(Pretty) Full Disclosure

I used to be a mean, angry, selfish, self-centered little girl, all alone in the world.  I tried to solve my problems myself but the only tools I had in my arsenal were fight, run, blame and playing solitaire, even though I was quite smart.  Soon after my 22^nd birthday, I came to the point where had ceased doing silly things like eating and sleeping.  I had run everybody off.  No one was talking to me.  Except poor Dan, the one hostage I had left.  And I wouldn’t really say he was talking to me. It was more like he was doing his own crazy thing and every once in a while we’d be in the same room together, at which point I would go all cataclysmic and shit. 

15 years ago in November, I ran out of all my crazy ideas and those crappy tools had up and quit serving me altogether. 

You know all that stuff about darkest before the dawn?

It turns out at the end of my rope were these beautiful answers.  With some help implementing these answers in my life, I have traded in fight for surrender, run for commitment and integrity, blame for accepting responsibility for my own life, and playing solitaire for a full full full life where I love a lot of people and a lot of people love me.  I’d like to think, at my best, I’m sometimes an example of what the power of Love and the power of God can do for a person.

I’ve written before about this idea of transparency.  It’s really intriguing to me, seeing as one of my default settings is secrecy.  I don’t know where I got the idea, but for much of my life I believed that I needed to hide the truth about who and what I was and what my life was REALLY like at all costs.  If I pretended hard enough that everything was okay, if I didn’t say out loud how dirty and pathetic and consumed with fear I was, then it must not be true. If I made sure things looked a certain way on the outside, spun my warped version of the truth in such a way, then you wouldn’t know what was really going on, and by proxy, I wouldn’t know what was going on either.

My goal for a little while now has been to live more and more transparent every day.  Not only because living in secrecy and denial is so poisonous, but because the more transparent I am with you and me, the clearer the channel is to God, to Creativity, to Love.  What that has meant in a practical way is that I have to keep revealing these awful truths about myself and my sick mind, because when it’s out in the light, when I can laugh at it, it doesn’t own me anymore.

The ugly truth today is that I have to postpone school.  For reasons in and out of my control.  The cool thing is that not one of these reasons has anything to do with me running away or being in fear or sabotaging myself.  In my past, (maybe not so long ago) I would have used this circumstance to confirm how little I thought about myself and what I deserve.  It would be very easy to see this as the Universe conspiring against me at every turn.  Except, boy, that’s just not working for me anymore either.  I contributed to these circumstances for sure.  If my life isn’t my fault, I’m screwed.  I can take responsibility for my part in this.  And for a moment I was heartbroken and devastated.  Fear of humiliation and failure runs deep.  But that's not all there is.

This morning, after taking the actions I know DO work for me – getting out of my head, reading some spiritual things and writing and praying – I feel like I have things a little bit in perspective.  I’m not sitting in anger or blame or sadness this morning. I’m not steeped in self-pity or martyrdom.  (At least not right at this moment.)  I’m actually sitting in trust and hope and all those other cheesy things of which I was once a scoffer.

This morning I know that postponing school does not mean the end.  I know that as much as my stomach - eh-hem - I mean my EGO hurts having to admit this to you, as much as I don’t like thinking about going to KC and my classmates to say goodbye for now, it doesn’t have to be that big a deal.  It’s just for right now.  The door to school or creativity or my life is not closed, no matter what my bad head says.  That thing lies all the time, so why would I listen to it?  And, who knows, maybe something else will work out.  My God is certainly bigger than these troubles.

I guess that’s what brought me to this point.  I want God’s will for me more than I want my own.  It works better.  I don’t sit on the floor these days playing solitaire waiting for Dan to come home so I can yell vile and vicious things at him in the hopes he’ll stop what he’s doing and say, "Gosh, Gaaby, you’re right, I’m going to change right now so that you can be happy for once in your life!"  I don’t chase everybody out of my life with my mean-hearted, damaging actions.  I’m not run by fear and resentment.  

There are some days when I contribute to the harmony, rather than the confusion.

If my will could have gotten me here, you can bet your sweet patootie I wouldn’t do all the things I have to do in order to maintain my connection to the other will.  But I want to maintain the connection.  On good days, I’m hooked into the source.  Hooked in enough that I am not swayed by what goes on outside of me.  If God, or Good, is involved in this, then there’s no reason to judge it one way or another.  It doesn’t need to be about disappointment or hurt or sadness.  It doesn’t need to be about taking steps backwards or not fulfilling something that needed to be fulfilled.  It’s just another stop on the path.

