Elizabeth Percer's Blog, page 5
June 25, 2016
Writer's Log, June 24: The Life-Changing Magic of Revision
This one is for you diehard perfectionists out there. You know who you are. You haven’t finished that novel because you “just haven’t gotten around to it,” though it’s been sitting on your desk/computer/chest for the past ten years. You can’t write because all your youthful talent has disappeared, leaving only stodgy half-starts and depressingly mediocre early drafts. You won’t show anyone your work because “it’s not ready yet,” though you yourself are terrified to reread what you once thought was the best thing you’ve ever written, and are sure you’ll explode in a high-strung-meltdown of neurotic doom should you find that it’s not quite as good as you once thought.
There’s this wonderful video of the late, great poet Stanley Kunitz meeting with a group of teenagers at the 92nd Street Y. He’s about 98 and they’re all about sixteen, and this one girl with sky high hair and blue eyeshadow asks him soulfully if he ever writes something he thinks is really good, only to find he doesn’t like it later. And he replies, just as soulfully and without missing a beat, “All the time!” He then goes on to describe how he writes every day in the wee hours of the morning, and how at 4:00 AM that which looks like genius looks decidedly different in the brutal, bright light of day.
It’s what he doesn’t say, though, that really sticks with you. It’s the undeniable enthusiasm in his voice, the tenderness toward this imperfect and glowing soul, the gleam in his eye that tells you that it’s those brutally bright days that challenge him to start anew, that have, perhaps, fueled him for the eight or more decades he’s been writing.
I wish revision didn’t have such a bad rap, didn’t have such a second fiddle, sloppy seconds, Skipper to perfectionism’s Barbie kind of street cred, ESPECIALLY among the more talented, less experienced writers. They are the ones in the worst trouble. If you’re young and gifted, you’re not used to the seasoning failure gives your work, you have no trust in the process, you probably aren’t brave enough to share what scares you about writing, so no one’s shared what scares them, and you get all tangled up in this huge net of self-loathing and frustration. Your only exposure has been Hollywood movies in which musicians take dictation from God and men pen masterpieces with one foot. And not just any foot – the non-dominant one. It’s the artist’s equivalent of only being exposed to NBA players and confusing their performance on the court as the everyday norm of basketball players everywhere.
Thank God for basketball, for all the amazing gifts we do bring out into the open, the talents we encourage young people (and by young, I mean in spirit, not numbers) to develop through practice and practice and then some more practice. We tell the young athlete that sore muscles mean she’s growing stronger, that a day of poor performance is just an anomaly, that if she shows up and dedicates herself to her art, she will see results long term that daily performance alone might never predict. We tell the young chef that his hard-won but botched dough will inform the next one even better; the young mathematician how long geniuses worked on single problems; the young carpenter that callouses need to be developed before a hand is truly strong.
But we don’t do this for writers. Writers, after all, are plagued with gifts that hit them like lightning at birth, causing them to act weird in groups and ostracize themselves and maybe get a hair or shank too far into the sauce and work in isolation if they can manage not to throw themselves into traffic first.
I’m here to tell you that this couldn’t be further from the truth. On the daily level, I moan and groan and roll my eyes and would rather do the dishes and clean up under the boys’ beds and empty the cat litter before I start writing. And sadly, for many years I thought that avoidance and fear was a sign I should never begin, was it was an advance-warning that I would never amount to anything. But then I got a little older and wiser, and I remembered how afraid I used to be before going out on stage, how nervous I was before seeing a loved one after a long absence, how tension and anticipation and the unknown were signs of caring enough about something to risk putting the entire contents of your heart out there on its behalf. I also made the astonishing mathematical discovery that a novel is made of up of individual sentences, and that sentences are made up of words, and that words can be organized, free of charge, into any number of strange and compelling combinations. I spent ten years working on a book of sixteen poems. I wrote a dissertation so dense physicists are forming new theories about the existence of intellectual black holes. In other words, I wrote a lot, and most of it didn’t see the light of day.
What’s more, I realized that Keats was an anomaly - a wonderful anomaly, to be sure - but for every Keats there are thousands of writers whose work isn’t rich until their lives are, and they’ve had some time to reflect on those paradoxically mundane and unique riches. Writing responds incredibly well to maturity, both in content and approach. It likes a grizzled, black-humored sea captain with twenty years of dark empty nights under his belt much more than it likes a dewy eyed freshman. It much prefers a mom who’s raised a dozen kids and grandkids and has stretch marks and weird, as-yet-to-be-defined curves and lumps, yet goes out running every morning anyway, and loves every minute of it to the starving supermodel. It much prefers Stephen King to a virgin.
And I promise, I speak from experience. I was a terrible writer until I actually wrote. I was hugely talented, but a terrible writer all the same. And it was the writing and revising and falling down umpteen times and getting back up umpteen more that forged that bone-deep relationship to writing that I know cannot do without, not to mention a few life lessons as well. I became a writer by writing, and 99% of writing is revising. It’s considering and reconsidering and shaping and chipping and getting one’s hands dirty in the miraculous, frustrating medium that is language. It’s a puzzle that will never be solved, a goal that can never be reached, and it reminds me, every day, that fighting the good fight is always a thousand times more rewarding than leaping into victory.
So with apologies to all you freshly minted knights ready to slay the dragon with one fell swoop, I can’t WAIT to meet you after you’ve been knocked to the ground so hard you can’t quite breathe, but then you do, and it makes you laugh, and you reach out a hand for help. I can’t wait to meet that character. And I’m absolutely sure I won’t be alone, that we all ache to read things written by other bloodied and dirty and strong-hearted souls, that so many other hands will be reaching toward you, too.
There’s this wonderful video of the late, great poet Stanley Kunitz meeting with a group of teenagers at the 92nd Street Y. He’s about 98 and they’re all about sixteen, and this one girl with sky high hair and blue eyeshadow asks him soulfully if he ever writes something he thinks is really good, only to find he doesn’t like it later. And he replies, just as soulfully and without missing a beat, “All the time!” He then goes on to describe how he writes every day in the wee hours of the morning, and how at 4:00 AM that which looks like genius looks decidedly different in the brutal, bright light of day.
It’s what he doesn’t say, though, that really sticks with you. It’s the undeniable enthusiasm in his voice, the tenderness toward this imperfect and glowing soul, the gleam in his eye that tells you that it’s those brutally bright days that challenge him to start anew, that have, perhaps, fueled him for the eight or more decades he’s been writing.
I wish revision didn’t have such a bad rap, didn’t have such a second fiddle, sloppy seconds, Skipper to perfectionism’s Barbie kind of street cred, ESPECIALLY among the more talented, less experienced writers. They are the ones in the worst trouble. If you’re young and gifted, you’re not used to the seasoning failure gives your work, you have no trust in the process, you probably aren’t brave enough to share what scares you about writing, so no one’s shared what scares them, and you get all tangled up in this huge net of self-loathing and frustration. Your only exposure has been Hollywood movies in which musicians take dictation from God and men pen masterpieces with one foot. And not just any foot – the non-dominant one. It’s the artist’s equivalent of only being exposed to NBA players and confusing their performance on the court as the everyday norm of basketball players everywhere.
Thank God for basketball, for all the amazing gifts we do bring out into the open, the talents we encourage young people (and by young, I mean in spirit, not numbers) to develop through practice and practice and then some more practice. We tell the young athlete that sore muscles mean she’s growing stronger, that a day of poor performance is just an anomaly, that if she shows up and dedicates herself to her art, she will see results long term that daily performance alone might never predict. We tell the young chef that his hard-won but botched dough will inform the next one even better; the young mathematician how long geniuses worked on single problems; the young carpenter that callouses need to be developed before a hand is truly strong.
But we don’t do this for writers. Writers, after all, are plagued with gifts that hit them like lightning at birth, causing them to act weird in groups and ostracize themselves and maybe get a hair or shank too far into the sauce and work in isolation if they can manage not to throw themselves into traffic first.
