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Living the dream. |
*This
title is stolen from the Joan Didion essay, "Why I Write," who, fun
fact, stole her title from George Orwell's essay by the same name. This blog
post is inspired by both the Joan Didion essay, that I just re-discovered in
the messy "Re-Read when Bored" bookmark folder on my Chrome, as well
as the recent Thought Catalog post 33 Authors
On Why They Write, which, conveniently, references Didion and Orwell's
essays. I will now stop this complicated and run-on beginning footnote and get
on with my own essay.
I
wrote my first short story when I was seven; I was bored on a vacation in West
Virginia, there was a thunder storm, and my aunt had that computer paper that
ceased to exist after the 90s, the kind that was perforated on the edges and
connected into one long, long piece of paper that would only separate if
carefully torn. The story was about a little boy frog and a dad frog. The
little boy frog was bored on a vacation, stuck inside because of a thunderstorm
(I must have dug deep for that premise), and did not like any of the
suggestions the dad had for his son - board games (aptly spelled
"bored" games), running around the living room, playing with one of
seven cats (no logic in this story - a frog with a pet cat?), and drawing
pictures of dolphins on computer paper. The little frog never found anything to
do because I never finished the story - a precursor to how a majority of my
short stories would end up later in life.
In
high school, I knew I was a genius because I wrote in my diary every three
months about "real" things. Freshman year, my grandpa died, and I
wrote really crappy poems with cliche'd metaphors and phrases like, "I'd
walk the path to heaven to find you." And, like the short story about the
frog, my mother made photocopies of all my crappy poems, giving me the
photocopies and keeping the original handwritten ones in her underwear drawer
next to the Tic-Tac box of my baby teeth. She made me feel like I had real talent - a mother is one of the most
dangerous creatures when it comes to pursuing a creative life. I could
literally copy a sentence out of Snooki's book and my mother would think it was
beautiful and well-rounded and toss me a photocopy of it on her way to filing
it in her underwear drawer.
I
know that deep down, I was writing to cope with the sadness and loneliness any
grieving teenager would have, but mostly it just made me feel important. I
carried around this black and white composition notebook and scribbled little
bits and pieces from people's conversations like a detective. I wrote in class
and at lunch and made sure everyone could see that I was writing without ever
showing them what I was writing. I still have that
notebook. It sits in a box with twelve other notebooks filled with scribbles.
My favorite line is stolen from a conversation between my mother and her college
roommate: "Honey, I'd have a beard if it weren't for my good eye."
I've
continued to write in lined notebooks since then, taking a break sophomore year
of high school to write in a graph-paper-lined notebook. That notebook was my
food journal, or rather, my eating disorder journal. In it, I taped pictures of
women's thin arms and abs and those annoying tear-out workout cards from Shape magazine, using it
as "inspiration," or, in other words, reasons for me not to eat.
When I did eat, I would overeat and throw up in my parents’ shower. I only
remember this because it's conveniently logged like a police report in the
graph-paper lined notebook. It lasted three months and I lost a lot of weight,
but I also hated every moment I spent counting calories and doing crunches late
at night on my bedroom floor.
In
the year following the food journal, I got healthy again, at least physically,
just in time for my grandmother to become incredibly sick. She was my best
friend and the reason I got through many painful nights in high school. It was
at 16 that I started to see a bigger picture forming in my mind: she was dying,
and I could not save her. So instead, I carried my notebook with me and
recorded our conversations and pieces of advice she would offer me. I scribbled
things like, "I used to smile all the time," a line that I still have
not found the proper home for in a short story. I made lists of all the things
we wanted to do the summer before she died. I wrote things we made, scores of card games we played, and grocery lists she wrote for me. That notebook is one of my greatest treasures.
She
died when I was 17, but not after a long and painful struggle, and myself
sitting there and witnessing all of it. After she died, I didn't know or
understand how to deal with the indefinable sadness that was worse than
anything I’d ever experienced. I took a creative writing class my senior year
of high school. The class was taught by one of the most amazing and inspiring
people I've ever met, someone I still keep in touch with. In her class,
she had us write in composition notebooks. I was no stranger to the
notebook-wielding business - this was my jam. I didn't, however,
realize what a profound effect being forced to write everyday would have on me.