My intention is to keep you posted.  I’m going to talk to KC today. Maybe something fun will happen that I can tell you about.  If not, I feel confident that I can stay on the path of growth and transparency – in whatever form.  My wish is that when the times comes that I get back into this particular swing of things, you will all cheer loudly and for a long time.

Slaughter

That’s what it sort of felt like by the time class ended.

Two of my fellow students came up to me before class as we waited in the sitting area outside of our classroom.  One of them asked me if I had a Southern Baptist background.  There’s a religious bent to my story.  I told him no, but I had a repressed background.  The other guy sat next to me and told me very sweetly that he liked my story.  Those two things helped me feel a little less nervous. These guys seemed like they were on my side.

We were going in reverse alphabetical order, so Thompson went first.  Whew.  He was dignified in how he received what people were saying.  I tried to assume his posture.

Then came my turn.  KC always asks what works first.  It’s helpful.  It makes a person feel better, kind of like one of those pressure machines for cows that sooth their central nervous system before the blade comes down.  I got a lot of positive feedback for a short time. 

Then he asked what didn’t work.  It seemed like we spent way more time in that arena.  I listened and took notes.  It was a really interesting experience.  I’ve worked one-on-one with a lot of editors and authors, but to have them all in the same room, contradicting each other, disagreeing, invested in communicating what they thought about my writing, that was something else. The largest part of me hovered at a distance, observing.  The other part yearned to sit in the corner with my fingers in my ears.

I have stood in front of hundreds of people and revealed some of the most intimate details about myself and my life.  This blog has been a truth receptacle of the same variety.  In both instances, I am fairly confident.  I’m clear about my intent and my ability to communicate.  I have an inherent and unquestioned connectedness with my God when I’m talking about my real life, my real self that affords me the ability, even if I’m nervous because I’m invested, to be confident.  In those circumstances no one can tell me it’s wrong.  And if they do, I’m under no obligation to humor them. 

This creative place is a different place.  A tender and fragile place.  And it’s not that I haven’t accepted, and flourished, from criticism of my writing before.  I’ve been knocked down a peg or two or 7,459.  Because I’ve been raised to seek growth, I have been able to learn from these experiences in my past.  There have been times my mind has been blown, wonderful times when entire worlds have been opened up because of an observation someone has made about my work.  This is no different.  I’m sure.  It’s just new.

When KC was talking for SO LONG about the things that didn’t work in my story, I wanted, yet again, to stand up on my desk and yell, “HEY! I’ve never written a short story before! I only had three weeks to work on it! These guys probably worked on their stories for months! They probably read short stories all the time! I only submitted to you and this short story class because the head of creative writing said something about the way you treat your favorite students!”  With that many exclamation points.  And maybe that last part’s the crux.

Someone once said to me, “Gaaby, you can’t always be the favorite.”  To which I replied, “Why not?”  That’s just how I roll. 

In my dreams – you know, the ones where this day had nothing to do with slaughter – there seemed to be a remote chance that I might blow KC away with my command of the English language.  I thought perhaps I was in for a whole mess of praise.  I thought maybe he’d say, “Gaaby, this is the most amazing first short story I’ve ever read.  Did you say you’d written a novel? Can I read it? Can I send it to my agent?  Let me take you under my wing and nurture your career. Drop this class. You don’t need to be in college.  You just need to focus on becoming a New York Times best selling author.”

But, really, when it comes right down to it, what fun would that be? 

What he said in class and wrote in his critique is that stories are built out of more substantial materials.  He said an awful lot of it consisted of my main character thinking about stuff, at length.  He said I could cut almost everything I currently have to make room for more.  What he said in maybe ten different ways was that he wanted more.  And who can fault a guy for that?  It’s the same stuff I got with the first draft of the other thing.  Hilarious.  That darn peeling onion.  When people have come to me grappling with what seem to be the same problems for the hundredth time, I encourage them rather than to see it as a step backward, to see it as a step deeper.