I’m here to tell you that this couldn’t be further from the truth. On the daily level, I moan and groan and roll my eyes and would rather do the dishes and clean up under the boys’ beds and empty the cat litter before I start writing. And sadly, for many years I thought that avoidance and fear was a sign I should never begin, was it was an advance-warning that I would never amount to anything. But then I got a little older and wiser, and I remembered how afraid I used to be before going out on stage, how nervous I was before seeing a loved one after a long absence, how tension and anticipation and the unknown were signs of caring enough about something to risk putting the entire contents of your heart out there on its behalf. I also made the astonishing mathematical discovery that a novel is made of up of individual sentences, and that sentences are made up of words, and that words can be organized, free of charge, into any number of strange and compelling combinations. I spent ten years working on a book of sixteen poems. I wrote a dissertation so dense physicists are forming new theories about the existence of intellectual black holes. In other words, I wrote a lot, and most of it didn’t see the light of day.
What’s more, I realized that Keats was an anomaly - a wonderful anomaly, to be sure - but for every Keats there are thousands of writers whose work isn’t rich until their lives are, and they’ve had some time to reflect on those paradoxically mundane and unique riches. Writing responds incredibly well to maturity, both in content and approach. It likes a grizzled, black-humored sea captain with twenty years of dark empty nights under his belt much more than it likes a dewy eyed freshman. It much prefers a mom who’s raised a dozen kids and grandkids and has stretch marks and weird, as-yet-to-be-defined curves and lumps, yet goes out running every morning anyway, and loves every minute of it to the starving supermodel. It much prefers Stephen King to a virgin.
And I promise, I speak from experience. I was a terrible writer until I actually wrote. I was hugely talented, but a terrible writer all the same. And it was the writing and revising and falling down umpteen times and getting back up umpteen more that forged that bone-deep relationship to writing that I know cannot do without, not to mention a few life lessons as well. I became a writer by writing, and 99% of writing is revising. It’s considering and reconsidering and shaping and chipping and getting one’s hands dirty in the miraculous, frustrating medium that is language. It’s a puzzle that will never be solved, a goal that can never be reached, and it reminds me, every day, that fighting the good fight is always a thousand times more rewarding than leaping into victory.
So with apologies to all you freshly minted knights ready to slay the dragon with one fell swoop, I can’t WAIT to meet you after you’ve been knocked to the ground so hard you can’t quite breathe, but then you do, and it makes you laugh, and you reach out a hand for help. I can’t wait to meet that character. And I’m absolutely sure I won’t be alone, that we all ache to read things written by other bloodied and dirty and strong-hearted souls, that so many other hands will be reaching toward you, too.
June 22, 2016
Writer’s Log, June 22: What Is Love?
If anything, it’s undefinable. And I hope it remains so. Yet I’m always so surprised to come into contact with people who see it, somehow, as small. A thing for Disney movies and incurable romantics and – I don’t know – puppies? A thing those of us too naïve or soft to know any better turn to when we should be batting down the hatches or sharpening our knives and white-knuckling our guns or putting huge walls up between ourselves and our neighbors.
Because in this worldview, love and its particulars are for those who are too small to stand up and fight, who remain intentionally – and foolishly – too soft to match blow for blow, strike for strike, insult for insult, hate for hate. Yet while I’d be the first to admit that hate and fear and anger are loud and violent and hard to ignore, to feed and fuel and invest in them as if they are the most powerful and lasting contributions of humanity is no different than voting for a schoolyard bully as most likely to succeed.
I don’t mean to draw too much attention to the size of love, as it’s unquantifiable by almost anyone’s standards, but I do want to emphasize its pervasiveness, and its complexity. I wouldn’t have written an entire book about love stories if I could explain that theory in a few lines, but it does seem that the sheer bravery and strength and isolating thrills of love are undermined in our collective conversations. All stores ARE love stories, not because all stories are about our deepest, most fulfilling connections, but because of how, no matter what, we continue to seek those connections, or feel their absence, or define ourselves against their lack.
Love drives us all, whether we want it to or not, and yet so few of us want to admit to it. But this is because we try to define it too narrowly, too simply, when it truth it underscores the best and the worst in all of us. Those who do not feel it experience unimaginable isolation; those who are deprived of it feel forever incomplete; those who are hurt by it grow hard against it or develop callouses of the heart that make it strange and strong. We are driven to connect to one another, and to claim otherwise or try to diminish the light in this truth is an exercise in futility, a practice in denying the undeniable.
What happened in Orlando this week has sent millions of love stories into the ether, like so many sparks of light after an explosion. Stories of the terrifying risks of love, of the anguish of love ripped too cruelly and too soon, stories of those who fear it more than murder. Yet all of these fall away in the midst of stories of the sheer strength it takes for most of us to love, to stay open and affective while navigating a national crisis of violence and finger pointing and social desperation. It is astonishing to think that some consider love to be weakness, a deliberate pulling of the wool over one’s eyes, when it is the truth-fearing coward’s way out to shut down and calcify, to court toughness when our bodies and spirits are unchangeably mortal and dependent and fluid and short.
When we really look at love, there is as much sadness as there is joy to its stories, but to feel that sadness is to feel the entirety of love, to know that to lose or shun or deny it is to suffer, and that to welcome and allow for its imperfect allowances is step into our collective inheritance as we might step out of shadow into light.
Because in this worldview, love and its particulars are for those who are too small to stand up and fight, who remain intentionally – and foolishly – too soft to match blow for blow, strike for strike, insult for insult, hate for hate. Yet while I’d be the first to admit that hate and fear and anger are loud and violent and hard to ignore, to feed and fuel and invest in them as if they are the most powerful and lasting contributions of humanity is no different than voting for a schoolyard bully as most likely to succeed.
I don’t mean to draw too much attention to the size of love, as it’s unquantifiable by almost anyone’s standards, but I do want to emphasize its pervasiveness, and its complexity. I wouldn’t have written an entire book about love stories if I could explain that theory in a few lines, but it does seem that the sheer bravery and strength and isolating thrills of love are undermined in our collective conversations. All stores ARE love stories, not because all stories are about our deepest, most fulfilling connections, but because of how, no matter what, we continue to seek those connections, or feel their absence, or define ourselves against their lack.
Love drives us all, whether we want it to or not, and yet so few of us want to admit to it. But this is because we try to define it too narrowly, too simply, when it truth it underscores the best and the worst in all of us. Those who do not feel it experience unimaginable isolation; those who are deprived of it feel forever incomplete; those who are hurt by it grow hard against it or develop callouses of the heart that make it strange and strong. We are driven to connect to one another, and to claim otherwise or try to diminish the light in this truth is an exercise in futility, a practice in denying the undeniable.
What happened in Orlando this week has sent millions of love stories into the ether, like so many sparks of light after an explosion. Stories of the terrifying risks of love, of the anguish of love ripped too cruelly and too soon, stories of those who fear it more than murder. Yet all of these fall away in the midst of stories of the sheer strength it takes for most of us to love, to stay open and affective while navigating a national crisis of violence and finger pointing and social desperation. It is astonishing to think that some consider love to be weakness, a deliberate pulling of the wool over one’s eyes, when it is the truth-fearing coward’s way out to shut down and calcify, to court toughness when our bodies and spirits are unchangeably mortal and dependent and fluid and short.
When we really look at love, there is as much sadness as there is joy to its stories, but to feel that sadness is to feel the entirety of love, to know that to lose or shun or deny it is to suffer, and that to welcome and allow for its imperfect allowances is step into our collective inheritance as we might step out of shadow into light.
June 17, 2016
Writer’s Log, June 17: Reclaiming Summer!
I’m writing this from my favorite spot on earth – Cape Ann, Massachusetts. It’s a little spit of land off the north coast of the state, and it’s all light and ocean and old houses and visits from nearly forgotten but essential ghosts of myself. We spent almost every summer up here when I was a child, and at every turn I can catch a glimpse of my younger self at the other end of the beach, or in the light dappled shadows of the trees, or further down the dense forest paths where the wild blueberries can be found. And the most wonderful thing about all this is that when I look around, I see that my ghosts aren’t alone.
For example, have you ever noticed how the beach is a great equalizer? People of all ages wander the sand looking for shells and sea glass, or squeal when they put their toes in the Atlantic in June, or lie on beach towels and chat for hours while they bury their hands in the sand.
