without arguing, without struggling, how do you learn?” Max clamped his arms on the edge of the chair and looked up, but the harsh lights forced his gaze down again.
“Incredible how, despite the misery and hopelessness of a severely limited life span, this creature rationalizesthe need for conflict. As you can see, too, pre-sentient creatures are easily riled. Despite that, we should all remember to treat him with the compassion.”
A murmur of agreement followed and a smattering of polite applause. At the sudden sound the baby let out a soft wail.
“Pre-sentient?”Maxwell said. “Is that how you view us?”
“Forgive me,” Lenny said, “but your intellect and sensory capabilities are severely limited compared to ours. You are less evolved. For example you are capable of seeing only a short color range. Just as we do you see colors like yellow, red, and blue. But you are unable to distinguish aber-moorish and flu-escent. To you, having no frame of reference, they would be impossible to describe.”
Maxwell frowned and opened his mouth to speak, but no words came.
Lenny continued. “Of course, I mean no insult. Members of your species are among our ancient ancestors just like our piscatorial predecessors and for that we are all grateful to you. But back on point: What do you think is the best thing we can do for Baby Josie, aside from finding a cure for the disease of mortality appropriately delicate for her fragile cells?”
“Well,” Maxwell leaned toward the audience, “you could start by treating her with respect and not pity. You could love her, play with her, and teach her that her short life on earth is a gift. Let her know that she may suffer at times, but that she will learn from it and that there will also be joy. And do not ever treat her like a freak. She is not an atavist, she is a baby. She was not born to soothe your boredom, nor is she is a pin cushion. For the love of God, stop poking her with needles and making her cry for your amusement.”
“How, then, should we amuse ourselves?”
Maxwell looked around. “This show is an outrage. For a species so evolved, you are a bunch of idiots. Fuck this place. Fuck your ennui.”
“My goodness.” Laughter rang out from where Lenny was sitting. “I am so glad that we decided to have you on our show. You are, quite simply, a delight. Audience, do you agree? Is he not the most entertaining guest we have ever had?”
Cheers exploded from the audience. “But,” Lenny said, “I think he is more than entertaining. His visit has been educational. In our time, most everyone knows too much.Maxwell here has proven that even for us, life can be an adventure, full of discovery. And Max makes another excellent point. Folks, we have noreason for ennui. None, whatsoever. New horizons of knowledge exist, if only we can dust off our curiosity and explore them.
“Furthermore, I believe we may be poised on the brink of a revolution,” Lenny continued. “And it began in such a surprising way, with Baby Josie and the wildly popular holo-vids of her being injected with needles and crying. Given her primitive status, she is an unlikely savior for those of us gripped with ennui, but that is what many have called her, facetiously, a savior.” Lenny chuckled. “And I must say, I agree.”
“Regrettably, the talking portion of our show is now coming to an end. In a moment the holographic pyrotechnics will commence. But to remind all of you suffering from ennui of how spectacular your lives are, allow us to leave you with a final image of hope.” He motioned to the nurse at the bottom of the stage and she looked up expectantly. “If Baby Josie would perform for us one more time.”
“There is no more room on her neck, Lenny.”  
“No problem. I hear that the tender skin around the eyes is especially sensitive.”
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.

(To be continued)

My First Science Fiction Story: "The Atavist" Part I of III

Note: I have written a lot about writing in my blog, but sometimes I just want to write. This is my first science fiction story, which I am introducing as a series of three parts. After you have read them all, let me know how I did.


At 44 Maxwell was the most ancient person on the planet. Behind the curtain he waited uneasily for his name to be called.

“Hi there, Ladies and Gentlemen,” the host began. “A special treat for you tonight. Heartbreaking, yet fascinating as any of you who have been following the story of Baby Josie and Maxwell Farnsworth already know. Without further ado, please welcome to the stage our favorite mortal and inspiration to all, Maxwell J. Farnsworth.”

Max swept the curtain aside. Applause thundered in his ears and bright lights stung his eyes. He moved toward the host, who welcomed Max with a grin, looking down at him from his elevated chair near the edge of the stage. Max stopped short of the identical guest chair.


He shook his head. “I prefer to stand.” 

Lenny tossed his head back and bellowed laughter toward the ceiling. “Are our 10 foot chairs a bit high for you?” he said. “No worries, my friend. We thought of everything.” A second man emerged from behind the curtain wearing grey overalls and rolled out a padded swivel office chair. “There, is that better?” Lenny asked. “Our research indicates that this type of chair was common in the U.S. circa 2051.  No stilted chair legs for you, no sir, and no need for a ladder. We want you to be as comfortable as possible.”

Max settled into the padded chair as Lenny, looking down, shot him a winning moon-bright smile. “Can you hear me from way up here?” Lenny chuckled. The audience rippled laughter. “Well, just let us know if you change your mind and decide to join us.”

The smile faded softly. “As I believe any of us here would agree, you are quite an inspiration. You are a relic, a symbol of our past, our distant ancestor, and even a different species as examination of your DNA suggests.

“When you froze in the Arctic wasteland, you were engaged in a scientific expedition. You were an engineer recruited as part of a team searching for undiscovered organisms able to endure extreme conditions. Our technology allowed us to resuscitate you, and it has turned out that you were one of those organisms. We unearthed you, of course, for a reason other than our historical curiosity. Two of our audience members, Myrtle and Wilhelm Banks have given birth to a curiosity. An atavist.

“As you already know from your reading, here, in the year 7056, what you call humanity has changed quite a bit, to the extent that when we first exhumed you, you were unable to understand us. Our experts of ancient history had to teach you our language and, despite your primitive brain, you absorbed our current syntax.

“Afterward you shared your fascinating story about the day you froze. We learned about your depression, and how you lost your trail, and how the sheets of snow blinded you, and how at the time you were too depressed to fight the onslaught of cold. It all sounded like a quintessentially mortal problem and therefore, hard for us to understand.

“Given your history, it must all be quite a shock to you that we are able to stay eternally young. We have conquered disease and hunger, and – barring extreme physical trauma like fire – we are as immortal as the vampires of your myths.

“Short of our devastating ennui epidemic, which too often leads to suicide, we live for many hundreds, and even thousands, of years, which has allowed our greatest minds time to gain the expertise needed to colonize distant planets.

“But to Myrtle and Wilhelm Banks, a baby has been born who, unlike us, suffers from pain. Real pain, not just ennui.”

“Please, Monique, if you will bring out the subject.” Max turned his head and saw a white-clad blond woman emerge from behind the curtain, rolling a rose-colored bonneted bassinet onto the stage. Lenny nodded to her, and she gathered a pajama-clad bundle from the blanketed interior.

“Josie, say hi to the audience,” Monique cooed.

At first Max could see little of the baby, except for a single unruly curl of peach hair secured with a pink bow.

But the nurse turned Josie around. The infant looked at the audience with large, curious eyes, but when the spotlight struck her face, she began to cry. She turned, latched onto the lab coat and planted her face shyly against the woman.

Max could see how the baby had bluish cloud-shaped markings that marred the back and sides of her neck.

The nurse pried the tiny fingers away and yielded the squirming bundle to the stage hand who had appeared next to her. He held her away from his body, dangling her from beneath her arms. The baby reached for the floor and emitted a pleading wail.

The nurse withdrew a syringe and plunged it into the skin on one side of the baby’s pale tender neck; the infant screamed and kicked her pajama-clad feet. Max lifted himself a little from his seat and looked on with horror as the audience burst into applause.

(To be continued. Watch  for "The Atavist," Part 2)

Writing: How Setting Limits Grants Freedom

For most of my life I thought my biggest problem was “discipline,” or how to “make myself” do things I should do. In my mind, the more of them I did, the better. For example, writing for 24 hours a day would have been ideal.

Basic needs like eating and sleeping were only unfortunate obstacles to that ideal. More of something virtuous was always better. If I “should” do something, I should do it all the time, at every moment of every day.

I never formulated these thoughts verbally. If I had, maybe I would have seen them for the nonsense that they were. I just felt and believed them until they took the form of chronic anxiety.

To relieve it, I was constantly planning to write, yet I rarely wrote. My goals were too daunting, my resistance too massive. My guilt about not doing what I planned only led to more avoidance. When finally I did write, I spent a lot of time thinking about doing other things.

But all of that changed when I discovered a use for a tool that is often called discipline but that is actually the opposite of forcing an activity: restraint.

My lesson in restraint began with advice that, if you had trouble making yourself write, you could tell yourself, "Just write a sentence." After beginning, you would almost certainly want to write more. I tried it and it worked. But sometimes when I told myself, "Just write a sentence," I became anxious. I was becoming suspicious of myself, because I knew I was trying to trick myself into writing more. For that reason, on some days I really would limit writing to a sentence to "prove" to myself it was okay.