We did free writes five days a week - basically just five minutes of
unadulterated pen-to-paper mental diarrhea. It forced me to push out the sludge
in my brain and really connect with the deeper, raw emotions that were tangled
inside me and my stupid and adolescent, grieving heart.
The
biggest lesson with writing I almost learned too late was that the feelings I
had inside - the sadness, anger, frustration, confusion, and fear - they weren't
unique in any way. It was how I talked about these feelings that made my story unique, and learning how has been the greatest challenge of all. No one would give two shits about my short story with a
protagonist who was sad because her elderly grandmother died. Why? Because the
death of an old woman is not a
tragedy, and reading a sappy story where the narrator whines and complains with
phrases like, "I was inconsolably sad and stifled the sadness with
cigarettes and vodka," does not win a reader over. In fact, if you'd like
a surefire way to get a reader to immediately stop reading your shitty short
story and go find something better to read, pack it full of saying how sad your
narrator/protagonist is, without ever talking about why or how or when or who
or what they are sad about.
Writing
has helped me to understand myself in this way. It's not what you write about, it's how you write about it; it's not what you talk about, it's how you talk about it. Writing has allowed me
to actually listen to people, not just plan what I'm going to say next. And I
listen to my characters, too, crawl inside them, hear their heartbeat, cry with
them, laugh with them, and then find myself in them and write their story
(lucky for me, all of my protagonists thus far have been some version of
myself).
Unfortunately,
I spent a majority of my young adult life feeling like I was a genius because I
wrote things down. Sometimes I still feel that way. But now when I write, I
write because I'm trying to untangle the messy wires and memories and make them
feel less painful. When I write, I get to see my grandma again. I get to eat
oatmeal at the kitchen table with her and play cards with her and hold her close
to me and protect her from falling over her oxygen cords and into a coma. Or
sometimes, I let her fall. I let her fall over and over again, in reverse, in
forwards, in slow motion, in fast motion, into a bathtub, into the ocean, into
me. Some days, on paper, I meet up with her after being away for months and she
asks me where I've been, turning and smiling at me in a sweater with a sailboat
on it.
Other
times, more often these days, I rework relationships. When I miss him, I write
it out on paper. I get to go back to that ranch, back inside that barn. I get
to relive the night that we drank two bottles of wine after shoveling
horse shit and hay all afternoon, that night when he undressed me for the first
time and whispered in my ear that he was scared, like a little boy, Cass, I'm
scared. I listen to my memories
and sew what those memories tell me into a stronger version of myself (my
protagonist).
When
I write, I get to rethink the fights I picked with him. I grow a pair of balls
and kill the crickets that invaded our kitchen instead of waking him up at 2
a.m. to kill them for me, making him so mad he wouldn't even let me kiss him. I
unravel the anger I still have, the bitterness that he could not love me the
way I wanted to be loved. I get to cultivate a new me, an understanding Cass
that accepts what, at the time, felt like cold, stale unloved love but was
really just his way of taking every hurt and heartbreak he'd had in his past
and putting up a shield to protect himself from being hurt again (and this
time, I don't contribute to his pain; this time, I stay with him in our apartment in
Northern California instead of fleeing to Los Angeles).
Writing
lets me relive past lives, it lets me drink up the sadness and anger and
bitterness and burp up some sort of beautiful conclusion about myself, my life,
my past.
I
guess writing does still make me feel important, but it's not that egotistical
importance I had when I was fourteen. Instead, it makes me feel like my life
itself and everything that has or hasn't happened to me is important. Writing
makes me feel alive, it makes me feel okay, and it makes me believe that I can
do great things (like heal myself and help others).
May you feel important, in a good way.
Namaste.
Essay writing is one of my hobbies and I think I need to upgrade my skills.
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