In four days, it will officially be summer. I know, I know. You have work to do, a full schedule, a demanding life. But isn’t it true that everything in the world has a counterpart, that all actions have equal and opposite reactions? One of our biggest faults as a society is that we tend to convince ourselves that, in all our greatness, the laws of the physical and natural universe will probably just bend on our behalf. We don’t really need all that much sleep. Or to feed ourselves well. Or soften and be vulnerable. We’re too busy working and doing and earning to think of such trivialities.
That is, until we get sick, or burn out, or get divorced, or lose our jobs and think our lives are over if we can’t earn as much money as we once did. Sooner or later, the balance we haven’t cultivated is going to come crashing down on us like so many spiritual and/or metaphysical bricks.
So how’d I get from beach days and childhood to such a sobering reminder? I’m so sorry, but you made me do it. Because the beauty isn’t enough, is it? The gentle call from within you -- the one that already asked you to schedule a beach day approximately six trillion times since the last frost – keeps getting told it can wait. Even though we all know it can’t. Just because your work voice is a bully doesn’t mean it’s right. In fact, the loudest and bossiest among us are usually the most exhausted and cranky.
So how’s your wandering calendar? Have you scheduled any Not Work? Maybe you can circle June 21st on your calendar. Draw a star by it, or outline it in every pen color you can find, or just mark it with something else totally ridiculous to remind the hidden, quieter parts of yourself that you're going to make it OK for them to come out of hiding. You’re going to make some space for them to breathe. You might even find a way to let them run around a bit and stretch their legs. Maybe even play.
And the great part of all this is that you can justify it to the most sober and serious and responsible parts of you. Because even they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that a life of work produces nothing. That distress and disease and discomfort and disappointment don’t make you into some kind of noble work martyr. They just martyr your work. The real saints among us – and most of the creative and productive and accomplished people I admire – radiate joy. Aren’t you ready to join them? Aren’t you ready to be whole again?
For example, have you ever noticed how the beach is a great equalizer? People of all ages wander the sand looking for shells and sea glass, or squeal when they put their toes in the Atlantic in June, or lie on beach towels and chat for hours while they bury their hands in the sand.
In four days, it will officially be summer. I know, I know. You have work to do, a full schedule, a demanding life. But isn’t it true that everything in the world has a counterpart, that all actions have equal and opposite reactions? One of our biggest faults as a society is that we tend to convince ourselves that, in all our greatness, the laws of the physical and natural universe will probably just bend on our behalf. We don’t really need all that much sleep. Or to feed ourselves well. Or soften and be vulnerable. We’re too busy working and doing and earning to think of such trivialities.
That is, until we get sick, or burn out, or get divorced, or lose our jobs and think our lives are over if we can’t earn as much money as we once did. Sooner or later, the balance we haven’t cultivated is going to come crashing down on us like so many spiritual and/or metaphysical bricks.
So how’d I get from beach days and childhood to such a sobering reminder? I’m so sorry, but you made me do it. Because the beauty isn’t enough, is it? The gentle call from within you -- the one that already asked you to schedule a beach day approximately six trillion times since the last frost – keeps getting told it can wait. Even though we all know it can’t. Just because your work voice is a bully doesn’t mean it’s right. In fact, the loudest and bossiest among us are usually the most exhausted and cranky.
So how’s your wandering calendar? Have you scheduled any Not Work? Maybe you can circle June 21st on your calendar. Draw a star by it, or outline it in every pen color you can find, or just mark it with something else totally ridiculous to remind the hidden, quieter parts of yourself that you're going to make it OK for them to come out of hiding. You’re going to make some space for them to breathe. You might even find a way to let them run around a bit and stretch their legs. Maybe even play.
And the great part of all this is that you can justify it to the most sober and serious and responsible parts of you. Because even they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that a life of work produces nothing. That distress and disease and discomfort and disappointment don’t make you into some kind of noble work martyr. They just martyr your work. The real saints among us – and most of the creative and productive and accomplished people I admire – radiate joy. Aren’t you ready to join them? Aren’t you ready to be whole again?
Writer's Log, May 28: Handwriting
Writer's Log, May 28: Handwriting
As I write this, I'm sitting across the room from a man who is handwriting a letter. He's got a knapsack and a martini and a huge card that he is filling with microscopic, slanted letters. We are both at an inn in Mendocino County, a gorgeous stretch of coastal land on the western edge of Northern California, where there is nothing to see but the Pacific, and nothing to imagine but the rest of the world on the other side of it.
I try to reserve vacation time for, well, vacationing, but I wanted to seize this fortuitous moment to reach out to you on this topic, as I have been thinking of doing for some time. A while back, I wondered aloud in this space what had happened to the lost art of writing letters. Not that the answer itself is what I'm really seeking -- because the answer could be answered in fairly obvious terms -- but a wonderment about why, in such a tirelessly connected world, the truer connection are falling further and further into obscurity.
And then this afternoon, at a bookstore, I came across an entire wall of beautiful stationery, which I didn't buy, but now that I've been visited by this letter-writing familiar, I think I might have to go back and choose the honeybee print from the twenties, evocative of wood and sunshine. But somehow that doesn't feel exactly like what I want to do, though it represents a small part of it -- what I really want to do is to be a part of a movement that gets all of us writing to each other again. Maybe just once a month, to someone we love very much who lives far away; maybe weekly, to a pen pal. There are so many possibilities, so many small ways we can begin to reclaim our slower, more thoughtful ways with words. Might today be the day we begin?
As I write this, I'm sitting across the room from a man who is handwriting a letter. He's got a knapsack and a martini and a huge card that he is filling with microscopic, slanted letters. We are both at an inn in Mendocino County, a gorgeous stretch of coastal land on the western edge of Northern California, where there is nothing to see but the Pacific, and nothing to imagine but the rest of the world on the other side of it.
I try to reserve vacation time for, well, vacationing, but I wanted to seize this fortuitous moment to reach out to you on this topic, as I have been thinking of doing for some time. A while back, I wondered aloud in this space what had happened to the lost art of writing letters. Not that the answer itself is what I'm really seeking -- because the answer could be answered in fairly obvious terms -- but a wonderment about why, in such a tirelessly connected world, the truer connection are falling further and further into obscurity.
And then this afternoon, at a bookstore, I came across an entire wall of beautiful stationery, which I didn't buy, but now that I've been visited by this letter-writing familiar, I think I might have to go back and choose the honeybee print from the twenties, evocative of wood and sunshine. But somehow that doesn't feel exactly like what I want to do, though it represents a small part of it -- what I really want to do is to be a part of a movement that gets all of us writing to each other again. Maybe just once a month, to someone we love very much who lives far away; maybe weekly, to a pen pal. There are so many possibilities, so many small ways we can begin to reclaim our slower, more thoughtful ways with words. Might today be the day we begin?
May 24, 2016
Writer’s Log, May 23: Listen Up!
Last week, I went on what might go down in my personal history as the Worst Fieldtrip Ever. All the right intentions were there: a devoted dad who wanted to share his exciting workplace with his daughter and her classmates; fifty-odd second graders primed for a day out of the classroom; several energetic parents along to chaperone and drive. But it was pretty clear that things were not going to go as any of us hoped within the first five minutes.
It’s hard to describe, exactly, what went down, but suffice it to say that this well-meaning dad had little experience working with children other than his own sweet daughter, and he had a knee-jerk, verbally punishing response to losing their respect and/or attention. So during the first activity, which was some miasmic concoction of dividing the fifty kids into two teams who then had to divide themselves into groups of five – or five per group, as he occasionally shouted as the hysteria ramped up, though the numbers didn’t work, which made some children start to cry – in order for half of them to start developing advertising logos and the other half to race against the clock to complete a building challenge under threat of no treats if they failed to do so, we veered from pleasant school outing to Lord of the Flies panic. Or so I thought. Because as I sank down to see if I could help the huddle nearest me, I overheard my usually mischievous and rabble-rousing friend Joshua chanting to his classmates, “Stay true to yourselves! Don’t panic! We can do this!! STAY TRUE TO YOURSELVES!!!”
And just like that, I was reminded that, as usual, taking just an extra beat to listen wholeheartedly instead of jumping in and speaking up can lead to the most surprising of revelations. We tend to all look up and look out when the loudest voice rises above the crowd, but what kind of world has that yielded us?