Taking the one-sentence rule further by forbidding myself to write more than a sentence yielded some interesting insights.

My feelings toward writing changed. I was amazed at how ordering myself to stop at a sentence created the opposite urge. Forbidden to write, I had to write to be happy. No more guilt. The energetic part of me that had rebelled against writing was now on the side of writing.

The next morning, freed from restraint, I would hurry to my computer the way I used to as a kid on Christmas morning. The chocolate that was forbidden yesterday was finally allowed. Who needed discipline? My concentration sharpened. I lost all sense of time passing.

Although restraint was not the goal, it illuminated my desire to write whereas "discipline" had buried it. Discipline led me to ask, “How do I make myself write?” when I needed to ask, “Do I want to write?” Restraint proved to me that I did.

Beyond being a motivational tool, restraint is indispensable to the art of writing. A major problem I struggled with as a writer was knowing what details to omit. If I wrote about an emotional experience, I would try to include every detail and explain everything. But every event I described had a network of tendrils branching off into other memories. Everything I wrote seemed to need an explanation, including the explanations themselves.

In theory I could start writing about my first day of high school and end up writing about the day I was born. I could go back even further to the origin of the universe. I learned to make conscious decisions about what details to omit or de-emphasize. I had to seal off the loose ends and let my story be finite, and that required restraint. I had to say, “For now I am writing about high school. Even though sixth grade bullying affected how I felt about high school, this is not the place to go into all that.”

Paradoxically, boundaries are what allow creative freedom to exist. Some people imagine that art, being emotion-driven, is about chaos. The opposite is true. Without setting limits, there is no art. A painting stops at the edges of a canvas. But within the edges of a limited frame, possibilities are endless.

Setting limits has also benefited a story writing project I began a few months ago. I wanted to write a short story a week, but I had my blog and my novel too. Adding story-writing to them was diffusing my efforts. I felt scattered.

I limited my story-writing to weekends and made the length three pages. The short length of the stories frees me to quickly cycle through many different ideas without any single story blossoming into a massive and daunting project.

It also keeps me from falling prey to “Parkinson’s Law,” which describes an insidious phenomenon of work behavior. The law states: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” In other words, if I give myself ten hours to write a story, I will likely end up taking ten hours, even if I can do it in two.

Limiting the time and length of the stories allows creativity to flourish while preventing the headaches of over-revision. And I look forward to Saturdays now the way I look forward to ice cream. Forbidding myself to write stories during the week makes them more enticing on the weekends.

That is why whenever I hear professional writers advising stoic discipline to aspiring writers, I cringe. Granted, some activities, like paying taxes, are so unpleasant that self-coercion is required to carry them out. But for me, writing is not one of them.

Maybe discipline does work better for some. But for me the freedom of restraint has worked better and I wish I had known about it sooner. I wasted far too many years being disciplined when I could have been writing instead.

Note: Read my earlier post, "How I Lost My Guilt and Became Addicted to Writing." It deals with how the belief that you "should" write works against creativity. It was a big hit on Reddit before Reddit kicked me off.

Why I Love the Word "Bipolar"

For someone with bipolar disorder, I have apparently been way out of the loop in terms of knowing about all of the intense controversies raging within the bipolar community.

However, my recent post “My Bipolar Event in High School” met with an overwhelmingly supportive response from most who read it.

But there was a problem. Writing about my experience had tumbled me head-first into a semantic boxing ring.

I learned that there is a heated debate in the bipolar community about how certain words should be used, if they are used at all. One of these sensitive terms that I used in my post was apparently off-limits: “nervous breakdown.”Granted, this term is vernacular and non-clinical, which is why I put it in quotation marks. But one of my readers told me that the term was bad, because it “does not help children or adolescents.”

Stunned, I tried to think of any way my post could have hurt children and came up short. I mainly used the term because I got tired of using the sterile word “episode” again and again. And in some ways the term “nervous breakdown” seemed more apt. The night before my hospitalization, I did feel like I was falling apart.I felt conflicted because the same person was complimentary of my post overall and thought it would encourage those with bipolar disorder to seek help.

I earnestly hoped that my post would ease the pain of other bipolar sufferers. But when I wrote about my experience I was not thinking of that. I wrote it to write it. I wanted to share a personal experience that I have been carrying around in my head for decades. I drew from my verbal well all the terms that I thought would get it across.

From a writing standpoint, the term “nervous breakdown” is not ideal, but I have found no words in the English language which accurately convey what a manic episode is really like.I did the best I could, and nothing awakens the rebel in me like being told there are words I can never use. It was my blog. It was my awful experience; I could call it anything I wanted.

But the language debate goes even further, including a fierce argument about whether the public and media should say that sufferers “are bipolar” or “have bipolar disorder.”

The thinking is that if you call someone bipolar, you are slapping an unfair label onto them and are suggesting that they are only their disorder.This confuses me. If people say to me that I am female, does that mean they think I am only female and nothing more? Maybe some uber-chauvinists do think that, but they are not people whose opinions I value. I am perfectly content to dismiss them as stupid and move on.

The debate also confuses me because I like the word “bipolar.” Not the disease but the word. For decades I had no idea what I had. The doctor overseeing my hospital stay never volunteered a diagnosis. But I desperately wanted to understand and pressed him. Finally he unloaded his unhelpful, vague, and shocking diagnosis on me: "Acute psychotic episode." 

The term slammed into me and almost took my breath away. I was a self-conscious 17 year old girl who had seen a lot of horror films, including the sixties Hitchcock classic. Having a word with such a grisly cinematic history applied to me by a licensed medical professional was a blow. 

I envisioned hockey masks with heavy breathing, frantic night time races through briery woods, screaming, and creepy music. 

I had never worn a hockey mask, had never even watched a hockey game. I had walked off my high school campus mid - session in a euphoric daze. 

Before I took to walking off campuses, I had spent most days doing homework on a bean bag. I liked taking long walks through my heavily treed neighborhood, but I had never chased anyone through it, and especially not at night.   

I could barely think the word and resolved to never tell anyone what he had said. “Crazy" would have been a welcome euphemism. If my doctor had only bothered to ask a few more questions, he might have spared me years of shameful secrecy by pinpointing a more specific cause. And he could have given me a drug better designed to treat my condition, which may have prevented a recurrent episode in 2001. 

In 2001, when my new doctor said the words “bipolar disorder,” I embraced the term completely. Next to my first diagnosis, it was a gift. Plus, I was no longer alone. People like Carrie Fisher, Van Gogh, and others I admired had the same disorder.
I personally see no stigma in the word “bipolar.” I have owned it since the day it was given to me. I have never had trouble saying to anyone “I am bipolar.” Besides I think adjectival forms of nouns are a good thing. For some who have had different experiences, “bipolar” apparently has awful connotations. I can easily imagine someone having the word spoken to them in a contemptuous, accusing, or disparaging way.

I was lucky to have a psychology professor for a dad. He understood that bipolar disorder was not something sufferers choose and never talked about any mental illness in a derogatory way. My other family members were equally supportive. Others are not so lucky and I can only imagine how painful it must be to have people, even those closest to you, blame you for the misfortune, adding to the pain that already exists.

More communication is certainly needed. But banishing sensitive words from the conversation is not the answer.Dictating how others phrase their thoughts limits open dialogue and makes everything awkward. It discourages kind people who want to understand from asking questions. It focuses on minutia and assumes that most people are emotionally challenged cretins who must be wrangled into empathy.

From the outpouring of understanding responses to my last post, I am convinced that people are far more empathetic and understanding than we give them credit for being. Bipolar disorder is one of many thousands of ways people can suffer, and most anyone can understand bad things happening that are beyond their personal control.Many semantic “offenses” are committed innocently by compassionate people. Coercing them into semantic etiquette creates not empathy but fear.

But the principle underlying the bipolar word controversy is true. People are more than their disorders. I consider myself more of a writer than a bipolar sufferer, and I think about words a lot. I like some better than others. There are words that I cringe to hear, like racial or ethnic slurs dripping with such contempt that it impossible not to reproach cruel individuals who use them as weapons.

But the words themselves are not at fault. Intentions matter, which is why comics can get away with saying offensive things better than others can. Their intention is not to denigrate but to entertain. Our best hope of removing stigma is by harnessing the power of words to communicate what having bipolar disorder is really like.

Words are not good or bad. They are tools that allow people to think and talk about reality. And in a world where so many misunderstandings exist, we need all the tools we can get. That being said, the term “acute psychotic episode” delivered to me long ago when I was 17 was painful to hear. It is still hard to say and hard to write. I hope that no one ever applies those words to me again. But as part of language, as words, as tools, they deserve to exist, and I will never tell anyone not to say them.

