You Knew This One Was Coming, Right?

This blog seemed like a good idea at the time. It excited me, it filled me up with possibility and plans and energy. It seemed like a way to force myself to be someone I’ve always wanted to be – productive, on task, organized, efficient. One post a week, ticking off little checkmarks on a list made up of hazy summer weeks. I pictured myself sitting at my desk in the little office nook in my apartment, surrounded by towering stacks of books, a candle lit next to me, writing hard to meet a self-set deadline. I saw a bulletin board above my head, full of little sheets of paper with scribbled essay ideas, contest deadlines, and inspirational quotes for literary heft.

I made a special trip to Office Depot to buy that bulletin board. I carried it home with great pride, two little boxes of shiny red tacks making a happy racket at the bottom of the shopping bag as I strolled. It sits beside me right now on the floor, dusty and still wrapped in plastic, and of course I already lost the tacks.

This writing plan of mine – one post per week – was not even remotely realistic, of course. I could blame my failure on lots of things – my family came to visit. My day job got really intense. I had a head cold last week, and legitimate food poising this week, and oh my god it’s summer and it’s beautiful outside and I have to go to the beach/take a walk/drink sangria outdoors right this very moment!

All of this is absolutely true, and all of this is also absolutely bullshit, and don’t ever listen to me when I try to insist otherwise.  

I have a problem with the depth of space between ambition and reality. This isn’t unique to me, of course. There are far more dreamers on this earth than doers. It’s way easier to think fondly of doing the things you want to do, to sit and dream about them, to chat about them with your friends, than to get down into the dirt and do the freaking work required.

I am awesome at coming up with ideas, and having big plans for the future, and being excitable about life in all ways. I am less good at accomplishing anything in a measurable, steady way. I have always loathed this about myself, and admired people who are action-oriented instead of slovenly. People who say they will do a thing, and then, as if it were really that easy, just walk out into the world and do that very thing. Without worrying about it, or complicating it, or stalling or despairing or overthinking themselves into an exhaustive oblivion. Just simple action. This is amazing. Miraculous. Totally not me.

For the past year or so, I’ve been working hard to change this about myself. And in a real, action-oriented way - not just worrying about it and then following up my panic session with a nice nap.

There were things I didn’t like about myself, and I decided to change them, so I did. I hadn’t been traveling enough, so I unearthed my trusty purple backpack and went to some crazy places, and this simple act of movement was like a great miraculous awakening.

I had spent years turning into a homebody by accident, drifting into some socially nervous, tentative stranger-girl, and this just wouldn’t do. So, I invested in time spent with friends. I made a deliberate choice to drink far too much alcohol, to stay out later and laugh louder and dance stupider, and all of this felt delicious and perfect.  It was like running into a very best friend I lost a long time ago, and realizing, wait a minute, this chick is pretty fun after all, and her hair is certainly not as bad as she thinks it is. It’s better to be around her, or hey, actually BE her, than it is to be the mousy chick at home weeping on her dog over yet another viewing of the movie Pay It Forward on Lifetime.

I listened to the voice that has been commanding me to write for my entire life, signed up for some classes and gave that a whirl for awhile. This may seem like it’s not a big deal, and frankly, it’s such an obvious decision that I feel a little bit stupid. But what can I say? Sometimes we’re stupid enough to not recognize the things that we love the most. At least I am learning.    

I realized one spring morning that I’d lost 50 entire pounds but still loathed my body in such a deep and violent way that it was coloring my entire life. For no reason, on this particular day the weight of this misery became unacceptable, so I decided to no longer accept it. In one swift action-step motion, I hired a personal trainer and begged him to teach me to be strong. He took it one step further and taught me to be fierce, turning me into a girl with calluses on her hands from weight lifting, someone who fights to the death on the gym floor, goofy with laughter and dripping with sweat until she collapses in a gross ponytailed heap. I am more proud of those calluses than of any other physical piece of myself. I laugh and call myself a gym warrior as a joke, but I am not kidding. I am one.

By late spring I was living with a near-manic intensity, writing hard and working out hard and having fun and sleeping like a bear every single night. I was productive. I was efficient. I was making shit happen.

But the money ran out in June, as tends to happen with money and me, so I had to make different choices. Out went the lovely personal trainer, who was helping me become someone I’d always wanted to be. Out went the writing classes, which were starting to feel as vital as oxygen. These days I can barely afford soup. It became time to stand up for myself alone, without paying anyone to push me forward.

I was worried about self-accountability, which is the polar opposite of my strong suit. I was terrified to backslide into the person I used to be, a girl with great big exciting life plans, with lovely intentions, but an almost magnetic fondness for the couch, and the ability to watch the same sad cable movie twice in one night, because the remote is just too far away and this trough of ice cream is just too fabulous to ever stop eating, ever, and why would a person want to stop, anyway?