Later that same day, as we tried to shepherd the fifty kids through eight different food station choices and a hungry noon worker bee crowd, I thought of how easily I might have missed overhearing the most important lesson of the day had I given in to my Type A, mother-of-three and teacher training to organize, interrupt, and manage. And believe me, I know: It’s SO hard to listen when you think you have good ideas. This is true in all aspects of life, but it’s especially true in the most important ones, those areas of life that sustain us – like our relationships to children and to our best work. And while I regularly have tough writing days when I come in, guns ablazing, ready to conquer the next piece with all the ideas I’ve collected overnight or in the car or while jotting dutiful notes down in a recovering academic’s blackout, the work almost always goes better when I remember to come in and listen to what the writing wants to say.
And what does writing want to say? Well, it’s usually similar to what children want to say. To get off its back and let it create and play and be heard not because it’s fully formed or logical or authoritative, but because when we open our minds to the quieter, less bossy voices in our lives, we might just let in the sort of vitality and wisdom we've been searching for.
It’s hard to describe, exactly, what went down, but suffice it to say that this well-meaning dad had little experience working with children other than his own sweet daughter, and he had a knee-jerk, verbally punishing response to losing their respect and/or attention. So during the first activity, which was some miasmic concoction of dividing the fifty kids into two teams who then had to divide themselves into groups of five – or five per group, as he occasionally shouted as the hysteria ramped up, though the numbers didn’t work, which made some children start to cry – in order for half of them to start developing advertising logos and the other half to race against the clock to complete a building challenge under threat of no treats if they failed to do so, we veered from pleasant school outing to Lord of the Flies panic. Or so I thought. Because as I sank down to see if I could help the huddle nearest me, I overheard my usually mischievous and rabble-rousing friend Joshua chanting to his classmates, “Stay true to yourselves! Don’t panic! We can do this!! STAY TRUE TO YOURSELVES!!!”
And just like that, I was reminded that, as usual, taking just an extra beat to listen wholeheartedly instead of jumping in and speaking up can lead to the most surprising of revelations. We tend to all look up and look out when the loudest voice rises above the crowd, but what kind of world has that yielded us?
Later that same day, as we tried to shepherd the fifty kids through eight different food station choices and a hungry noon worker bee crowd, I thought of how easily I might have missed overhearing the most important lesson of the day had I given in to my Type A, mother-of-three and teacher training to organize, interrupt, and manage. And believe me, I know: It’s SO hard to listen when you think you have good ideas. This is true in all aspects of life, but it’s especially true in the most important ones, those areas of life that sustain us – like our relationships to children and to our best work. And while I regularly have tough writing days when I come in, guns ablazing, ready to conquer the next piece with all the ideas I’ve collected overnight or in the car or while jotting dutiful notes down in a recovering academic’s blackout, the work almost always goes better when I remember to come in and listen to what the writing wants to say.
And what does writing want to say? Well, it’s usually similar to what children want to say. To get off its back and let it create and play and be heard not because it’s fully formed or logical or authoritative, but because when we open our minds to the quieter, less bossy voices in our lives, we might just let in the sort of vitality and wisdom we've been searching for.
May 23, 2016
Writer’s Log, May 17th: Drop. Your. Sword.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that, if you’re reading this, you’re a proud member of the league of misfits, one of the army of artists and scientists and left-field players that make all goodness in our world go around. But do you know why you make the world go around? It’s not just because of your intelligence and good humor, it’s also because you are fighting the good fight for the truths that make the most sense to you, even if they directly oppose the truths of your parents and grandparents and judgmental dog and snooty goldfish. Because if any essential parts of yourself need to get discarded in order to follow any kind of advice, it’s a pretty good sign that it is the advice that is at fault, not you. Advice is, after all, only an idea to be mapped onto a life; it’s the life itself that truly knows what works out there in the field.
The surprising thing is that it takes a lot of practice for us to remember this. All of us. For some reason, trusting oneself is a wacky idea in this culture, more so for those of us who spend any amount of time getting smacked around by the cacophony of voices in educational institutions and through the media and on the information highway. Truth be told, most days I’m like that little kid who gets a bucket stuck on his head in the original Parenthood movie, running into walls and mewling “helphelphelphelphelp.”
The lucky thing is that about ten years ago, I had kids, and in the face of pursuing things that took me away from my children or affected how I raised them, I suddenly saw those pursuits as separate from me, impositions from the outside world. Most of these I’d taken on willingly, even eagerly, but I’m not sure I bothered to check to see how well they fit. And suddenly, it no longer made sense to pursue an academic career when all I wanted, really, was the title that came with it. It no longer made sense to listen to those voices that told me I should be thinner, nicer, or more organized, those “shoulding” voices that were “shoulding” all over me. This was due in part to the fact that I was just too bone tired to pay attention to anything but the most essential parts of my life, but it was also due to the fact that having kids seemed to wake me up to the noise in my life, as if along with my nascent maternal instincts and wildly fluctuating hormones, my BS meter was suddenly cranked up to the highest detection level.
Talk about a silver lining.
Because that’s when I started to write. I always wanted to be a writer, but I was too tied up in the noise of what that was supposed to mean, what I could do with it, how it would help define me. At first, and for the longest time, I could only take the most halting steps away from these shackling standards, but over the years it’s gotten better. A lot better.
But it takes so much practice, and not just the sort of practice we usually think about when we think about writing, the sitting-down-at-the-keyboard-and-furiously-typing-come-hell-or-high-water practice. We need that practice, but we also need to practice how we think about writing.
I used to think that writing was something other people knew more about than I did. I used to confuse writing talent and publishing accomplishments for authority on the subject of how I should think about writing in general and about myself as a writer more specifically. I devoured the dictates of my teachers in print and in the classroom, but it rarely occurred to me to decide if their words made more sense to me than their prestige did. If an avid Hemingway fan tore apart my lyrical writing, I tore it apart, too. If an intellectual derided my whimsical characters, I scrubbed them out of my stories like a scullery maid going after a floor with hot lye. And because I couldn’t bear to be anything but the ideal student for each teacher I came across, it was no surprise that I wound up not knowing how to be the best version of myself.
So deciding to devote myself to the truth that was my passion for writing was only part of the turning point I had come to. Hours spent in agonizing creative judgment and paralysis helped me to eventually realize that I would need to work on not just the writing itself, but the way I thought about the writing. I would need to insert as much of myself into my writing practice as I would into the writing itself.
This takes a great deal of self trust, something I think I had in negative quantities (if that is at all possible) when I started out. But along the way, I’ve slowly paid attention to certain road signs that keep me writing, and I follow those, rather than the ones I’d cemented to my psyche since childhood (most of which read “Caution!” or “Do Not Enter” or just, “Wrong Way”).
Now John Gardner and Harold Bloom are gathering dust on my bookshelf and my favorite motto, the one I come to again and again, is adapted from The Princess Bride (which never fails to give my elitist self hives when I admit it and inspires my true self to clasp its fists in victory). It goes a little something like this:
Do you remember that scene toward the end, when Wesley hasn’t yet regained his full strength and Prince Humperdink discovers him reclining on Buttercup’s bed? They each have their swords trained on the other, but because Humperdink is such a coward, he falls victim to Wesley’s taunting, and eventually all Wesley has to do is say “Drop. Your. Sword” with enough conviction and Humperdink’s sword clatters to the floor and he allows himself to be tied up. I love this scene, and I’ve loved ever since I saw it at the movies umpteen years ago (and in the countless viewings afterward). The old version of me would never admit this, at least not in writing. She would have been embarrassed that she didn’t love Citizen Kane more, or couldn’t rattle off a list of award-winning independent filmmakers at the drop of a hat. She wouldn’t understand that she is as much Prince Humperdink as she is Wesley, as cowardly and fearful as she is brave and faithful. That she needs to laugh and be reminded that sometimes all it takes to win battle is showing up.
So that’s what I tell myself every time my elitist, judgmental and judging self gets in my way: Drop. Your. Sword. Just knock it off. Drop your sword or your standards or whatever inflexible thing is getting in your way and remember that silliness and whimsy and vulnerability and care are strengths, too, especially if they run deeper within you than a critic of them ever could.