While words can be used to hurt, weakening them with arbitrary etiquette rules does nothing to enlighten. Rather, it creates a nation of stutterers and shuts down the dialogue needed to clarify, describe, and educate.

For those of us who have bipolar disorder, being seen for who we really are will require freedom of expression on both sides of the conversation. Nothing less than a language operating at full capacity will do. To create genuine understanding, open discussion and words – lucid, vibrant, and unfettered – are the best hope that we have.

"Be Human" (A Short Story)

Note: Lately I have been writing a short fiction story every weekend. I am going to start sharing a few of them with you, while continuing my regular posts. This story is about a tortured and gifted 8 year old boy.


Be Human

They called him “Alf the Calf.” 

But not for long, he hoped. Alf set his palms flat on his desk, careful not to touch the test until ordered to begin. The guidance counselor, standing in a cloud of perfume near the whiteboard, gave him a tight smile.
He tried to smile back, but smiling was hard for Alf. He always worried that his mouth would make the wrong expression. But he had always wanted this, to be someone. It was about time, too. He was eight, and so far his life had been unpromising. There was the matter of his sunken nose, a hollow, a dip, where the defining line of bone should be.
He was bow-legged, too, and his jeans never fit quite right, always baggy in places, and too tight in others. Hence, the nickname.
When he was around, frowns appeared, the kinds of scowls you would expect of someone who has just eaten a whole lemon in one bite.
But he was unable to tell himself that the rejections were due only to his looks. A boy in his class named Mack must have weighed 200 pounds, but he was always joking and everyone loved him.
But Alf was afraid to tell jokes. Afraid he would shut down, lose his train of thought mid-way. He was too conscious of his flaws, and always confused, especially by the doe-eyed girls with silken hair who seemed too pretty not to be nice, unless they had a good reason.
But now he had hope that he was not just a lemon. He had written a story that was, the teacher said, beyond his years.
He read a lot, books that were beyond the grasp of most kids his age. He lived in the library, seeking to escape into other worlds. Alf thought of books that way: like planets, each inhabited by a separate mind. The teachers said his use of metaphors indicated a talent for abstract thinking that eluded many seventh graders; and that his depth of emotional maturity was highly unusual for an eight-year-old.
There was talk of promoting him two grades ahead, where maybe his nose and legs would not matter anymore. The other kids would know he was smart and would like him. Best of all, he would have a reason now to snub those who had snubbed him.
But the rule was that, for him to be moved ahead, he had to score exceptionally high on the test. No one said the word “genius,” but Alf knew. Knew that everything pivoted on the number that went with that word.
He sat at the round table in the office of the guidance counselor, just her, him, and his dad. The best thing about his new status was how his father was treating him differently. His dad had always tolerated Alf like an old piece of furniture he had promised to never give away, but that had changed.
Alf suddenly found himself being showered in gifts: brand new books with crisp glossy pages, giant hardbacks with bright colorful photographs of animals; a junior chemistry set in a box the size of a small television, full of vials and magnets; a microscope; puzzles; and even an elaborate magic kit with trick boxes and two-faced cards.
His father and the counselor both were looking at him, eyes shining with approving expectation. Alf rested his forearms on the round pinewood table as he gripped his sharpened number 2 pencil, but like a worm it had a life of its own, trembling and squirming in his fingers.
What if he failed? What if he was not extraordinary? Not a genius? That word, genius, a word edged in gold leaf, a word that glowed with power and richness. If he was exposed notto be one, everything would go back to the way it was before.
He would return to Lemon-hood.
The more he thought about it, the more his worm of a pencil squirmed in his fist. He ordered it to relax and it almost did, until the guidance counselor pulled a large-faced watch from the pocket of her caramel hip-long cardigan and set the alarm.
Alf felt the muscles inside his forehead go painfully taut. He had not counted on time pressure. He hated being timed because his dad was always rushing him. It made Alf anxious, and when Alf reached the breaking point of anxiety, he sometimes fell asleep, which made his father angry. His father always blamed him but Alf knew there was a word for what he had: narcolepsy. Alf forced his eyes wide open and pleaded with his brain not to go to sleep during the test.
After a tense smile, the lady cleared her throat and became all business. “You will have 20 minutes to complete the test,” she said. All of her sunny warmth had slid into shadow. There was a forced formality in her tone, an authority that brooked no argument. “When I tell you to stop, you will lay down your pencil immediately, or the test will be invalid. Are you ready?”
Alf tried to nod, but his head was slow to budge. For a second, he was afraid his stomach would swallow his head, because his lower abdomen felt hollow, a churning black hole below his rib cage. Worse, his rib cage seemed to strain against his lungs. He struggled to yawn, to get a good breath, but his yawning muscles were out of order.
“You may begin,” the counselor said.
Alf imagined a gun going off, like in races. His impulse was to sprint instead of write. But he continued to sit.
The questions blurred into an inky mass, ran together like a group of runners on a track. He took a deep breath and ordered his eyes to focus, until the blurry edges sharpened into legibility. He could comprehend better now, so why did he feel like he was drowning?
He glanced at the clock. Two minutes had already passed but his trembling hand was slow to move. How had that happened? He could hear the clicking of heels and the breathing of the counselor as she paced behind and beside him, the floral smell of her like a smothering fog. Why did she have to pace? There was no one in the room to cheat from.
He looked at his father sitting in a chair beside the closed door. His father, who rarely smiled at anyone, smiled encouragingly, even proudly, at Alf.
The smile and the pride of his father’s eyes terrified Alf, because he could too easily imagine losing them. He had to do well. Ace this. He had to.
He glanced down at the sequences of shapes, the processions of numbers, and the made-up words like “sloom” or “gornack,” which were used for logic problems. He began to think them through, and write quickly.
He was going too fast, but he was painfully aware of the wall clock ticking out its damning rhythm. He tensed in his chair, because he knew his hands, and not his mind, were doing most of the work, and hands could never be trusted.
He looked at his father again, whose legs were crossed, one over the other, his large pale hands resting on the arms of the chair.
Alf tried to think harder. Instead, he wrote faster. He had the feeling that a hidden world of depth flourished beneath the text and symbols, but that he was not touching it.
In the next problem, he decided to reach the depth, if it was there to reach. He stared at it, a sequence of shapes to be completed: a parade of circles, squares, and triangles with four multiple choice answers. He slowed down in his mind, fell into a world of curves and straight lines, and the answers began to clarify themselves.
He could see how the test was a conversation or a game, where someone rolled a ball to you and you rolled it back, in just a certain way.
He forgot about the clock and the clicking heels and the cold cloud of perfume that reminded Alf more of funerals than pretty flowers. But his newfound concentration lasted only for a few problems.
“Stop.”
The clicking of heels snapped a final time, leaving a vacant silence, and for a moment Alf thought that the instructions must have been, not for him, but for the shoes.
“Put down your number 2 pencil and leave it at the top edge of your test.” Alf obeyed and the counselor swept up the test booklet. It bothered him that he had not gotten to finish the test. In class, he usually finished first.
“I am violating protocol,” she said, “but I feel comfortable doing it because you are such a special case. Normally, I would score this after you left. But,” she smiled, “given your track record, I am confident you will have a stellar score, and I can see that your father is anxious. For that matter, so am I.”
She sat down at her desk at the front of the room and smoothed her skirt over her knees. Alf watched her intently, the slightest impression of a smile still etched on her face.
He watched as the smile faded, then disappeared, observed how the muscles around her mouth tightened, and the way her forehead crumpled. With the next few beats of the clock, Alf wanted to fade too.
He could hear her pen skidding across the surface. Alf wanted to snatch the test back from her. She was working too hard, taking too long.
Her eyebrows were doing a strange dance. All at once, she laid down her pen, forced a smile at Alf, and turned her head away. He looked at her face for some sign of reassurance, but her eyes, lost in the glare of her bifocals, were avoiding his.
“Well done,” she told Alf, but there was no emotion in the words. She turned to his father, who looked back with eager eyes. “Mr. Tyler, may I talk to you alone for a minute?”
She pointed to a door behind the test room, leading into an office, where Alf could see the dark corner of a desk and a lily bending in a vase. His father rose and followed the trail of clicking heels. The counselor shut the door.
Alf could hear the surge of voices, a back and forth like a game of ping pong, a woman and a man paddling words back and forth. His father was clearly the most aggressive opponent, but it was hard for Alf to make out the words. He could make out only one: overachiever. When he heard the word, it sounded to him like the final slam of a coffin. As if to complete the image, Alf closed his eyes.
He tried to find the space that he retreated to whenever kids called him Alf the Calf. Instead, the room blurred and he fell into a kind of half sleep, lulled by the ping pong cadence of voices. The room he was in fell away behind his lids, and he suddenly found himself in another place.
For a dream, the detail around him was crisp and vibrant. He was standing in a brightly lit yard in front of a log cabin. He looked away from it and could see, far away, the jagged tips of mountains.
The splintered door was already opened, but he nudged it open wider and found a large muscular man asleep in a rocking chair, head back and mouth  hanging open, his denim-clad legs sprawled. Below him a dark four-legged beast was chewing on something that looked like a chicken thigh.
The dog gazed up at him curiously, meat hanging from the corners of its mouth. Its eyes were an eerie red color. Alf began to back away and knocked over a fire poke leaning against the wall. He exited the room quickly, consoling himself that the dog already had what he wanted: the meat-covered bone.
Still, Alf was shaking as he fled across the yard. Hard to do since he had no idea where he was going. He fled toward the forest that lay in the shadow of the mountains, where it was dark and cool and mossy.
But as he went forward, he found himself blocked. It was the dog. No, not a dog; it was too big and feral-looking. A wolf. Alf could only stare at the creature, at its dull black fur and red eyes. The wolf was high enough to meet Alf at eye level.
Alf was too fascinated to do anything but stare at the beast and the red intensity of its eyes. “You were afraid of me,” the wolf said. “May I ask why?”
Alf stumbled back a little. “I thought you might want to eat me.”
“Would that have been so bad? You look so unhappy. Would I not have been doing you a favor?”
Alf seriously considered the question. Yes, sometimes he had wanted to die. He had. But right now he was too curious. “I want to live,” Alf said. “I just wish I could be someone else. I want to have a normal nose. And straight legs. But I can’t, so I want to be extraordinary. I want to be…a genius.”
“A genius? What is a genius?”
“Well, you take a test with puzzles in it. And if you solve enough of them in a certain time, it means you are a genius. Everyone is impressed with you. And if you have any terrible flaws, they stop mattering.”
“Ah,” the wolf said. “I know nothing of this test. But solving problems for a reward: that I understand. Perhaps what you mean is cunning.”
“Cunning? Well, I suppose.”
“Wolves have a lot of that.We have to. Cunning is the reason I waited until the man was asleep to steal his food. Sometimes we use it to corner our prey. Of course, cunning is not enough to make a wolf what it is.”
“No,” Alf said. “You have tails, pointed ears, and four legs.”
“No, more than that. Far more. A wolf must have courage.” The wolf turned to the side and Alf could see a patch of singed fur, with raw pink skin beneath. Alf stepped hesitantly forward, but the wolf emboldened Alf with a nod.
Alf reached out tremulously and ran his fingers along the rough scar. The wolf spoke again. “The first time I robbed the man you saw he burned me with a fire poke. I should have bitten him and grabbed the food. Instead I yowled and limped away. Two of my cubs starved. That day I was a coward. It was only much later that I returned, because I had to.”
“But I thought you said wolves were always courageous.”
“Wolves are lots of things, beyond cunning. We are vicious and kind. We eat and are eaten. We fight and retreat. The challenge for a wolf is to be a wolf, with all that it means. To know struggle and survive. For all that cunning is useful, but not enough to make a wolf a wolf, and especially not an extraordinary one.”
The wolf stared at Alf with dangerous eyes. “We corner. We persuade. We intimidate. And sometimes we are cowards, because sometimes we have to be. We are wolves. If you want to be extraordinary, if you want to be a genius, then stop trying. Instead, be human. Be human with all that it means, and never flinch from it. Be human, be cowardly, and be brave. Then be honest. As honest as you can possibly be. If you can do that, your kind will see you as a genius. And in every way that matters, you will be.”
Alf stood speechless, looking into the glare of earnest red eyes. Alf felt a burning flush, yet a shiver rippled through him from his neck to his spine. “Thank you,” Alf said. “I will try.”
“What will you try?” the wolf prompted.
At first Alf was confused, until he realized the wolf was testing him like his teachers did sometimes to make sure he understood. “I will be human. Always human. And then honest. But…tell me more. Help me understand.”
“You can start by looking out the window.”
“Huh? What window?”
“Behind you.”
Alf turned around and saw none of the grass and no mountains – only the large office picture window with its cracked mini-blinds and the sun winking through them. He turned back around and could see the round clock mounted to the wall, and hear the voices.
He wiped the bleary confusion from his eyes with his fists. The door cracked open a bit so he could make out what the woman said, though she was whispering. “Bear in mind, Mr. Tyler, I am not a licensed psychologist. It was only one test. The discrepancy tells me something else was going on with him. Please. Even if he is only an overachiever, you have every right be proud of him.”
Though the woman was defending him, the words that struck Alf the most was the phrase “only an overachiever,” confirming his impression that it was not what you did that defined you,  but who the world said you were.
When his father emerged, Alf desperately searched his face for any vestige of the pride and approval he had seen the last few weeks. But his father kept his head down. His face was drawn and pale above the starched collar of his shirt, his tie askew.
His sudden pallor made the network of lines around his mouth look deeper. There was a look of pain in his blue eyes.
He looked so old and tired, Alf wanted to comfort, to hug, and reassure him. “I can take the test again,” Alf said, but his voice broke up on the last two words.
His father sighed wearily and shook his head. “Get your coat, Alf.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I can do better. Please, let me try again.”
“What did you do with the bags?”
“Huh?” Alf thought his father meant book bags, but Alf only had one of them, which was slung across his shoulder.
“The bags. The ones all your new brain toys came in, the ones I bought you. I need the receipts. All of them.”
The words burned like a fire poke inside Alf. They scorched and scraped his heart raw. And he thought about the dream wolf and the red power of its eyes, containing all the courage and cowardice of every wolf who had ever lived.
Alf remembered the jagged scar scorched into its flesh as if it were his own and felt again the rough warmth of furless skin against his fingertips.
And he remembered what the wolf had said. Be human.
Alf knew right then that the test was wrong; that the world behind his eyes went far and deep beyond what any test could ever tell. He imagined the fire poke sinking low and hot into his skin, the fire-heat burning away everything inside him that could be burned and illuminating everything he was or ever could be.
Never in his life had he felt so brilliantly burned; so raw and so defeated; so determined; so cowardly; and so courageous.  
He had never felt so human.