So I suppose I ought to take my own advice.  When we were leaving the classroom, KC caught my eye.  He told me to look over my classmates’ comments and come see him next week during office hours.  So when I got home, I did just that.  I pulled out the marked up copies of my story and I studied them.  I’m going to tell you the truth.  No one was as harsh as he was.  They said lots of great things.  One of them said it was his new favorite story of the class. Many of them said my descriptions were wonderful (too wonderful, I’m sure KC would say).  My favorite kudos was that my last paragraph was “totally kick ass.”

And the truth is, it was totally kick ass.  Those sentences are two of my favorite lines I’ve ever written.  That doesn’t take away from the fact that all the things KC said were true.  Those things can exist in the same place.  There’s something inside me that thinks maybe he was so harsh because he sees something of value there.  I’ll let you know next week if that’s the case or if that’s just another one of my fantasies.  Regardless, at this particular moment, three and a half hours after the butchering, after processing a little bit out loud through this forum, I have this centeredness.  I have this hope.  In writing this, something seems to have shifted into perspective.    

Here’s what I’d like: I would like to get to the end of this class with no more than half of the insecurity and tenderness I have right at this moment – or I had earlier today.  I would like to be rid of this pathetic and deceitful thinking.  I’m not entirely sure how to accomplish that, but as Bestie B would say, I can see the next indicated actions.  They seem to be to pray, to write, to keep walking forward, to go to KC’s office and hear what he has to say, to engage fully in the process of honing this skill, learning how to make art the best way I can.  Since I have started this class, while I haven’t written much fiction, I have written at least eight pages a week right here in this blog.  That might not seem like much to some, but to this writer who’s been lost in a drought for the past year, it seems consistently like a hell of a lot.  

Thinking

By the end of this post, you may think I’m trying to get sympathy or that delicious brand of encouragement that you all provide.  I assure you, you’d be wrong.  (Though it is an AMAZING bonus.)  I’m just trying to tell the truth.  And the truth right now is that I’m shocked at myself.  I would have never guessed that I would react to this situation in this manner.

Last weekend I went to the Lewis and Clark Caverns with my family.  We all joked around about my potential reaction before we headed there.  Ha ha ha, isn’t it funny when we take the little Jewish girl from Detroit on adventures where there are bats.  Hannah and Bestie B’s middle girl were ahead of me as we traipsed into the depths of the caves, spelunking our little brains out. Every once in a while, B’s girl would turn to Hannah or me (I couldn’t tell because it was pitch black and smelled like a basement) and whisper in what I took to be a menacing voice, “We’re inside a mountain!”   Oh, how I wished for duct tape.  When my brother-in-law of sorts asked the guide how far into the mountain we were, I had to plug my ears before the guide answered.  This reaction was beyond my control.  I’ll tell you that much.

As much as I joke about who I am – an indoor girl, I’ll often say – when it comes right down to it, unless it deals with blood or bodily fluid, sometimes I can hold my own when push comes to shove.  There is, I’d love to think, just a hint of badass in me.  Somewhere.

But my reaction to those caves was involuntary.

My reaction to blood and bodily fluids, to words like “tissue” or “chunk” when used in the wrong context is involuntary.

And my reaction to this class is involuntary too.  Insecurity and consuming fear of what others will think dogs my every step. 

I wish I was brave.  I wish I didn’t care.  I wish I still drank or did drugs or AT THE VERY LEAST SMOKED CIGARETTES!  I wish I bit my nails.  Anything to quell this anxiety.  But I don’t.  So I have to deal with it another way.

Walking through it, apparently, with Big Big Power on my side.

We had our first workshop on Tuesday and, man, do these guys know how to think.  I might catch on eventually, but these academics, they know the way to think about things and they spend time doing it.  I was in awe of the way they talked about each other’s work – with reverent consideration and a lot of knowledge about the mechanisms of writing.

Where writing and reading are concerned, I have been pretty much a feel your way kind of cat.  I know when I like something.  I know when something moves me.  I know when something doesn’t.  I haven’t spent a whole lot of time breaking it down.  If you’ll refer back to my blog post Woolston Magic Part 1, you’ll see that I’ve been this way for a long time.  The thinkers are like Chris:

“Here’s what a lead sentence looks like,” he’ll say. “And here’s the organized manner in which you build off of it.”