The surprising thing is that it takes a lot of practice for us to remember this. All of us. For some reason, trusting oneself is a wacky idea in this culture, more so for those of us who spend any amount of time getting smacked around by the cacophony of voices in educational institutions and through the media and on the information highway. Truth be told, most days I’m like that little kid who gets a bucket stuck on his head in the original Parenthood movie, running into walls and mewling “helphelphelphelphelp.”
The lucky thing is that about ten years ago, I had kids, and in the face of pursuing things that took me away from my children or affected how I raised them, I suddenly saw those pursuits as separate from me, impositions from the outside world. Most of these I’d taken on willingly, even eagerly, but I’m not sure I bothered to check to see how well they fit. And suddenly, it no longer made sense to pursue an academic career when all I wanted, really, was the title that came with it. It no longer made sense to listen to those voices that told me I should be thinner, nicer, or more organized, those “shoulding” voices that were “shoulding” all over me. This was due in part to the fact that I was just too bone tired to pay attention to anything but the most essential parts of my life, but it was also due to the fact that having kids seemed to wake me up to the noise in my life, as if along with my nascent maternal instincts and wildly fluctuating hormones, my BS meter was suddenly cranked up to the highest detection level.
Talk about a silver lining.
Because that’s when I started to write. I always wanted to be a writer, but I was too tied up in the noise of what that was supposed to mean, what I could do with it, how it would help define me. At first, and for the longest time, I could only take the most halting steps away from these shackling standards, but over the years it’s gotten better. A lot better.
But it takes so much practice, and not just the sort of practice we usually think about when we think about writing, the sitting-down-at-the-keyboard-and-furiously-typing-come-hell-or-high-water practice. We need that practice, but we also need to practice how we think about writing.
I used to think that writing was something other people knew more about than I did. I used to confuse writing talent and publishing accomplishments for authority on the subject of how I should think about writing in general and about myself as a writer more specifically. I devoured the dictates of my teachers in print and in the classroom, but it rarely occurred to me to decide if their words made more sense to me than their prestige did. If an avid Hemingway fan tore apart my lyrical writing, I tore it apart, too. If an intellectual derided my whimsical characters, I scrubbed them out of my stories like a scullery maid going after a floor with hot lye. And because I couldn’t bear to be anything but the ideal student for each teacher I came across, it was no surprise that I wound up not knowing how to be the best version of myself.
So deciding to devote myself to the truth that was my passion for writing was only part of the turning point I had come to. Hours spent in agonizing creative judgment and paralysis helped me to eventually realize that I would need to work on not just the writing itself, but the way I thought about the writing. I would need to insert as much of myself into my writing practice as I would into the writing itself.
This takes a great deal of self trust, something I think I had in negative quantities (if that is at all possible) when I started out. But along the way, I’ve slowly paid attention to certain road signs that keep me writing, and I follow those, rather than the ones I’d cemented to my psyche since childhood (most of which read “Caution!” or “Do Not Enter” or just, “Wrong Way”).
Now John Gardner and Harold Bloom are gathering dust on my bookshelf and my favorite motto, the one I come to again and again, is adapted from The Princess Bride (which never fails to give my elitist self hives when I admit it and inspires my true self to clasp its fists in victory). It goes a little something like this:
Do you remember that scene toward the end, when Wesley hasn’t yet regained his full strength and Prince Humperdink discovers him reclining on Buttercup’s bed? They each have their swords trained on the other, but because Humperdink is such a coward, he falls victim to Wesley’s taunting, and eventually all Wesley has to do is say “Drop. Your. Sword” with enough conviction and Humperdink’s sword clatters to the floor and he allows himself to be tied up. I love this scene, and I’ve loved ever since I saw it at the movies umpteen years ago (and in the countless viewings afterward). The old version of me would never admit this, at least not in writing. She would have been embarrassed that she didn’t love Citizen Kane more, or couldn’t rattle off a list of award-winning independent filmmakers at the drop of a hat. She wouldn’t understand that she is as much Prince Humperdink as she is Wesley, as cowardly and fearful as she is brave and faithful. That she needs to laugh and be reminded that sometimes all it takes to win battle is showing up.
So that’s what I tell myself every time my elitist, judgmental and judging self gets in my way: Drop. Your. Sword. Just knock it off. Drop your sword or your standards or whatever inflexible thing is getting in your way and remember that silliness and whimsy and vulnerability and care are strengths, too, especially if they run deeper within you than a critic of them ever could.
May 9, 2016
Writer’s Log, May 9: Mothers’ Day
Now before you get your knickers in a twist, no, that’s not a typo. It’s a call to revolution.
It occurred to me yesterday that I can’t be the only mother who finds mother’s day deeply uncomfortable. Here I am muddling through caring for three kids 364 days a year, and then along comes this one day when they're supposed to thank me and put everything they feel about me into words on a card and/or into selecting the right gift. (Though I have to say that one of my favorite cards ever was the one in which my now thirteen-year-old son wrote in second grade: “Dear Mom. You’ve been a really good mom this year.” As if motherhood was a position to be annually renewed based on good behavior.)
The pressure is enormous for everyone involved. I never enjoy it because my kids and husband are on tenterhooks, and I feel obligated to become apoplectically happy over everything they give to me. I’m incredibly, ridiculously lucky that my kids and husband appreciate me in a myriad of small and big ways almost every day, a state I fervently wish on every single mother. But what really, really bothers me about mother’s day is the placement of that godforsaken apostrophe.
Listen up, folks: mothers should never, ever do their jobs alone. This is a horrible sentence to decree on any parent, and it goes against everything our functional mammalian heritage has offered us. Is there any other mother in nature who is expected to be the primary caregiver to her young from the ages of 0 through 18 (or maybe, more realistically, 28 or 38, given the extended adolescence that has grown in popularity over the last several decades)? Can you imagine a momma orangutan being left in her orangutan corner by the rest of her tribe immediately after giving birth so she could “have space and get to know her baby?” As if a mother’s bond to her child was as tenuous and delicate as magic beans sprouting in the rare light of a full moon. Let me tell you that the moment that child is ripped from your body, there is no one and nothing that can keep you from loving it so fiercely you are sure your heart might just explode from your chest at any moment during its long and complicated life. So I’m going to answer the orangutan question for you: No. If that were to happen, the orangutan would give into her natural instincts and toss the baby to the nearest passing lion after about forty-eight hours of maddening solitude before returning with PTSD to a herd that would maybe keep her psychologically and emotionally damaged self around for a few weeks before tossing her to the nearest passing lion without a second thought. Because she would have gone against every natural instinct mammals have cultivated over the past several thousand years.
I know, I know. You want to object because humans are different. We’re socialized. We’re evolved. We know better. Or do we?
My own mother was a part of the Mother’s Day culture. The one where she was supposed to do everything for us and in which asking for help was perceived as a slight on her character. It destroyed her, and it almost destroyed us. I have never met anyone more capable of maternal love, but living up to the mothering standard -- and this was before mothers were really seen as needing anything like careers or creative outlets -- was her undoing.
And yet I still know far too many mothers who call themselves “bad mothers” if, god forbid, they forget to bring the toilet paper rolls to school on Wednesday by 9:30 AM for the kindergartner’s “Create a Turtle” craft project, even though they made breakfast for him and got him dressed and make sure he gets to school on time and that he has what he needs to eat and that his dentist appointment doesn’t conflict with his AYSO schedule or his grandparents’ decision to drop into town and stay for a few nights last minute or his dad’s need for her to cook and clean and run the budget because he has to work 80 hours that week to make ends meet.
And I promise you, Scout’s honor and all that, that this scenario is just a teeny, tiny window into most mother’s daily realities. In fact, I am sure that if most mothers really stopped to think what they do in a day or week or month or year, they’d see that they were defying the laws of human physical and psychological capacities and realize, just like the guy in those old Bugs Bunny cartoon who runs off the cliff and keeps going in thin air until he looks down, that they should have crashed and burned long ago.