It’s almost September now. There’s still a little bit of summer left to go, but the air has shifted cooler, and the dark is drawing closer.  And in a sign that I might (finally) be growing into a real, human adult, I’m glad to see that I didn’t fall apart this season. I did pretty ok, in fact. I didn’t gain back 50 pounds in one summer, which must be what I secretly thought would happen based on the desperate intensity of my fears. I am still working out, hard. I am still spending time with friends and fighting the instinct to hibernate into my couch and wear pajamas at all times, like a second skin.

And although this blog appears to say otherwise, I am still writing. I am writing, writing, writing all of the time. The problem is not in the writing at all, the problem is with sharing what I have written.

I thought that if I stood up and stated, out loud and in public, that I would write once a week and find the balls to share that writing, that I then would. I thought I could will it to true by bellowing it out, under the threat of public humiliation if I failed.

And under that threat of a grand public failure, I really did write more. All of the time, even. But a funny thing happened. In knowing that everything I was writing was meant to be shared, it changed. All my little thoughts and stories and rambles started to drift away from what I am just beginning to realize is my own true sound, into something else. Something light, and careful. Very polite and politically correct. Sexless and joyless and gutless. Neutered, if you will.

 

I realized this on a fundamental level when I reread some of my work and realized I hadn’t cursed once. Whose lexicon was this? Some foreign, polite version of April who says things like “It’s true, I was pretty mad at her,” instead of “I wanted to rip her fucking scalp off and leap around on it, right there on the locker room floor, and then head straight out for a margarita.”

One of my truths: I think, and speak, like a truck driver. It’s the Jersey in me, and honestly, I like it that way. It makes me salty. So there. Fuck off.

It’s hard to write for an audience. It has been said that you must write as if no one will ever read what you have written, that you must write with your right hand as if your left is following just behind with an eraser, and goddamn if that isn’t breathtakingly correct and nearly impossible to do.

So, in a grand fashion, I sit here on this perfect late August evening and say, with a sweep of my arms and a dramatic bow, that I take it all back. I promise you nothing, my dear five readers, absolutely nothing. You will get zero posts per week here, a total black hole of writerly anything.

Until I can write for you with brazen honesty and loads of curses and dragon-like intensity, I will share nothing. Until I am able to sound like myself and still find something worth communicating, I will step back into my dusty little office and just keep working there.

For those that have been supportive, I’m so very thankful. You are my flowers, the sunspots of color in my great green empty field. I want very much to keep my promises and sweet lord believe me, I want even more to keep my pride. But let’s just go ahead and acknowledge total failure when we see it. Otherwise this page will just sit out there in the big quiet internet, haunting me. 

I will keep this blog, though. I’m a big nerd, and blogs are fun, so I’ll pop in and out of it. And since I am completely contrary by nature, in negating my promise to write I may have in fact unclogged my drain and will now finally be able to write.

But that is not a promise. I have learned a valuable lesson here about letting promises run away with you, and I will not unlearn it anytime soon.   

Right now the only thing that matters to me is that I’m sitting at my desk in my office, a candle at my side, writing. Like I said that I would. As I know that I should. Whether I’m writing for you, or for me, or just out of a blind sense of need and simple faith, all that matters is that I’m doing it. There is a quiet white line from my heart to the page, and from the page into your mind, and until I’m able to walk that line with force and dignity I won’t share anything at all.

I’m accountable to no one but my own great wild heart.  

And An Awkward Hello To You, Too!

I like to write.

If you know me well, you probably already know this. I guess it’s sort of obvious. As a little girl, I was a near-obsessive reader and journaler. There are drawers stuffed to the brim of barely-legible diaries at my mother’s house, collecting dust, that I will never be able to throw away. The early ones have dreamy adolescent flower or constellation designs on their shiny covers, and satisfying little locks on the side for the illusion of privacy, of having secrets worth keeping.

Over the years, these tiny books started to stack up as I chronicled my mostly-normal life. The first one I can locate is from 2^nd grade, age eight. In it, I wrote in unsteady pencil about my beagle Frisky, about Jesus and his father, God (thanks, Catholic school), and a lot, and I mean a lot, about my friends. The ramblings about my very, very best friends have that devotional little girl tone you can only conjure up when you are smaller than five feet and younger than ten, and are convinced that everyone else is way cooler than you will ever be.

As I crawled forward into teenagerhood, the focus in my journals (not “diaries” anymore, god, that’s so juvenile) changed, as it should, onto teenage things: boys. Boys who liked me, but I didn’t like back. Boys I liked who I despaired would never, ever notice me. There are frighteningly specific catalogues of first dates and first kisses and first fights. There is a legitimate five page spread, age 13, about the time I called the cute lifeguard from the neighborhood pool to ask him on a date. (He declined, as he was “kinda busy that summer,” thus handing me my very first romantic rejection to weep over.)

Of course other topics came up, too. That my parents just didn’t get me. More about how much I loved my friends. Generic complaints about my grades, my skin, my body, my hair. What to be when I grew up, and how I’d die, just crawl away and actually expire, if I didn’t get a part in the school play. That someday I was going to live far, far away and be exotic and sophisticated and mysterious and wear beautiful dresses and drink coffee in foreign cafes (probably wearing a scarf and big sunglasses) and read poetry and have adventures and see the world, the whole world! I doodled the word California in bubble letters a lot. Exclamations points and dramatically underlined phrases pound their way into every paragraph.