While I am more like me:

“Well,” I counter, “I just get a really cool idea I like and then it just sort of...” then I wave my arms around like a crazy person to help make my point.

Even when I’ve gotten to work with someone else’s stuff, my comments, criticisms, suggestions do not come from a cerebral place.  (Apparently, I only like to use my brain against myself.)  I talk a lot about the underneath – some sort of elusive writing place I think they can reach.  Everything I contribute is geared toward them finding the place they may need to find in order to figure some stuff out for themselves.  See.  Elusive.

Here’s how the workshop went: 

We were asked to read two of our classmates’ stories, make marginal comments and then write half a page to a page of comments separately.  This was hard for me in a couple ways.  First, I am a technical editor for a living.  I had to email KC to find out if I was supposed to be making grammar/punctuation/spelling comments.  He told me not to get lost in the weeds.

The second reason it was hard is that I’ve never done this before.  Duh.  But I prayed, read the stories several times and did the best I could.

When we got to class, KC asked the first student to read a few paragraphs out loud (YIKES!!!!!) and then asked us all what we felt worked and didn’t work. 

At first it was a little impossible for me to concentrate, what with all the projecting and such.  After a moment of getting myself in my body and out of Thursday when the same thing was going to happen to me, I was able to be present, placing all my skills of observation onto these fabulous creatures who have been studying the art of studying a story for three or four or five years.  

I was full of admiration and wonder.  They are practiced at thinking about the structure of a story, HOW things work, WHY the author did a certain something, WHAT the mechanism is that moves things from Point A to Point B, as it were.  I found myself wondering if their brains worked like this when they wrote.  I am hoping I have the chance to ask one day.

While I might not be so great at dissecting a short story, I am a wiz at dissecting human behavior (just ask my poor poor husband).  I tried to absorb as much as I could about the language they used, the analytical way they moved through the exercise.  And then I tried really hard to create my own little mash up.

When I write or read, it is 79.9% attempted brainlessness and 20.1% critic.  Okay.  Maybe those tables get turned every once in a while.  For the most part though, I’m not conscious of why something’s going where it’s going or the device with which people are getting places.  I’m just trying my hardest to hold onto the thread.  Sometimes there’s an idea I’m interested in preserving.  For instance, the short story I submitted to workshop first is all about obsession.  I knew all the way through that I wanted to demonstrate this character’s choicelessness.  I tried to stay true to his inability to say no to the object of his mania.  Other than that, I just sort of go where it takes me. 

Oftentimes, I am caught entirely unawares at something that happens, or better yet, at some pattern I notice when everything is said and done.  It’s kind of a crazy, Hey! Look what God did! kind of thing. 

When I’m reading, feeling good is a must.  I pay a lot of attention to how it’s making me FEEL, but not a whole lot of time paying attention to why.  If the good juju isn’t present right away, I move on, put the book down, try not to feel bad about not being able to get into it.

It’s kind of cool and scary to think about potentially harnessing this, seeing if I can shove it into a structure of some kind.  Learning!  What an amazing deal!

So I’m up tomorrow.  If I think about it for even a half a second, the blood vessels or muscles or something in my arms constrict and my heart starts pounding like crazy.  I start shaking and imagine I’m going to throw up at any moment.  I’m going to read out loud.  They’re going to say things and I’m going to listen.  It is only – ONLY I TELL YOU – because you walked through these very emotions with me a few short days ago that I feel I may be able to do it again. 

Here’s to hoping I react to life like a normal human being someday!

Now THAT'S More Like It

Just knowing that you were out there, semi-waiting for this, made me pay attention much more closely today than I otherwise would have.  Thanks for being there.  It is way less fun to have an adventure by yourself. I’ll tell you that much.

So today.  Today was a regular day for me.  Yay!  I met with someone too early this morning. I got my kids up and dressed and off to school. I worked.  I cleaned up around the house. I had a meeting at the kids’ school.  They came home and I was present for them. We looked over homework and snuggled a bit. We talked about their days. Without an ounce of recurrent anxiety.  Thank God for perspective that lasts.

Then I borrowed $2 cash for parking money from my 11-year-old son and I went to class.  Just drove there, like a regular person.  Didn’t even look in the mirror on my way out the door.  I saw someone I know standing outside my classroom and I was able to hug them and chat for a few minutes without puking or bursting into tears. 