Mothers are wondrous beings, but they are, indeed, beings, and we should tend to them as such. Are their lives and comforts any less valuable? Do we want to teach our kids that our worth lies in how hyper-responsible we are, how little we seek out the talents of others, how little we bask in compassion? Heros are lonely and die early on the battlefield. Mothering, on the other hand, is something each one of can come to in a variety of ways, and when we do we only find greater comfort and a real sense of the value of lives beyond our own
.
If only we had mothers’ days instead. Several warm and naturally celebratory days during the year when we congratulated ourselves on our collective mothering efforts, congratulated ourselves on a culture in which we unhooked mothers from the unbelievably high standards we’ve strung them to and put all our hands into the funny, messy, clumsy, imperfect, community effort it takes to make children into the sort of in touch, creative, socially aware, adaptive, and engaged human beings we all want to know.
It occurred to me yesterday that I can’t be the only mother who finds mother’s day deeply uncomfortable. Here I am muddling through caring for three kids 364 days a year, and then along comes this one day when they're supposed to thank me and put everything they feel about me into words on a card and/or into selecting the right gift. (Though I have to say that one of my favorite cards ever was the one in which my now thirteen-year-old son wrote in second grade: “Dear Mom. You’ve been a really good mom this year.” As if motherhood was a position to be annually renewed based on good behavior.)
The pressure is enormous for everyone involved. I never enjoy it because my kids and husband are on tenterhooks, and I feel obligated to become apoplectically happy over everything they give to me. I’m incredibly, ridiculously lucky that my kids and husband appreciate me in a myriad of small and big ways almost every day, a state I fervently wish on every single mother. But what really, really bothers me about mother’s day is the placement of that godforsaken apostrophe.
Listen up, folks: mothers should never, ever do their jobs alone. This is a horrible sentence to decree on any parent, and it goes against everything our functional mammalian heritage has offered us. Is there any other mother in nature who is expected to be the primary caregiver to her young from the ages of 0 through 18 (or maybe, more realistically, 28 or 38, given the extended adolescence that has grown in popularity over the last several decades)? Can you imagine a momma orangutan being left in her orangutan corner by the rest of her tribe immediately after giving birth so she could “have space and get to know her baby?” As if a mother’s bond to her child was as tenuous and delicate as magic beans sprouting in the rare light of a full moon. Let me tell you that the moment that child is ripped from your body, there is no one and nothing that can keep you from loving it so fiercely you are sure your heart might just explode from your chest at any moment during its long and complicated life. So I’m going to answer the orangutan question for you: No. If that were to happen, the orangutan would give into her natural instincts and toss the baby to the nearest passing lion after about forty-eight hours of maddening solitude before returning with PTSD to a herd that would maybe keep her psychologically and emotionally damaged self around for a few weeks before tossing her to the nearest passing lion without a second thought. Because she would have gone against every natural instinct mammals have cultivated over the past several thousand years.
I know, I know. You want to object because humans are different. We’re socialized. We’re evolved. We know better. Or do we?
My own mother was a part of the Mother’s Day culture. The one where she was supposed to do everything for us and in which asking for help was perceived as a slight on her character. It destroyed her, and it almost destroyed us. I have never met anyone more capable of maternal love, but living up to the mothering standard -- and this was before mothers were really seen as needing anything like careers or creative outlets -- was her undoing.
And yet I still know far too many mothers who call themselves “bad mothers” if, god forbid, they forget to bring the toilet paper rolls to school on Wednesday by 9:30 AM for the kindergartner’s “Create a Turtle” craft project, even though they made breakfast for him and got him dressed and make sure he gets to school on time and that he has what he needs to eat and that his dentist appointment doesn’t conflict with his AYSO schedule or his grandparents’ decision to drop into town and stay for a few nights last minute or his dad’s need for her to cook and clean and run the budget because he has to work 80 hours that week to make ends meet.
And I promise you, Scout’s honor and all that, that this scenario is just a teeny, tiny window into most mother’s daily realities. In fact, I am sure that if most mothers really stopped to think what they do in a day or week or month or year, they’d see that they were defying the laws of human physical and psychological capacities and realize, just like the guy in those old Bugs Bunny cartoon who runs off the cliff and keeps going in thin air until he looks down, that they should have crashed and burned long ago.
Mothers are wondrous beings, but they are, indeed, beings, and we should tend to them as such. Are their lives and comforts any less valuable? Do we want to teach our kids that our worth lies in how hyper-responsible we are, how little we seek out the talents of others, how little we bask in compassion? Heros are lonely and die early on the battlefield. Mothering, on the other hand, is something each one of can come to in a variety of ways, and when we do we only find greater comfort and a real sense of the value of lives beyond our own
.
If only we had mothers’ days instead. Several warm and naturally celebratory days during the year when we congratulated ourselves on our collective mothering efforts, congratulated ourselves on a culture in which we unhooked mothers from the unbelievably high standards we’ve strung them to and put all our hands into the funny, messy, clumsy, imperfect, community effort it takes to make children into the sort of in touch, creative, socially aware, adaptive, and engaged human beings we all want to know.
May 4, 2016
Writer’s Log, May 3: My Therapist Is Moving Away!
If you’ve spent any time around children in the past decade or so, you’re sure to have come across the great Mo Willems, who has written such classics as A Big Guy Took My Ball!, The Duckling Gets a Cookie?!, and Should I Share My Ice Cream? I wish he would write for adults. We could enjoy such titles as My Boobs Have Started Sagging!, My Doctor Just Ordered a Colonoscopy?!, or My Therapist Is Moving Away!
I love my therapist. I’m not afraid to admit it. She is wonderful in every way. I’ve been in therapy off and on since I realized that my mother was an alcoholic and my father was in denial and these facts had left me very confused about the truths that I saw and the ones the people I loved most refused to accept. So for most of my adult life, in other words. I found my current therapist just before my first novel was published, and all the good in my life was giving me hives. Like magic, she was simultaneously putting out a shingle that reflected her belief that it is sometimes the most wonderful occurrences in life that challenge us the most. Since then, she has never let me avoid the sort of truths that are so much easier to sidestep than acknowledge, and she makes the most sympathetic faces when doing so. It’s sort of infuriating and 110% amazing.
And now she’s moving away. In a characteristically annoying and super-evolved fashion, she has decided that she’s had enough of the busy, achievement-oriented Bay Area and psychology’s hyper-focus on the Ego and she’s actually going to do something about it. She’s leaving her practice and the area to walk the walk, as it were, letting her newly powerful spiritual beliefs guide her toward a more peaceful life. This is a woman who earned her Ph.D. from Stanford, has a successful practice in a wildly competitive field, and has barely seen forty summers. You love and hate her now too, don’t you?
In all honesty, I’m not the least bit surprised. I would have been surprised, in fact, if she hadn’t eventually done something like this. But I will miss her so. And I realized this morning that one of the things I will miss the most is the ability to really talk with someone who is also committed to developing a deeper emotional conversation, one that reflects the deeper emotional experiences we are all having. I love this country, but we are really, really bad at talking about our feelings. If the American emotional dialect were to have a true linguistic parallel, I think it would fit in somewhere in between Desperate Caveman Grunting and Medieval Warped and Corrupt Castigations. Did you see that clip last night of Ted Cruz confronting a Donald Trump supporter? I practically had dry heaves. My husband had to pick me up from rolling around on the floor and assure me that all communication has not gone to hell in a handbasket, that a man on the street has no hope of really going up against a career politician, so he’s going to resort to fighting dirty. Wait. THAT was supposed to convince me? Excuse me while I go lie in the street for a minute.
In case you’re wondering how I got from emotional vocabulary to politics, let me tell you that they are far more closely intertwined than any of us want to admit. My therapist would never let us get away with such emotional smoke and mirrors, but the reality is that we are reaping the results of our failure to truly communicate, to prioritize experience as much as we prioritize wealth and power – not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because there is simply no way around the fact that we are profoundly emotional organisms, that our experiences and desires and hopes and fears play just as big a role as our jobs and finances and titles and acquisitions, even though we have been pretending, probably since our country was founded, that they do not.
