Life's so good it's nerve-wracking!
so I'm getting my bearings by checking in with you
It’s…it’s too weird. I…I had this wild workout yesterday afternoon and then I came home and went to therapy which session ended with my therapist saying, “I think you made a lot of breakthroughs,” and she never, never says that, and I realized it’s because, with an unprecedented lack of stressful or draining people in my life, I don’t have to spend 15 minutes getting professional help dealing with the day-to-day, so I can actually address trauma, straight-up, for the whole session, because there’s nothing on top of the trauma that’s rendering anything difficult. Anything in my life that might be fucking up my intentions happened a loooooooong time ago. Everything happening now is really good? How, I wonder, did that happen.
Well, my dad’s voice from the cosmic ether stopped me from an actual suicide attempt a year ago, that was certainly point the first, gotta commit to Being Alive on a basic level before we can heal anything. All that shifted between then and now is a little bit much to go into here, but I have a memoir about some of it that’s now at 300 pages and counting, so, there you have that, for the curious. (I’m not actually assuming anyone is curious and I can’t answer for sure how curious I want anyone to be. Attention Whore-me is at odds with the rest of me on these matters, and how much of me the former accounts for varies from 10-minute-increment to 10-minute increment throughout the course of each day.)
Shit also got good because I risked some severe disappointments. They didn’t end up being disappointments because I got what I once wanted more than anything which was to be recognized by and accepted into Dream MFA Program, but then the dream changed, and now I’m in a different program that IN ACTUAL REALITY is paying me to write for the next 3 years, a fact I will not soon get over. If it comes up here at seemingly random intervals it’s because it hits your bewildered author at random intervals. What a day, what a time.
Hard to explain to my personal trainer, though, who’s all about things that actually sound exciting, why loving my life more than ever goes back to short-storyizing a 1970’s bank robber/heist romance novel I feel like I’ve wanted to write since cognition. I’ve been writing scenes and character descriptions in a lovely notebook that Ian’s mom got me from a monastery in Italy (!!), made from God’s own leather with pages that feel like durable silk. I didn’t think I was ready to put any of it into digital form, but one of my favorite lit mags is putting out a New York-themed issue and wouldn’t you know it, that’s where most of this story takes place. So I summed it all up, a kind of intro/short version. I’m not honestly sure how well it works as a stand-alone story since it basically stops before the action, but telling you I’ve wanted to write a heist story for most of my life is not the same as telling you that I’m capable of such a thing without a fuckton more research than I’ve as yet had occassion to do. And….and now I’m going to be paid to do it! I…I…I…I.
This is the life I’ve always wanted, always, for as long as I can remember conceiving of wanting a life. I started writing in earnest (as opposed to for fun) when I was recovering from my operation at age nine. Before that, I wrote — my favorite class in first grade was Computer on the days that Mrs. Tapscott allowed us a free period, so while everyone else was playing what games were available in 1989/1990 I was freeing my soul in Fredwriter. But that wasn’t the same writing as the poetry I wrote from those body casts. I wrote that shit to survive. And when it was explained to me that writing is a thing people can grow up and actually do I thought oh wow that’s me then.
Cue decades, however, where, contrary to what it looked like from the outside — I had a handful of plays produced in my 20’s, I got an MA in Children’s Literature and did a creative thesis of more playwriting — I didn’t really write. Because at no point in my life did I feel safe to say what I wanted to say. And for good reason! When I started to write with motivations other than people-pleasing, I lost a lot of people I once thought I couldn’t live without. I lost people I thought were my very close friends. I lost half my family. That whole almost-suicide thing? That came from believing that they were all right about me, that if I wasn’t terrible, I wouldn’t have been abandoned.
You know that contemporary adage, “If everybody hates you, maybe you’re the problem”? I would like to offer a counterpoint: “If everybody hates you, maybe you’re traumatically wired to gravitate to people who don’t give a shit about who you really are as long as you can be who they want you to be.”