If that was the end of the experience, it would have been sufficient for me.

But it wasn’t the end of the experience.  Today was full-on-workshop-chairs-in-a-circle-people-talking-too-much-or-not-enough-certainly-thinking-too-much-with-some-shining-nuggets-of-gold experience.  No sick professor.  None of God's hilarious jokes.  The pretty real deal.

There are the usual suspects in my workshop – the guy with the long fuzzy ponytail who probably writes science fiction and the little hipster, all the way down to his D&G glasses, who feels so much like a non-Jewish Schmidt I want to bring a douche bag jar to class with me next Tuesday.  And there’s the little girl who sat next to me with a random zebra printed duct tape cuff around her arm.  She licked the lid of her smoothy for about five minutes in the beginning of class and had a very hard time sitting still.  For those of you who know me and what I’m used to in a group setting, you’ll understand that this was distracting to me, to say the very least.

I sat very still and prayed and tried to keep my friend’s sage wisdom in mind. “Just don’t talk too much.  Nontraditional students always talk too much.”  I tried to be quiet inside and I only talked when Professor Canty asked me what I thought.  Which was quite often, I’ll have you know.

The day he called in sick, he’d passed out this story called I am the Bear by Wendy Brenner.  I adored it. It was exactly my kind of strange and beautiful, full of longing and the fundamental separateness.  It reminded me of when I was 12 and my mom took me to see The Princess Bride.  The movie ended and the credits rolled and I fell apart in her arms, my scrawny adolescent body wracked with sobs because Jason Glass would never love me.

The infants had a lot to say.  They talked about how it didn’t make any sense, how they couldn’t identify with it, how the language was trite and the phrases overused.  I thought they missed the point.  When I was asked what I thought, I told them the Jason Glass thing.  Then I listened to them talk some more and I tried to stay very present.

I wanted to be in my body because every once in a while, amidst the pretentious, intellectually arrogant bullshit, Kevin Canty would say something about writing. 

I read something recently about spiritual learning actually being remembering what we already know.  I felt like he was talking to my guts and all the other important parts that allow me to do what I do.  It was Anne Lamott and Stephen King sitting right in front of me talking with humor and passion about this thing we all love.  Stellar.  A couple times I tried to scribble some of it down.

What he said over and over was that if I don’t do it, it’s not going to get done.  If I’m not writing, I’m not a writer.  I can think about it all I want, but the life is in the doing.  I’m supposed to be writing like I eat and breathe and love. It’s meant to be one of the things that serves to sustain me.  And it’s not that I didn’t know this.  It’s that I haven’t practiced this in a very very very very very long time.  Too long.  It’s been one million years since I’ve gotten up every morning at 5:00 to meet my writing mind.  One million.  What I have needed is a kick in the ass.  And I’m not 100% sure, but I think that’s what I’ve gotten myself into here.

I’ve been trapping myself a lot lately.  Like this blog.  I’m roped into it in a way that my ego will most likely not let me out of.  (See there, I write “most likely” because I want to give myself a backdoor.)  It’s true though. There are a lot of people I want to share this experience with.  This is a convenient way to accomplish that.  I’ve been in the practice of documenting what happens to me in this arena. I like being back in that practice.  But I’ve really forced myself to be accountable to something bigger than my crazy brain.  Cause that thing lies.  It lets me talk myself out of things with ease.

So here I am, cornered.  I’ve got you on one side, with your texts and Facebook messages and phone calls, all wanting to know what’s happening to me on this journey. And I’ve got him on the other.  This unreal resource who tells me to come to him, that he wants to teach me, that that’s his purpose.  I have to produce another 31 pages for him this semester.  HAVE TO.  And 31 pages wasn’t much to me back in the good ol’ days when I was honoring that which has been gifted to me and cranking out five pages a day.  Now I’m rusty and lazy and scared. 

But I’ve got some beginnings. And Kevin Canty tells me I can bring him three one-page beginnings and we can see what we see.  He also tells me I better be getting my ass up at 5:00 to write.  So I think that’s what I’ll do.

He asked for volunteers to bring in short stories next week to workshop.  I raised my hand, like the Good Student I am.  YIKES!