Just look to the language. Science and art and every other channel of deep reflection tell us that the human emotional capacity is as informative and critical to our functioning as our intellects are. Yet we continue to tell each other to “deal,” to “be a man,” or “grow up,” or we tell our kids to stop feeling sorry for themselves, we praise them when they hold back tears, or demonize them when they explode with fear or sexuality or rage. We continue to try to pretend that our deeper emotional selves are not worth the same time and respect we devote to our intellectual and externalized selves. But however we may feel about the fact that emotional experiences play just as great a role in our lives as anything else, they simply do – no matter how hard we try to subvert and deny and ridicule them.
I can’t help but think that the challenges they present would be so much better incorporated if we all took a deep breath and stopped denying them. Stopped seeing them as punishment because we punish ourselves for them, and start seeing them as opportunities for insight and growth and bravery by acknowledging that they’re there and we’re not sure what to do with them. At the very least, couldn’t we try a few new ways of talking about them? And not just behind closed doors with a trained professional, but with those we love and trust already, who might be just as eager to acknowledge our collectively hidden corners as we are? Isn’t that always where the most powerful revolutions begin – with unreasonable hope in the face of tiresome fears?
I love my therapist. I’m not afraid to admit it. She is wonderful in every way. I’ve been in therapy off and on since I realized that my mother was an alcoholic and my father was in denial and these facts had left me very confused about the truths that I saw and the ones the people I loved most refused to accept. So for most of my adult life, in other words. I found my current therapist just before my first novel was published, and all the good in my life was giving me hives. Like magic, she was simultaneously putting out a shingle that reflected her belief that it is sometimes the most wonderful occurrences in life that challenge us the most. Since then, she has never let me avoid the sort of truths that are so much easier to sidestep than acknowledge, and she makes the most sympathetic faces when doing so. It’s sort of infuriating and 110% amazing.
And now she’s moving away. In a characteristically annoying and super-evolved fashion, she has decided that she’s had enough of the busy, achievement-oriented Bay Area and psychology’s hyper-focus on the Ego and she’s actually going to do something about it. She’s leaving her practice and the area to walk the walk, as it were, letting her newly powerful spiritual beliefs guide her toward a more peaceful life. This is a woman who earned her Ph.D. from Stanford, has a successful practice in a wildly competitive field, and has barely seen forty summers. You love and hate her now too, don’t you?
In all honesty, I’m not the least bit surprised. I would have been surprised, in fact, if she hadn’t eventually done something like this. But I will miss her so. And I realized this morning that one of the things I will miss the most is the ability to really talk with someone who is also committed to developing a deeper emotional conversation, one that reflects the deeper emotional experiences we are all having. I love this country, but we are really, really bad at talking about our feelings. If the American emotional dialect were to have a true linguistic parallel, I think it would fit in somewhere in between Desperate Caveman Grunting and Medieval Warped and Corrupt Castigations. Did you see that clip last night of Ted Cruz confronting a Donald Trump supporter? I practically had dry heaves. My husband had to pick me up from rolling around on the floor and assure me that all communication has not gone to hell in a handbasket, that a man on the street has no hope of really going up against a career politician, so he’s going to resort to fighting dirty. Wait. THAT was supposed to convince me? Excuse me while I go lie in the street for a minute.
In case you’re wondering how I got from emotional vocabulary to politics, let me tell you that they are far more closely intertwined than any of us want to admit. My therapist would never let us get away with such emotional smoke and mirrors, but the reality is that we are reaping the results of our failure to truly communicate, to prioritize experience as much as we prioritize wealth and power – not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because there is simply no way around the fact that we are profoundly emotional organisms, that our experiences and desires and hopes and fears play just as big a role as our jobs and finances and titles and acquisitions, even though we have been pretending, probably since our country was founded, that they do not.
Just look to the language. Science and art and every other channel of deep reflection tell us that the human emotional capacity is as informative and critical to our functioning as our intellects are. Yet we continue to tell each other to “deal,” to “be a man,” or “grow up,” or we tell our kids to stop feeling sorry for themselves, we praise them when they hold back tears, or demonize them when they explode with fear or sexuality or rage. We continue to try to pretend that our deeper emotional selves are not worth the same time and respect we devote to our intellectual and externalized selves. But however we may feel about the fact that emotional experiences play just as great a role in our lives as anything else, they simply do – no matter how hard we try to subvert and deny and ridicule them.
I can’t help but think that the challenges they present would be so much better incorporated if we all took a deep breath and stopped denying them. Stopped seeing them as punishment because we punish ourselves for them, and start seeing them as opportunities for insight and growth and bravery by acknowledging that they’re there and we’re not sure what to do with them. At the very least, couldn’t we try a few new ways of talking about them? And not just behind closed doors with a trained professional, but with those we love and trust already, who might be just as eager to acknowledge our collectively hidden corners as we are? Isn’t that always where the most powerful revolutions begin – with unreasonable hope in the face of tiresome fears?
Writer's Log, April 29th: White Woman Water
As a card-carrying White Woman of the Overly Privileged variety, I am never without my water bottle. I mean, how else would I make it through my ninety-minute yoga class on Sunday morning? Or through a day running errands in the California sunshine? Sometimes, I even put electrolytes in it. Because electrolytes are god’s work.
My mother’s not too different. My dad says she’s like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who fixes everything with Windex. Except my mom’s Windex is purified and filtered, and its bottle is BPA free. If you have a fever, allergies, depression, fatigue, a bad day, a terrible year, a disappointing life, she’ll ask you if you’re getting enough water. Dehydration is no joke, folks (and if my mother ever got a tattoo, I’m pretty sure that’s what it would say).
As much as we try not to parent as our parents did, we do. And I have to admit: when generally healthy children are concerned, water can seem like a panacea. Maybe it’s just the act of sitting down and breathing and sipping, but that moment of taking care of one’s essential self is such a gift, especially given how easy it is to do. I’ve tried and try many things as a mom to give my children the best possible care, and I have to say that some of the sweetest moments involve something as simple as handing over a cool glass of water and sitting with them while they drink it.
Yet this very morning, I had to laugh when I caught myself in the internal debate of water consumption vs. pee break opportunities that so often characterizes the minutiae of my day. I tend, shall we say, to overthink things a wee bit, but in my defense, it’s a strange position to be in – to have to remind one’s self to drink, or to have to plan drinking water – or eating, or sleeping – around one’s day. It speaks volumes to how little I am in tune with my essential needs, how privilege has eclipsed parts of my humanity. Thank god for writing, which forces me to at least pause and consider what I’d normally tune out. How strange is it that we have things like water bottles with metrics stenciled into their colorful sides? How strange is it that we have a water industry at all?
There are so many things out of balance in our world – it’s a refrain that’s becoming almost meaningless, given how often it appears in our everyday media and conversations and lives. I live in a drought-plague state and have unlimited access to the “finest water in the world.” Thirty miles south of me, in Central California, immigrants are working all day in hot fields for wages that might not sustain them. The idea of a water break is as probably as foreign to them as Donald Trump suddenly commending them by name for the agricultural bounty they make possible for the entire country. These imbalances might be illustrated ad infinitum worldwide. And the painful lack of progress we seem to making toward righting them is almost unbearable to comprehend. For all the lip service everyone gives it, rising up to truly combat these imbalances is an emotional problem as much as it is a social and economic and intellectual one, and I’m just as squeamish around that fact as you are.
Water certainly cannot fix everything. But maybe knowing that even our water – the very stuff that makes up the lion’s share of our bodies – is so oddly delivered, so poorly and unevenly distributed, might also alert us to how far we’ve drifted from the basic things that make all living things thrive. Things like water and good food on one level; compassion and consideration on another.
Part of me is frustrated with how we continue to drum up increasingly complex solutions to an increasingly tangled global human experience. Part of me wants to know why more opportunities for connection are erring on the side of more opportunities for misconnection. Have we grown so arrogant that we cannot return to the answers that have almost always worked for us? Have we grown so fearful that we cannot relax into our essential needs and, once they’re met, turn and meet our neighbors’, too?
I don’t have answers to any of these questions. But I believe that questions are often more worthwhile than answers. Maybe admitting to vulnerability and shame and fear is the way toward sharing their load more generously. Maybe wondering whether or not you or someone you love might just need a glass of water before reaching for the alcohol or Prozac or iTech might be the way toward reclaiming some of that silly, lovely humility that characterizes those atomically small moments in humanity that make us who we are. You know the ones: the ones we can’t have when there isn’t enough water or bombs are being dropped or wars are being funded and fought. The simple ones that we forget to notice while we’re off trying to change the world.