My Bipolar Event in High School

My 1987 yearbook photograph
Note: In writing about my bipolar disorder, I have always focused lopsidedly on the depression; it was easier that way. But I am inspired by bipolar bloggers like Dyane Harwood, who have more fully shared their fascinating stories. I decided it was time to share mine. Here it is.

Changing from a religiously restrictive private school to a public high school in the tenth grade jolted me from a nightmarish three-year depression. Big changes were never easy for me, but this one was worth it.

Changing schools was new and exciting to me. I tried to reinvent myself that year. I had made such awful grades in grammar school, classmates made fun of me, but now I was discovering I could make an A in every subject.

Everything was going great for a while. My grades and self-esteem were soaring. There were few warnings of the ominous event that would strike during my senior year of high school in 1987.

But if there was any sign at all, it might have been the music. I had always liked music, but this was different. Certain songs swept me up into stratospheric heights of euphoria where I had never been.

Whenever this happened, I lost all sense of there being a physical world around me. The room I was in blinked out as the world of my imagination swung wide open. Fantasies spilled out, many of them silly. But sometimes I would write things in my head: humorous poems or passages of stories or essays. When the music stopped I would hurry to my notebook and write down my ideas.

If I found the right song, I would play it over and over again, like a lab mouse pressing a trigger for a food reward. My parents and brother wondered how I could replay the same song for over an hour.My music addiction seemed to cause no problems in the tenth grade, but it seemed to be a great way to take a break from studying.

But in the spring of my junior year, something else happened. My family doctor prescribed me Premarin, a hormone. This was because, since I had transferred to a public high school, my period had stopped. At first the doctor thought this was because of the stress of changing schools. But when over a year had passed and nothing changed, he prescribed the hormone, which force-restarted my cycle.

Shortly afterward, during that spring, my focus for listening to classroom lectures, never great, dissolved almost completely. Luckily almost all my teachers tested from the textbook, which meant I could go back and read whatever I missed. But even reading was harder than it was before.I became moody, swinging back in forth between melancholy and music-induced bliss. And I came down with a crush. Emotionally, I pivoted from the calm optimism of the tenth grade. For the first time since I had changed schools, I felt lonely.

To comprehend anything I read, I had to fight myself, pushing away my feelings and coercing my mind into focusing. I did it, but by the end of my junior year, I was exhausted. The summer before the fall of 1987 I called the main office of my high school and changed my schedule. I withdrew from A.P. English and Latin III and shrunk my course load to accommodate my shifting moods and faltering concentration.