Plans and Designs

My first class started at 3:40 today.  Since the potential for complete failure was through the roof, I had worked myself up into quite a frenzy by ten after 2:00.  I could no longer function.  I tried to work.  I tried to watch The Glee Project.  I tried to talk to the people who love and support me.  All to no avail.  All I could do was try to anticipate what was going to happen.  What it was going to be like? Who was going to be there? Would I be able to find parking?  Would I be able to find my classroom?  If I did find my classroom, would I be asked to introduce myself? If I was asked to introduce myself, how should I go about doing that?  Should I leave out the whole kids and stretch marks thing in an effort to fit in?  Should I focus on the writing?  Should I make some jokes about my nontraditional nature?  All of this, but like magnified by 3,000.  Plus crying and shaking.

I left my house at 3:00 and called Dan as I drove down the street.  We can still do that here in Missoula.  He was walking into a meeting.
“Hey, you’re going to be great,” he started right in. “It’s going to be so much fun,” blah blah blah.  He went on for a while before he realized I was crying.
“Holy shit, are you crying?”
Sniffle, slurp, “I am so scared!”
“Oh.  Well,” he said, changing tactics, his voice taking on that quality it has when he’s trying to keep Hannah from going into total meltdown, “you’re the prettiest girl in the class.  And you’re the smartest too."  He ALWAYS knows what to say.  I started laughing through the tears.  “Yep, so you’re the prettiest and the smartest.  So there’s that.  Okay?”  He had done his duty and we got off the phone.

Bestie B called right at that moment.  Again with the crying.  We talked about God and anticipation and expectation and the difference between arrogance and confidence and why I was feeling the way I was feeling.  Still shaking.  Still a bit teary, but my body was taking me to the damn school anyway.
        “If I hadn’t outed myself on that damn blog, I would NOT be going right now,” I told her.
To which she said: “None of this has been your will.  That’s why it feels so wrong.”

I pulled into the parking lot and got off the phone with her.  I went to the little parking station and plugged it with quarters until it gave me a ticket for two hours.  I put the permit in the window of my car and started walking to class, just the way I had practiced it on Saturday.

(Side note: My mom happened to be in town last weekend for my birthday. My friend took me to campus to do a trial run and go to the bookstore and, because she was in town, my mom came with us.  As we were walking around, I started noticing all the little freshman walking around with their parents.  “Look, Mama,” I said getting a little teary, “it’s freshman orientation!  I totally stole this from you and God gave it back!” How cool is that?)
 
Yet another phone call carried me to the Native American Studies building, where my class is taking place.
        "I’m going in,” I said at 3:30 and hung up my phone.

I knew enough to know that Room 202 was probably on the second floor.  I did not look at anyone around me.  Keep your head down, Kid, I said to myself. Just make it to the bathroom.  The bathroom on the second floor of the Native American Studies building is much cooler than the second floor in general, a fact for which I was grateful.  The first stall I opened was a shower.  Great, I thought, this is what it’s going to be like.  You’re probably going to walk into the wrong room.  It’s probably not even the right day. What are you doing here!?!?!?  That’s when I got down on my knees in the actual bathroom stall to take a moment.
        “Okay, God,” I said, “if this is what you want me to do, then you’re going to have to get me into that room.  Deal?”

At which point I got up off the bathroom floor, washed my hands and walked out of the bathroom and into Room 202.

There were a handful of kids there already.  KIDS.   CHILDREN.  I pulled up a seat in the second row against the wall and watched as more tiny infants walked in.  The rate at which this room was filling up with newborns was unreal.  One of them actually said, “Wouldn’t it be so funny if our teacher was, like, sitting here, like, the whole time?”  I swear he was looking in my direction.
I had to text my husband.
They’re all babies, it said
But you’re the smartest and the prettiest, he texted back.  I smiled at my life and waited for my professor to make an appearance among the embryos.

The Man walked in at 3:40.  All grey hair and glasses and New York Times reviews.  I’ll admit it, I held my breath for a moment.  Here we go, I thought.  There was the setting down of coffee and the shuffling of papers, some talk about chair arrangement.  And then we got down to business.  The handing out of the syllabus.  I almost drooled.  Nothing this girl likes better than a list of tasks.  Yes!  My mind was still running furiously.  Were we going to move the tables and chairs into a circle? Were we going to do introductions? Would he ask me to read my short story out loud?