My mother’s not too different. My dad says she’s like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who fixes everything with Windex. Except my mom’s Windex is purified and filtered, and its bottle is BPA free. If you have a fever, allergies, depression, fatigue, a bad day, a terrible year, a disappointing life, she’ll ask you if you’re getting enough water. Dehydration is no joke, folks (and if my mother ever got a tattoo, I’m pretty sure that’s what it would say).
As much as we try not to parent as our parents did, we do. And I have to admit: when generally healthy children are concerned, water can seem like a panacea. Maybe it’s just the act of sitting down and breathing and sipping, but that moment of taking care of one’s essential self is such a gift, especially given how easy it is to do. I’ve tried and try many things as a mom to give my children the best possible care, and I have to say that some of the sweetest moments involve something as simple as handing over a cool glass of water and sitting with them while they drink it.
Yet this very morning, I had to laugh when I caught myself in the internal debate of water consumption vs. pee break opportunities that so often characterizes the minutiae of my day. I tend, shall we say, to overthink things a wee bit, but in my defense, it’s a strange position to be in – to have to remind one’s self to drink, or to have to plan drinking water – or eating, or sleeping – around one’s day. It speaks volumes to how little I am in tune with my essential needs, how privilege has eclipsed parts of my humanity. Thank god for writing, which forces me to at least pause and consider what I’d normally tune out. How strange is it that we have things like water bottles with metrics stenciled into their colorful sides? How strange is it that we have a water industry at all?
There are so many things out of balance in our world – it’s a refrain that’s becoming almost meaningless, given how often it appears in our everyday media and conversations and lives. I live in a drought-plague state and have unlimited access to the “finest water in the world.” Thirty miles south of me, in Central California, immigrants are working all day in hot fields for wages that might not sustain them. The idea of a water break is as probably as foreign to them as Donald Trump suddenly commending them by name for the agricultural bounty they make possible for the entire country. These imbalances might be illustrated ad infinitum worldwide. And the painful lack of progress we seem to making toward righting them is almost unbearable to comprehend. For all the lip service everyone gives it, rising up to truly combat these imbalances is an emotional problem as much as it is a social and economic and intellectual one, and I’m just as squeamish around that fact as you are.
Water certainly cannot fix everything. But maybe knowing that even our water – the very stuff that makes up the lion’s share of our bodies – is so oddly delivered, so poorly and unevenly distributed, might also alert us to how far we’ve drifted from the basic things that make all living things thrive. Things like water and good food on one level; compassion and consideration on another.
Part of me is frustrated with how we continue to drum up increasingly complex solutions to an increasingly tangled global human experience. Part of me wants to know why more opportunities for connection are erring on the side of more opportunities for misconnection. Have we grown so arrogant that we cannot return to the answers that have almost always worked for us? Have we grown so fearful that we cannot relax into our essential needs and, once they’re met, turn and meet our neighbors’, too?
I don’t have answers to any of these questions. But I believe that questions are often more worthwhile than answers. Maybe admitting to vulnerability and shame and fear is the way toward sharing their load more generously. Maybe wondering whether or not you or someone you love might just need a glass of water before reaching for the alcohol or Prozac or iTech might be the way toward reclaiming some of that silly, lovely humility that characterizes those atomically small moments in humanity that make us who we are. You know the ones: the ones we can’t have when there isn’t enough water or bombs are being dropped or wars are being funded and fought. The simple ones that we forget to notice while we’re off trying to change the world.
Writer’s Log, April 23: You Might Feel a Little Discomfort…
This is one of my least favorite things a doctor can say. For some reason, medical “discomfort” usually translates as flat out pain to me. Was there some secret doctor seminar back in the ‘70s where someone came up with the brilliant idea that people would feel less pain if they simply called it something different?
But I don’t think we can blame the doctors. We have a very limited vocabulary in our society for those things that raise our hackles, or set our nerves on edge, or just hurt – either emotionally or physically. It’s as if we’re as afraid to describe pain as we are to feel it.
There’s been a lot more discomfort in my life lately than usual, most of which I’m encouraged to consider should go under the heading of “it hurts now, but it’ll be good for you in the long run.” I’m doing physical therapy for my post-surgical broken wrist, and that involves a lot of bending and stretching I’d just rather not do. I’m also working with a personal trainer, a petite body builder who presses on the fascia in my legs until I cry uncle – at which point, of course, she smiles her beautiful smiles and tells me to stick with it. And sales on my novel, something most writers are told they should not concern themselves with, are poor after the first critical month of its debut. It’s impossible for novelists not to care about such things, as sales determine whether or not we will be able to continue to be paid for our work, but their success or failure is entirely out of our control. We must sit with the discomfort of wild popularity or dismal attention or something in between and know that once the book is out there, our work is done. But I struggle with this, crying out against it just as I want to call the very real “discomfort” of reawakening the use of my right hand “pain,” and I want to insist that the reintroduction to the unknown muscles of my body is as skin crawling as it is good for me.
Through all this, it has struck me that maybe it isn’t just that we have a limited vocabulary around discomfort. It’s also that we don’t like to talk about it, which also means, unfortunately, that we don’t get to talk about the remarkable emotional paradoxes that can exist within us simultaneously. I am disillusioned and in pain and struggling, but I am also immensely proud of my book and willing to let it go and elated that I get to use my hand again and totally jazzed that I have this trainer who seems to have found new ways for me to connect with my body.
And I find, incidentally, that all this connects with the title of my novel, too, at least as far as I meant it. All stories are love stories not because we always talk about the love between us, but because it never leaves the equation, even when suffering and pain and fear shoulder their way in. Love doesn’t lessen suffering and pain and fear, but it does go to battle right along with them. And at the end of the day, I do believe that certain essential experiences -- love, fear, pain, and longing – inform every story, and that our stories are far more complex and wondrous than we are usually willing to admit.
But I don’t think we can blame the doctors. We have a very limited vocabulary in our society for those things that raise our hackles, or set our nerves on edge, or just hurt – either emotionally or physically. It’s as if we’re as afraid to describe pain as we are to feel it.
There’s been a lot more discomfort in my life lately than usual, most of which I’m encouraged to consider should go under the heading of “it hurts now, but it’ll be good for you in the long run.” I’m doing physical therapy for my post-surgical broken wrist, and that involves a lot of bending and stretching I’d just rather not do. I’m also working with a personal trainer, a petite body builder who presses on the fascia in my legs until I cry uncle – at which point, of course, she smiles her beautiful smiles and tells me to stick with it. And sales on my novel, something most writers are told they should not concern themselves with, are poor after the first critical month of its debut. It’s impossible for novelists not to care about such things, as sales determine whether or not we will be able to continue to be paid for our work, but their success or failure is entirely out of our control. We must sit with the discomfort of wild popularity or dismal attention or something in between and know that once the book is out there, our work is done. But I struggle with this, crying out against it just as I want to call the very real “discomfort” of reawakening the use of my right hand “pain,” and I want to insist that the reintroduction to the unknown muscles of my body is as skin crawling as it is good for me.
Through all this, it has struck me that maybe it isn’t just that we have a limited vocabulary around discomfort. It’s also that we don’t like to talk about it, which also means, unfortunately, that we don’t get to talk about the remarkable emotional paradoxes that can exist within us simultaneously. I am disillusioned and in pain and struggling, but I am also immensely proud of my book and willing to let it go and elated that I get to use my hand again and totally jazzed that I have this trainer who seems to have found new ways for me to connect with my body.
And I find, incidentally, that all this connects with the title of my novel, too, at least as far as I meant it. All stories are love stories not because we always talk about the love between us, but because it never leaves the equation, even when suffering and pain and fear shoulder their way in. Love doesn’t lessen suffering and pain and fear, but it does go to battle right along with them. And at the end of the day, I do believe that certain essential experiences -- love, fear, pain, and longing – inform every story, and that our stories are far more complex and wondrous than we are usually willing to admit.