Ian’s been in my life for eleven years now, but we live in a culture that says you have gone HORRIBLY wrong as a woman if you don’t have a group of YOUR GIRLS that matter at least as much (or, in the Bay Area, much more) than your MAN. So I was unfathomably lonely for about nine and a half of those eleven years. Then, for a wild year and a half or so, I wasn’t lonely at all. I was understood at a level I had never dreamed possible. Then, by necessity, that life-changing thread was cut too. I still mourn that loss. But I’m starting to understand that part of the reason for that is because for me to be myself in San Francisco I had to defy so, so, so much at all times. Defying shit by yourself is exhausting. Defying shit with someone else, everywhere you go? There’s no more intoxicating way to live.
But I didn’t write much when I was spiritually intoxicated. I might have tossed out one of these every so often, but you know from the typos that my “routine” was 1.) coffee. 2.) overshare. 3.) send/post. NOW I have a respectable routine of, 1.) coffee. 2.) REALLY overshare, my god 3.) look it over at least? See if there are any glaring typos but accept that you’ll probably miss some?
Good thing we all know that the linear progress narrative is a product of the patriarchy.
A week from now, I’ll get to meet hopefully all 6 of the rest of my MFA cohort over Zoom. 6 of us, WRITING, in a cute-college-town middle of nowhere, which means it’s likely to cultivate in an unfamiliar brand of closeness/intimacy. Sharing personal writing is one thing: clearly I have no qualms about that. Developing your work with other people, though? Taking in their insights and reactions on a one-to-one level? That’s a level of vulnerability that I’ve never experienced as an adult. (There exist, all over the world, people who are adults by 22; I wasn’t one of them.)
I feel emotionally equipped not because I’ve established “healthy distance” from my work; I couldn’t be further from that, I’m not even convinced that’s a goal. I’m emotionally equipped because I feel ready to go home to scream and cry if scenes I treasure are despised. I feel emotionally equipped because I’m better at differentiating between “writer’s purpose” and “my preferences as a reader” than I’ve ever been. I feel emotionally equipped because the supportive environment that radiates even at a distance from Georgia College couldn’t serve in more robust contrast to all I’ve since heard about Dream MFA Program Who DID Accept Me Just Wanted To Make Sure We’re Clear On That I Turned Them Down.
Sigh, I became insufferable after all. I’ll get knocked down more than my due pegs in Workshop I’m sure. I know how these things go. I’ve got an undergrad degree from FUCKING IOWA. And nothing but gratitude for Reza Aslan, who, in the days before he became a big name celebrity, was a Frank Conroy protègè who somehow established an encouraging and inspiring enviornment in which to savage us as needed, and he always left us laughing at ourselves.
I remember that class with astonishing clarity, even though I was seventeen. It was my first-ever college Creative Writing class, and, being one of those Smart Kids who had always been told I would thrive in college and therefore having anticipated this period of my life since I was nine, I was up that day when the cafeteria opened. Someone asked me what time my first class was and when I brightly answered, “10:30!” a whole table of bleary-eyed freshmen looked like they would have formed an angry mob if they weren’t so tired. I was unfashionably happy for the entirety of my first year of college, and if I got shit for that in the goddamn Midwest I can only imagine what they would’ve done to me if I had applied and gotten into Dream School back then. But there’s no way I could have. I was a hardworking dedicated writer who didn’t have a damn thing to say, or if I did, it would be decades before I was ready to say it.
Such is life. My life at least. A lot of people have families who push them to achieve. The half of my family who hates me now expressly wanted me not to achieve any more than they’re capable of, and unfortunately they’re derpy as all get-out, so that left me screwed for some time. I’ve just offered another instance of Why Am I Telling You All This? being a too-appropriate title for my memoir.
If I were treating this like a real essay and not just like what I’m doing instead of having coffee with any of you which is what I would prefer, I would Conclude something, but as of this moment there’s nothing to conclude. I have absolutely no specifics I hope you take away from this one. I want you to not have felt that you’ve wasted your time and anything else I’m grateful for but it all begins with that.
I still can’t believe my life is real and that’s the main reason I’m writing this. I’m starting to understand why even the ruins of Pompeii contain graffiti that roughly translates to “I was here.” This is like that timeless sentiment, only it’s in the present. I am here. Struggling with wrapping my head around this invigorating fact, and your readership is part of my evidence.
Always, always appreciated.