I decided to just make it through my senior year; in college I could get a fresh start. But that fall, the boy I had admired from a distance ended up in one of my classes. I could hear him behind me speaking to friends. I dreamed of speaking to him, but the idea terrified me. Crushes equaled pain, and I had taken pride in being self-contained, too interested in important things to care about anything as trivial as a boy.

I was embarrassed by how much I was thinking about him.I tried various methods of getting my mind off him, scouring the library for books I wanted to read, and escaping into music.

I lost my appetite. Sometimes I felt too heavy to walk; then I was full of nervous – and sometimes euphoric – energy as my imagination dreamed up clever things to say to him.Sleep became elusive. At first I was only getting four hours, but even they tapered off. And instead of feeling tired as I should have, I felt like I had binged on coffee.

I was clinging to my GPA by a thread, forcing my brain to perform despite its inclination to race off in all directions, but I knew if the mental trend continued, I would soon be unable to study at all.Whenever I sat down with my textbooks, a wall of my own thoughts fell between me and what I read. By early November the thoughts themselves seemed different than before.

One reason I had always been better at writing than speaking was that my brain rarely presented to me only one way of saying something. My mind was a grab bag of fleeting verbal fragments, and as I struggled to choose the best in conversation, I seemed under-confident, which reinforced the impression of shyness. But in November of 1987, each of my thoughts seemed to march out as a decisive, fully formed, grammatically solid whole. The multiple options of loose, uncertain fragments were gone. As a result, I felt super-articulate and clear.

My inhibitions unclamped, but I found a way to explain this to myself. I had started noticing the kids around me more and had the thought that most of them, no matter how talkative they were, were secretly as insecure as I was. This new observation was how I explained to myself how I could suddenly feel so confident, and why I had become – for the first time in my life – extroverted. I went to school and began joking with my classmates, who smiled and laughed and seemed to like me.

Doubts kept whispering to me that something was wrong. Terribly wrong. I even asked myself the obvious question: Am I going crazy? But going crazy wasn’t supposed to feel this good, and the way I seemed to be making friends convinced me that my life was getting better.

Except for the not sleeping and not eating part.

For about a week, everything I saw seemed profoundly meaningful. Colors seemed to brighten; edges to sharpen.The night before my hospitalization, everything fell apart. My mind descended into a chaotic tangle. Images flashed. Memories gushed. Words clattered. I imagined I was having epiphanies – hundreds of them at once, like comets bombarding a moon. Every thought I had seemedto be an epiphany.

That is, every thought I had gave me that stunned feeling I got whenever I learned that the truth was the reverse of what I thought.It was terrifying.

If I tried to explain my “epiphanies” now, they would make no sense. Not to me and not to anyone. But at the time I thought they were important, so I found a spiral notebook, tore out a page, and wrote them down. Many months later I would look at that paper and see only meaningless, incoherent fragments. I had not written on the lines. The words were diagonal, both small and large, and they were everywhere.

I stayed up all night, bombarded with what I thought were earth-shattering revelations. And the next morning my mom drove me to school. I was disoriented from the minute I stepped out of the car. My high school looked familiar and alien at once. The brick buildings, the sidewalks and everything else appeared to glow in a nimbus haze, and the walls I passed seemed to lean dangerously.

The students all seemed to lumber instead of walk, and to move slowly. I was supposed to go homeroom but I was too confused to get there. I ended up in my math class instead and was shocked to see unfamiliar faces.

A couple of students laughed when they realized the mistake I had made. I got out quickly, adjusted my course, and headed toward my actual home room in another building. Somehow I managed to get there and to my other classes, too. When the last bell rang before lunch, I headed toward the library where I volunteered and went inside. Like the outdoors, the library seemed unnaturally radiant.  I thought I either must be dreaming or I had entered some alternate dimension.

Despite the ethereal lambency, I felt calm, maybe because my sleep-deprived body was too tired to feel anything else.I accepted the unreal quality of light the way I accepted strange things when they happened in a dream. And in a way it was a dream: a dream dropped over my reality like a transparency in an anatomy textbook.

Having not slept in weeks, I felt my clenched muscles yield. A warm drowsy feeling settled over me like a soft quilt, along with the feeling that all my worries were an illusion and everything was going to be okay.I was unable to focus on my normal library duties. I missed the fresh sunlit November air.

I stepped back out into the vibrant autumn afternoon, where a soft breeze swept through my hair. I went around the library and looked down from the top edge of a green hill that sloped steeply down and away from the campus. I admired the broad, ruby and coffee-colored leaves scattered over the blanket of grass. The sky was a clear and radiant vault of blue overlooking an open landscape beyond, a world that seemed to have no boundaries.

I thought I was in heaven.As I wandered downhill, the autumn afternoon unfolded around me. After I had reached the bottom, a lady who worked at the municipal swim center below saw me, greeted me and asked me some questions.

The more I talked, the more her face changed, and even through my dream haze I could tell she thought I was confused. This set off a sequence of events that finally led to my dad picking me up in his car and taking me to a doctor.  I had lost a lot of weight and I was running a temperature. The doctor recommended that I be admitted into the local hospital.

I was there for about three weeks. The time I spent there went by  in a dream-like blur, and I have forgotten much of what happened there.When I returned home, I was heavily sedated. The Haldol the doctor had given me made it hard to compose a complete thought, let alone piece together what had really happened.

I would have had to continue the drug, but while taking it, I developed a heart rhythm abnormality. My parents were told to monitor my pulse and that if the count fell below a certain level, they should withhold the medicine. This happened a lot, so they finally stopped dispensing it. After that, my mind cleared.I was finally able to ask myself what, exactly, had happened to me.

I had always had sensible reasons for doing the things I did and could usually explain them. But the question of why I had wandered off my high school campus in mid-session was hard to explain even to myself. The doctor gave me little to go on; his diagnosis was vague and he refused to speculate on the cause of my “nervous breakdown.”

Not so with my family. Theories abounded. My mom said I had “over-studied.” My great aunt believed I had put too much pressure on myself. In her get well card, she wrote: “There is more to life than trying to be the best at everything.” Then she went to my father and accused him of overprotecting me.My father wondered if I had reacted adversely to a powerful disinfectant pine cleanser my family had been using to clean the house.

I was given a choice about whether to go back to school. My parents withheld the information that if I stayed home, I might not graduate that year, which certainly would have affected my decision.

Returning did appeal to me. I imagined going back to a normal life and pretending nothing had happened. But, in the end, I decided not to return.What would I tell my classmates if they asked what had happened? Lying would make the event seem more shameful, like an admission I had done something wrong. But I had no memory of making any choice.

A tutor, a math teacher, came to my house several times a week and gave me my assignments. At the end of the year, my guidance counselor convened with the principal of my school to decide whether I could graduate.

They looked at my academic records. I had made an A in every subject since enrolling at my high school. My grades were the deciding factor; they spared me the humiliation of having to repeat a year. I was able to enroll in the college of my home town the following year on a full scholarship, as if nothing had ever happened.
I only told one friend, a girl from my private school, about my “breakdown.” After my confession, the phone line went silent for what seemed like 30 seconds. “Uh,” she said finally, “well…everyone makes mistakes.”Her innocent misunderstanding of what had happened led to me keeping my secret for over a decade. I graduated college with honors and went many years without any more major “episodes.”

It was not until 2001, right after I had published my first novel, that history repeated itself. I recognized the symptoms early, but I was unable to stop the attack. Another doctor who knew I suffered from chronic depression finally made a diagnosis that made sense: bipolar disorder. Sitting on the strip of paper lining the examination table, I was relieved to hear those words. Bipolar disorder. There was a word for what I had. Others had it. It was not an anomaly experienced by me alone.

My doctor prescribed Zyprexa, a mood stabilizer. Without making me drunk like Haldol, it sent me hurtling back to earth. The drug caused some creativity problems for a while, which I discuss in A Trail of Crumbs to Creative Freedom, but I still take it, and I have had no “breakdowns” since 2001.

But bipolar disorder has no cure. Even on the medication, I still have mood crashes sometimes and at other times my mood soars. But those symptoms are less frequent and intense than before. The “episodes” seem to be a thing of the past.Remembering when I faced depression for the first time at age 13, I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had never had a mood disorder. I suspect that I would be a completely different person.

Maybe this hypothetical other me would be a wiser, happier, better adapted person, but maybe not. Whoever she might have been, she is a stranger. Much of how I see myself is based on how I have dealt with the turbulent events of my life and the insights I gained from them. If I could change the past, and take the bad away, it would mean turning in all the insights I have gathered from dealing with the bad.

But my bipolar episodes were hard on the people I love, and for that reason, I might be tempted to change the past if I could.

But I am glad not to have to make that decision. My memories, both good and bad, are part of me.