But let’s get real, during those years I mostly wrote about boys.

In college life changed and became, in equal measure, more interesting and more difficult. I wrote then, too, even more than before. I had a lot more to say. I’d sit up in the middle of the night in my creaky dorm room bed, leaning against a sweaty cinderblock wall as I typed furiously on my very first laptop over thumping music from other people's parties and lives. During those years I wrote about family, about sickness, about falling in and out of real love, about the astonishing brevity of a human life and what on earth I was supposed to do with mine. I wrote like it would save me, like it was breathing. I think it actually was breathing, for awhile.  

After college, I got swept up in the business of creating a real life, and I wrote far less. Whole years are now blank and mostly unremembered – if I didn’t write it down, if I can’t flip to the exact page where it happened and I noted it, it doesn’t feel like it happened. The only exception to the non-writing years are when I’ve traveled. If I’m on the road – any road, anywhere – you cannot tear the notebook of the moment out of my hands. Looking back now, my travel journals dazzle me with their intensity. In those pages, I can quantify my excitement by just counting the adjectives in each sentence. I can see myself at 23, stomach-down on the top bunk of an overnight train through Norway, in the bumpy scrawl of my handwriting. Those dirty little books are detailed and passionate and certainly ridiculous, and I love them more than is reasonable.

But aside from those fleeting times, almost all of my 20’s went by in an unexamined haze.

About two years ago this began to bother me. A lot of things began to bother me, actually, most of them involving the fact that I was now a real human adult instead of just a work in progress, and that I wasn’t positive I liked her. I kept thinking of the self I thought I’d be when I was 16, felt a little shadow girl watching me from a dark corner, wondering. I was feeling restless and vaguely incorrect, and wasn't sure how to fix it. So, I decided to do the only thing that made sense: write about it.

At first it felt unnatural, but it got easier with time. The urge to write became a little bit aggressive, a little bit chronic. In an attempt to try something new, I took an online writing class in creative nonfiction/memoir. And this, dear friends, was the moment.

For some reason, I attacked this class. I realized right away that I had no idea what I was doing, and this embarrassed me, so I used that shame as fuel to work harder. I learned things that are obvious in retrospect, but that I had never been given the tools to understand. I learned the importance of writing artfully and deliberately, instead of just blathering. I learned to write for a reader, which is new and scary for a private journaler-girl. I learned how to write dialogue, which for some reason scared the crap out of me.  I learned to knock it off with the adverbs, and to show and not tell (which I am not doing here).

I know now that I’d rather hurl my body out a window than write a first draft of anything, but I also know that I have the patience to sit and polish one page for hours before I’m satisfied with the rhythm of it. And speaking of that, I understand now that writing has a rhythm, that it’s just another kind of music, and that if I arrange my words just right a song can be hidden underneath.  

I learned to give criticism with both kindness and clarity, and to accept it with an open mind. Even if it makes you cry. (Please, especially if it makes you cry.) And it is important to note that the best teachers are the ones who aren’t afraid to tell you that you suck, and that the only reasonable answer to that is to work harder.

I finished that class and took another. Finished that one, and took the next. I’ve been in class nonstop for eight months, producing new work every week. I now understand that the craft of writing is much, much harder than I ever gave it credit for, and that I want to be good at it.

The problem is that now I’m broke. I can’t afford another class right now, and I also feel like it’s time to stop hiding in a virtual classroom and just start working. My fear is that my dear friend laziness is going to creep in without the prompt of a paid-for class keeping me in check, so I’ve decided on a new plan: this little blog.

My goal is simple: to keep writing one essay, or story, per week, all summer. I have no objective clearer than that, no planned theme whatsoever. I’d like to try all different things. Maybe some travel essays, that’d be fun. I’d definitely like to try my hand at horror, give you all a look at the nightmares always plaguing me. Maybe I’ll try fiction, but I just don’t think I have that in me. My aim is to never say an untrue thing, which is harder than it sounds. 

And my request of you, my friends, is also simple: just be aware that I’m doing this. Peer pressure is a mighty powerful thing. Knowing that you will be (maybe?) compelled to click this little link from time to time to see what’s new in my head, keeping your virtual eye on me, will probably give me the motivation to find more to say. Even if it’s not polished, or original, or even remotely interesting, at least I’ll be writing. And with time, we’ll see where it goes.

On off days, I’ll probably post other things. Poetry, quotes, little artsy pictures. And I don’t know, videos of puppies probably. If none of that floats your internet boat, may I suggest you just find somewhere else to waste your desk time? You will be bored here.

Here’s the thing: if I put some of the energy I put into my ramblings, nonsensical emails into the actual creation of an actual essay, perhaps this chronic over-emailer will bother your inboxes less, too. One can hope.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. I promise you will find no genius here, no real art, just simple practice. We shall see.