And I want to keep them.

How Real is Social Media?

Words have no value in the wild. If you show your fictional masterpiece to a starving lion, it will still eat you. Confronted with the most scandalous comment by a politician, a cat will not care, nor will she rave over your oil painting.

The reality of certain things is determined by a lot of people agreeing that they exist, and if all but one person disappeared, symbols such as money or artistic representations would lose all of their power.

But few measure reality from the point of view of a cat.

In fact, people keep finding new ways to detach themselves from a nature-based “cat perspective” of reality. We have built a world of text accessible by computer. Even the tactile surface of solid paper is going away, and books with physical heft are becoming a thing of the past. This trend toward abstraction has been denounced by many who declare that the warmth of real human contact has been replaced by superficial textual exchanges on Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media.

But this disembodying began before personal computers. Arguably, it – and social media – began not with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates but with writing. Writing lets people escape from communicating in real-time to recording thoughts for later deciphering. It is also a way to reach an undefined audience rather than a specific person. But to onlookers, writers appear detached from the real world.

But as a writer I am tempted to defend against criticisms of a text-based existence. For someone like me, disembodied communication is not a disease but a lifestyle.  While I feel free to be myself with family and close friends, I have generally felt lonelierin groups than when I was alone. In reading I found the honesty that was missing in face-to-face encounters. I could know a fictional character more intimately than my own family.

Attacks on social media usually assume that face-to-face encounters are always more real and honest than anything you will ever find written on a computer, and that text is a shoddy substitute for real human voices.But part of my impulse to write came from feeling that I could never be fully understood in situations where I was limited to speaking. Writing let me plumb below the surface and say honest things that would be too strange to say at parties.

But writing is ultimately not about withdrawing. No matter how solitary a writer plucking away at keys in his attic may appear, writing is in the end a social activity, spurred by a drive to connect -- to understand and to be understood.Writing is fundamentally social. Without readers to “listen,” writing has no meaning or power, any more than a painting would mean anything to a lion beyond, perhaps, the toxic chemical scent of oils.

Readers do a lot. They are as active in any written exchange as the writer, and just as much creators.For readers to make sense of text, they must form meaningful images from various combinations of 26 letters. From those abstract symbols, readers imagine, feel, and plumb the depths of their memories; without all of that, writing would be a jumble of meaningless symbols. 

Since reading is creative, no work of fiction is the same for any two readers. Even meanings of common words like “dad” or “brother” vary according to personal experience. The assumption that words mean the same to everyone leads to a lot of communication misfires and is part of why art is subjective. Still, language works well enough that I can read a novel written by someone who lives across the ocean in a country I have never visited and still grasp what it must be like to live there.

The internet has pushed readers into even more active roles: reviewing books on Amazon, commenting on blogs, sending emails, and posting to Facebook. Most readers are now writers – whether they call themselves that or not.But are detached, text-based interactions a mentally unhealthy phenomenon? Are they even real?

This may sound like a strange question, but to illustrate, I used to do some freelance writing on the web-based forum “Elance.” I never saw my clients, heard their voices, or shook their hands. My only knowledge of them came from deciphering variations of a 26 character alphabet in emails.As abstract as the communication was, I felt like I knew my clients. When their text indicated that they liked my writing, I was happy. When their text “disapproved,” I fretted. When it made irrational demands, I felt annoyed.

Working for these clients was a “life experience,” as real as any land-based job. But all I knew of them came from marks on a screen. My imagination created a model of who they were from variations of 26 letters. Sometimes I went too far in interpreting what lay behind those letters, reading emotions into them where none existed. For example, when emails were terse, I worried that my client was irritated.

My practical husband Donnie cautioned me not to read anything into the text beyond the literal words on the screen. Otherwise I would be building an illusion which had nothing to do with the true feelings of my client.

But as a reader I was already creating my own working mental models of my clients. Given limited textual information about them, I had no choice but to imagine them. Where then, did my imagination leave off and reality begin?Others struggle with this problem, too. Donnie told me about a former boss who interpreted every email as being angry, but when Donnie looked over the same email, he could never find any evidence of ire.

“Email is the worstform of communication,” Donnie says. “Most people are bad at it, they rush it, and because tone of voice and facial expressions are missing, the reader has nothing to interpret.” Donnie insists that emoticons like smiley faces are essential to web based correspondence. But as a die-hard writing chauvinist, I am unable to believe that speaking is a more effectiveform of communication than writing. Writing lets me reveal more complex thoughts and feelings than I ever could in speech without seeming insane.

Writing captures fleeting expressions, vivid sensory details, and sophisticated re-creations of emotional states that would be impossible to pull off in a casual conversation. But how sane is living a text-based world? Writing isan abstract and disembodied way to communicate. And no self-respecting mountain lion would agree to participate in such an unnatural activity even if it could.

Social media forces us to redefine what we mean by reality, as we drift more and more away from nature, distancing ourselves further and further from a practical “cat” definition of what is real.But cats do not know everything. What goes on in cyberspace comes from real people with real feelings, drawing from a world of experience and knowledge residing beneath the ice burg tips of the text they send.

Whether a text-based existence is mentally “healthy,” on-line interactions are real – as real as anything that is written; as real as Helen Keller drawing a model of reality from mere taps and touches. Computer based interaction, whatever its drawbacks, has created new avenues for personal expression. With only 26 letters, we manage to troll, befriend, inform, complain, persuade, anger, flatter, and disappoint. Social media – like writing – is complex, emotion-driven, human.

Though undeniably strange.

Think of Shaky Writing not as "Bad" but "Incomplete"

“Good writing is rewriting” is a common adage that reflects the belief that writing, regardless of its level of completion, is always either good or bad.

Furthermore, blocked and perfectionistic writers are often advised to write “badly” on purpose in order to lose their fears enough to let themselves write at all. The act of “letting go,” it is hoped, will ultimately lead to good writing.
Hearing this advice has always made me feel liberated and reassured. If bad writing is encouraged, then I can relax. And if a writer as renowned as Ernest Hemingway can compare all his rough drafts to unsavory bovine byproducts, then my ego is safe if I write badly.
At the same time, to say that a rough draft is the stage of “bad” writing creates an expectation of failure and consequently some dread.
The question is worth asking:  Why do we insist on calling a rough draft “bad?” A rough draft by definition is incomplete, similar to a sketch drawn on canvas prior to painting. Putting down the first words is an essential step. A rough draft is never “wrong,” any more than pre-baked cake batter is wrong. Both are just raw.
Neither deserve to be pelted with insults or tossed out the way something truly bad might. Incomplete writing, just like unfinished cakes, can be salvaged. But calling a first draft “bad” slaps a judgment on its quality at an early stage, which is exactly what writers need to avoid.
In fact, it is hard to think of any other field where an early stage of the process is considered the “bad” stage. I have never seen a chef on a cooking show say, “Now for the bad stage of making a cake. You mix eggs, flour, oil, and sugar together to get this big gloopy mess. Gross! It hasn’t got any frosting and it’s too soupy to slice and. It isn’t fluffy and it sticks to the spoon. Bad cake! Bad!”
In the same way, builders of houses don’t look at the framework of a structure before the bricks are laid and say, “This house is awful.”
What is it about writing in particular that makes us evaluate and label it every step of the way? Why does a first draft have to be either good or bad?
A rough draft is actually more process that product, more about discovering than writing. The problem is that it still takes the formof writing. The words are there, the text is divided into paragraphs, and sentences march along, yet when you read it aloud, it all sounds wrong.
Thoughts jump around, trite expressions pop up, and undeveloped ideas strut around the page acting finished. Bad, bad, bad!
But what if we could change the way we think of rough drafts or writing generally? What if we could stop calling writing bad, whether it’s ours or someone else’s, but instead view all flawed writing as incomplete?
Especially since this is true. “Bad” is an umbrella term, a subjective label that has no useful meaning. Plus, it puts all of the emphasis on what is wrong, when there may be a number of promising things about the draft that end up getting ignored.
Writers need to remember that writing is ultimately about building, not shooting down flaws, yet we are wired to see the “bad,” both in our own writing and that of others.
But even calling someone else’s book “bad” can hurt my own writing experience. Whenever I’m too harshly critical of a book I’m reading, I become twice as critical of myself. I’m more impatient with my rambling rough drafts, which are no better than the work I've just criticized. This is because no matter how much I learn about writing or how skilled I become, I will never lose the ability to write like a beginner.
But if you stop to think about it, all writing which we call “bad” is incomplete. Whether a draft is filled with run-on sentences or a character is too undeveloped to seem real, there is always a way to lift the writing toward the full expression of its original purpose. 
Of course, how beginners and experienced writers define "complete" are usually quite different. For a beginner, “complete” could just mean filling up an entire page with text. A more experienced writer has a longer checklist and asks questions such as, “Do I have a logical thought progression? Are my transitions smooth? Is my writing succinct? Are my characters convincing?”
That’s why the more I learn about writing, the better I get but the harder it is. My definition of completeness keeps changing. My stories now need more than a beginning, middle, and end. I want character consistency, a convincing resolution, and authentic dialogue. But I never thought about those things when I was twelve.
A master writer is someone who has an exceptionally high standard for completeness and the skill to pull it off.
But in a practical sense, what difference does it make if I think of my rough drafts as incomplete rather than bad?
It changes everything. It shifts the emphasis back to building rather than correcting. It reminds me of my original purpose. It turns writing into a creative puzzle to be solved rather than an exercise in self-flagellation.
To offer an analogy, I used to sometimes watch the show “What not to Wear” – not my usual type of show, but there were some interesting things about it. The makeup artist stressed identifying the most attractive features of her subject, such as stunning green eyes or clear porcelain skin. Then she worked to emphasize those features rather than to correct “flaws.”
The same philosophy works with writing. When I find myself being too critical of my writing I do something that I call a “rebuild.” I go through my text, identify the parts I love, and set them apart with bold lettering. Then I start a new file, paste my favorite parts onto it, and fill in the gaps with new writing, which I strive to bring to the same level as the parts I like.
Again, this shifts the emphasis away from what is wrong and refocuses attention on what is good and how I can make it better.
The tendency to call things “bad” or “good” is deeply ingrained. In fact, they’re some of the first words we learn as toddlers. Therefore, it is unlikely that I will ever be able to entirely stop thinking of my incomplete writing as “bad.”
But the effort is worth making, because it turns my focus away from merely tabulating flaws and redirects it to where it really belongs: the thorough expression of a creative vision.

From Creative Block to Creative Freedom: "Trail of Crumbs" Unearthed

It has been about a year since I published my e-book A Trail of Crumbs to Creative Freedom. Though I consider myself primarily a fiction writer, its content was important to me. It was a record of my transition from depression and block to recovering creatively, which led to finishing my newest fantasy novel, The Ghosts of Chimera.

During the time of publishing "Trail," I was going through some monumental upheavals, which led to my move from SC to Florida, where I live now. It was not until I had a chance to settle down that I even thought to be bothered that my book, dropped into a lonely corner of cyberspace, had found few readers outside my family.

And I literally mean a few. Writers, which were my target audience, were silent.

No one was buying. No one was reading. No one was reviewing. But the book meant a lot to me. The lack of feedback was upsetting.

I was used to getting feedback because of my blog articles, in which I reiterated many of the same points I had made in "Trail." Whenever I submitted these articles to Reddit, the response was always overwhelming, with readers telling me that the posts inspired or helped them.

I had written the book to be read. I considered that the price tag of 3.99 might have been the wall that was keeping people from buying. I actually considered giving the book away from free so that I could at least get responses, but I did not want to send the message that I thought it had no value when, in fact, the opposite is true.

At one time, when I was blocked and depressed, a book like "Trail" would have made a big difference to me. Recently I went back and looked at my book, and realized that I had changed a lot since the time of publication.

I went back and re-edited it to incorporate insights I had since first publication. I also thinned out some of my dashes.

During the time I wrote "Trail" I was a bit manic and cycling through punctuation obsessions. (See earlier post: "My Great Manic Comma Blizzard.")

When I looked at my first edition, I could see that I had way overdone the dashes, overriding my poor editor, who had done me a great favor by thinning out all my commas, little prepared for the dash fiend I was about to become.

In the new version, my dash explosion is safely contained.

Since I released my updated version with a 99 cent price tag, a few copies have actually sold and I have gotten a response from a fellow blogger.

Dyane Harwood at http://proudlybipolar.wordpress.com/ had some kind things to say:

Henderson released this relatively short book (88 pages) for only 99 cents on Kindle. In Trail of Crumbs she analyzes the creative writing process and how her bipolar disorder adversely affected her writing. She ends the book on a high note in sharing how she was able to let her creative juices flow again. I just started reading it, and I'm finding it interesting and well-written, so it was quite a deal for less than a cup of coffee!

Harwood ran across my book while researching bipolar disorder for her work-in-progress called Birth of a New Brain. I was happy to have captured the attention of a bipolar blogger because the audience I originally envisioned were bipolar writers who were blocked and depressed the way I was.

But since writing is known for being a bipolar process, I thought my book would appeal to a more general audience of writers as well.

Bipolar or not, many writers speak cynically about their profession, describing writing as torture or a type of insanity. While these things are often said tongue-in-cheek, a grim reality underlies them. Writers are not known for being happy but are instead known for alcoholism, mental illness, drug addiction, and suicidal urges.

To make matters worse, the world of writing advice is ridden with guilt, fear, and self-punishment.
Typical messages, which I see in many writing blogs, are: Stop being so lazy and selfish. Put the reader first. Write what you think others want to read. Do not be narcissistic, preachy, affected, or self-indulgent.

By all means do not offend the reader. Do not use the words "very" or "then." Do not use adverbs. Or talk about yourself. Just who do you think you are anyway?

In the popular understanding of what it means to write, writing is all about being careful. The true object of writing, which is to build, is side-lined. You would think that the arbiter of "good" writing was Miss Manners, when in fact the best writing is about honesty, not politeness; creating, not tearing down.

In writing my book, I wondered why so many professional writers hate writing and why we view writing as something we have to make ourselves do.

But it could be different. When I was in college, the writers I desperately envied were the ones who loved writing so much that they had to do it every day, like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. They defied the stereotypes. They viewed writing as a way to be happy.

At the time I had no idea how they had achieved this. I speculated that they were such geniuses that their minds and emotions were just better wired.

But after my experience of learning to enjoy writing again, I suspect not. More likely, they were people who were able to ignore cultural messages about how writing should be done and retain a sense of wonder that, for most people, burns bright in childhood and then fizzles out in adolescence.

So far I have avoided trying to sell anything in my blog. That is not its purpose. I much prefer to talk about other issues that interest me. But today I am making an exception.

My book costs the same as a dollar store spatula, less in fact. And although spatulas are wonderfully useful, I feel confident in saying that my book is worth more.

Not that my book is a "system" or a promise of magical results after 30 days, nor does it claim to be the only way that writers can work. It is a personal experience that mapped my transition from thinking I could never write again to my discovery that I could love and enjoy it more than I ever had before.

But for that to happen, I had to let go of conventional ideas about the writing process that I had absorbed over many years.

But back on point: If you are thinking about purchasing a spatula, restrain the impulse a little longer and buy my book instead. Your old one can hold out a little longer, until you are able to recoup your investment.

Then read my book, get back to me, and tell me what you think. I am eager to hear what you have to say. To any of you who have already bought my book, thank you!! And please tell the others that it is feasible to have spatulas and creative freedom, too.

With patience, Young One, all things are possible.

Life After Bullying

Note: I started this a few months ago and put it away, thinking it was too serious for my blog. But whenever bullying appears in the news, it catapults me back into the sixth grade. Also, many people seemed confused about the topic. I picked the article up again and finished it so that I could share what I understand. Here it is.


The worst part about the bullying was not the bullying. It was the way it crawled inside my brain, burrowed into my sense of who I was and, over time, set my mind against itself.

The antagonists were a gang of five girls in my sixth grade class. The leader, who hated me, was wildly popular and conscripted all her friends, including kids in other classes, to join her in a school-wide campaign of ridicule on a scale that must have inspired Stephen King to write Carrie.

She once explained to me in a reasonable tone that she was only bullying me because I was shy, and that if I would talk more and be more like the others, she would stop. She smiled. "Why are you like that anyway? Why are you the way you are?"
I could give her no satisfactory answer. She continued to roam the playground in her pack of five and follow me. She screamed epithets behind the megaphone of her cupped palms, especially when a lot of kids were around. Her friends joined her in a chorus of taunts and threats. "Are you just shy, or are you a snob? I think you might be a snob." I hated having attention called to me, so being thrust into a spotlight every time I walked into their view was torture. 

Whenever I did try to "talk more," my words were painfully scrutinized. "Say that word again. The way you said it was weird. Like you have a speech impediment. Do you?" 
Because the bullying – taunting, threats, and ridicule – was coming from kids from other classes as well as the ones in my own class, the illusion that everyone hated me was powerfully convincing. I wanted to disappear, but by law I was forced to attend class six hours a day, five days a week, with kids who wanted to hurt me.
I shut down.
I stopped talking. I was embarrassed to even get out of my seat, because standing would mean drawing attention to myself. I dreaded walking in front of anyone, because my manner of walking was declared "wrong." I created a safe place inside myself and I tried to stay there.
I felt like the world had split in two. There was the inner self, where the real me was. And then there was Outer Me, the shell that tried to get through the day without seeming to exist too much.
I read a lot that year.
I liked to pretend that my daily experiences were something I was reading in a book. “She ambled down the hall toward the library” or “The girls surrounded her and she ambled away.” I was always getting word obsessions, and that year I had fallen in love with the word “amble.” I loved most all words.
I got glowing praise for my creative writing assignments that year. I thought reading fiction was like reading minds. I imagined that I could live out a separate existence as a thought person, swimming in a flow of words.
Despite the abuses going on outside my creative bubble, I never got really angry. I was haunted by a feeling of personal failure. I had been told all my life by adults as well as children that shyness was very bad, and failing to “overcome” it filled me with shame.
And though I was no fan of my bullies, everyone else seemed to like and respect them. The consensus was that they were normal; I was not. Seeming to confirm this, my teacher sent me to a counselor, but not the bullies. My impression was that bullying was considered robust childhood behavior, while being bullied conferred a stigma and was seen as failure.
But shame was the wrong emotion; I wish that I had gotten angrier. At that singular instance in my personal history, I needed to lash out at my bullies, openly and without reservation. I needed to throw a temper tantrum, yell, and call them names. It would have been far better than closing myself off and shutting down.
Anger would have said, “The problem is with you, not me.”
But because the ridicule was coming from so many different classes, I had to consider that the problem really was with me. I imagined some distortion, like a badly placed mole, that marked me as innately unlikable.
But there was another reason I had trouble hating them. I could not view them as evil. Hate is a call to action, and the more villainous you believe the target is, the stronger the response.
I did dislike my bullies. 
But they were human. I saw them every day for about six hours. They worried about their hair looking bad. They fretted about gaining weight. Sometimes they said things I thought were funny.

When they passed kindergartners in the hall, they gushed over how cute the children were, unleashing a string of “Awwws.”
They liked things I liked: puppies, birds, turtles, and Cabbage Patch dolls, and they liked each other. But to them I was many things depending on the moment: a snob, a freak, and at one point a suspected drug addict.
If I could have viewed my bullies as inhuman, as dark avatars of pure evil, I might have saved my ego. Instead, the daily personal attacks distorted how I saw myself.
The distortion was so convincing that I failed to recognize a chance to get a clearer view. Selected for Project Challenge in art, I got to be in a different group of kids once a week, transported by bus to another school.
Though I said hardly a word to anyone, they liked me and invited me to play ball with them in the few minutes before class began. A boy even asked me to be his girlfriend.
I thought he was making fun of me, but he made it clear that he was serious. The change in how I was treated gave me emotional whiplash. Despite my confusion, my ego enjoyed its moment, and I left Project Challenge that day, soaring. 
I never went back.
It seems incomprehensible now. But I believed that I had fooled the art kids. At the same time, their acceptance gave me hope, and that hope was painful to me, because I could too easily envision losing it.
Going back to Project Challenge seemed like too great a risk. As long as the feeling of being accepted was a memory, I would have it forever. But if I went back and the newkids turned on me, then I would be thoroughly convinced that – no matter where I went – things would never change. I thought it would end me.
It seemed safer to stay in my prison than to inhale the breath of freedom, only to be thrown back into my cell.
It was years before I could grasp that there was no mark of shame, nothing innately “wrong” with me for the new kids to uncover, and that my treatment was due to power-seeking egos. Years later, I regretted my decision not to go back to a place where I had been embraced.
Even inside the fish bowl of my own classroom, there were signs that not everyone hated me, but I couldn't see them. For example, a boy in front of me in the line returning to class from lunch began hitting me, thinking that because I was shy, I would passively accept abuse.
I struck back. Hard. In shock, he drew away. Then he rallied and started swinging his fists. I ended up with a black, swollen eye, while he had only a few scratches, but on that day many of my classmates said I “won” the fight.
The boy never hit me again and even apologized. But the fact that my classmates were supporting me never penetrated. I was so blinded by the belief that no one could possibly take my side, I was unable to see that the kids who said I won probably wanted me to win.
Part of what confused me was being overly conscious of the numbers against me. I operated on the belief I that if I lashed out at the gang of girls, it would only make everything worse. In reality, I probably would have won supporters. Mentally healthy, happy people generally dislike unfair treatment of those who only want to be left in peace.
I sometimes wish I could go back in time and tell my twelve year old bullied self the things I know now. But to even begin to make sense of what had happened, I had to get away from the distorting glass of the sixth grade.
I finally did.
The following year I enrolled in a private school to get a fresh start with new people. The new group of students accepted me, although I was withdrawn. I reveled in the peaceful space around me and began to feel safe.
A couple of months into the first semester, my English teacher gave a writing assignment: to take the point of view of an American slave in the south.
This was the type of assignment I loved, the kind my sixth grade teacher had given every week. I fell into another world as I wrote, imagining a slave who tries to escape and ends up frustrated. I remember only one sentence: “We were just the property of other people.” I had often imagined how that would be, to be viewed as a thingthat belonged to someone, an object without any rights.
The following day the teacher came to me at my desk and knelt beside me, his face even with mine, his eyes wide. “Lisa.” He broke into a grin. “Yousurprised me. This paper you wrote is incredible.I want to read this aloud. Do you mind?”
Stunned, I said he could, and he asked if he could keep it. I let him. A little later the class was silent as he read my paper aloud, and after he read the last sentence, the room thundered with applause.
Afterward, one by one, kids kept approached me and told me how good they thought my story was. And I knew it was no dream; I had escaped the sixth grade.
Gradually, I made friends.
And some resolutions: to seek the company of nicepeople, regardless of their social standing or physical appearance; to like myself unconditionally; and to focus on things I could control directly, like my grades. I resolved to make an A in every class. And during the following years I did all those things, as time granted clarity.
Years later I could see that not everyone in the sixth grade had hated me and not everyone had liked the bullies; that their personal agenda had nothing to do with me; and that if I had been more vocal about disliking them, I likely would have found allies.
It took me too long to reach these insights. But bullying is taken much more seriously now than when I was a kid. However, I worry that adult-led anti-bullying campaigns, replete with pink "awareness" ribbons, could make life harder for bullied kids.
In some ways they elevate the bullies, endowing them with the coveted respect associated with power and danger. Plus, appearing to need adult protection makes victims look tantalizingly weak to the bullies. 
While current adult-led efforts to stop bullying may yield some results, they will always be limited. Short of installing totalitarian rule in schools, it is impossible to micro-manage every micro-exchange between children.
More is needed. For example, I wonder if anyone has ever explored humor as therapy for bullied kids. I think making fun of my bullies, even in my head, would have been powerfully therapeutic. Humor would have reduced them to non-threatening caricatures.

What else would have made the sixth grade more bearable? Aside from being removed from the situation, I would have loved to meet with someone who had emerged from a similar experience and ended up with self confidence, a sense of humor, and a love for life.

Preferably this would have been someone a few years older -- not someone to solve my problems for me but someone to offer understanding and a fresh perspective. 
A high school student could have shared the epiphanies of hindsight, while also “looking down” at the younger bullies, viewing them not as powerful forces of evil, but for what they really were: pipsqueak kids trying to augment themselves.
But anyone, regardless of age, could have helped as long as I sensed that they were being completely honest with me. My biggest vulnerability at age 12 was lacking the life experience to effectively deal with an alien situation. My life had not prepared me to deal with full-scale ostracism.
Ultimately, I needed to be removed from the situation so that I could work things out for myself and regain my emotional balance and feeling of self-worth. I did it, but it took me a long time.
And I did it alone. But anyone who has been bullied, learned from it, and risen above it could give invaluable emotional support to kids who are struggling. Someone who has crossed the rickety bridge from bullying to empathy and understanding could give them a hopeful glimpse of the other side.
Stopping bullying-in-progress is not nearly enough because it ignores the emotional damage that is already done. By far, the worst part of being bullied was the inner reality: the loss of self-esteem, the inarticulate confusion, the feeling of failure, and the despair -- feelings that lasted  long after the bullying had ceased.
But I could have endured most anything if I had known that there was life after bullying, beyond more bullying; that my present would not define my future; and that happiness was possible.

I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self those things. I wish I could tell her that one day she would think nothing of the bullies or what they thought; that she was not to blame; and that having bullies like you is no compliment. I would tell her to be honest about not liking them, even if it meant retaliation.
But every time I see a tragic news story about bullied kids, I am reminded that my story continues; that experiences similar to mine are happening every day. And while I can never go back in time, I can tell others: There is life after bullying.
And, many decades after my escape, I am glad I am still here.