        Instead, he said, “I’ve got that summer cold thing.  I’m sorry I’m not more present. It’ll be different on Thursday.”  And then he got up and started making his way out of the room.
“Right on!” the fertilized eggs thought in unison.
I was totally shocked.  I wanted to stand up on my desk.  “I cried over this!  All the shaking and the freaking out!  I changed my outfit three times!  I agonized!  Do you think I look this put together all the time? Well, I don't!  I PAID FOR PARKING!”

I didn't do that.  I followed him out of the classroom and when I was out of his earshot, I called Dan and told him the whole story.
“It’s like God was watching you spin maddeningly out of control all this time, totally laughing. ‘I’ve already planned to give Kevin Canty a head cold, Gaaby. Chill the fuck out!’” Dan said, doing his best imitation of God.

Best. Anti-Anxiety Pill. Ever.

Even if you had called me up and told me that you were terrified before you jumped off this cliff and that once you got there, it turned out to be no big deal and that you'd worried over nothing, I still would have had to worry.  It's just my way.  I have to learn through my own experience. Thankfully, I do learn.  I'm really hoping I can keep this in perspective all the way to Thursday.  I want you to know that I felt every single on of you with me, that I was fully aware how loved and supported and encouraged I was the whole time. I am just going to keep counting on that.  That and God's amazing sense of humor.

Resurrection Squared

I slithered out of high school with a 1.7 GPA. The morning of my graduation, I had to wait by the phone to see if I was going to be able to walk across the stage with my friends. There was no graduation party for me. The only celebration was the exhausted sigh of a mother who had fought and scraped and conferenced herself into a frenzy for the preceding eight years to get me through the public school system.


My two best friends went to the University of Michigan, both with some sort of scholarship. Almost everyone around me was going to college. I was the exception in my high school. I am undereducated. In the crowds I like to run with, I’m still the exception today.


My battle cry in high school was that my grades were no reflection on my intelligence. I tested very well. I knew I was smart. My grand plan seemed to be to ace my English classes and fail everything else. The biggest problem was that I had trouble showing up to anything else. Bestie A and our other best friend would sometimes try to bribe me.

“If you go to all your classes today,” they would say, their voices sugary sweet with promise, “we’ll take you to lunch tomorrow.”

I was the only child of a single mom. I didn’t ask for money to eat out. We lived on the edgiest edge of a school district that had a lot of money. From where I sat, my friends were very wealthy. They were going to Cancun and Fort Lauderdale for spring break. I was doing… other things. Going out to lunch was a luxury.

“Yes,” I would say earnestly, “I will go to all my classes today.”

But then Matt so-and-so would ask me to go smoke a joint with him in the parking lot and I’d have to go do that instead. Those good intentions would try really hard to move me toward that stupid math class I was in, but then I’d see all those zitty horrible freshman sitting there, humiliating me with their very presence, and I wouldn’t have a choice but to walk on by. I didn’t belong there at all.

When it came right down to it, there were only a couple things I liked about school. And they were mostly boys. It was a disaster.

Perhaps you’ll be happy to hear that I did walk across that stage. My mother brought her tribal drums and beat them when my name was called. My vice principal, Mr. Collins, asked me if I knew who those people were as he shook my hand. His eyes were twinkling with pleasure, seeing me in the cap and gown that had nothing to do with what I deserved. That was the true pisser. Everyone loved me. I was precocious and charming and everyone was pulling for me. Pulled me right through high school, frankly. By so much less than the skin of my teeth.

My mom and I left Detroit for Montana shortly after my 18th birthday, plans of going to community college to get my shit together and then transfer to UofM left in the dust of our Subaru Legacy. I was going to take a year off. You know how that goes. We got to Billings and more boys got involved and that was the end of that.

When I was 20, I did a brief stint at Montana State University-Billings. For the past 15 years, I have been telling people I four-pointed college, that I left after my second semester in yet another attempt to get it together. The real story is that I got a 4.0 my first semester. My second and final semester in college, I was shocked to learn recently, went out in a blaze of F-ing glory. I flunked everything.

The truth is, I am a quitter. I’ve quit almost everything that’s ever meant anything to me. I quit college. I quit people. I quit jobs. I quit paying my bills. I quit dreams. I quit goals. I quit exercising. I quit trying. I quit eating healthy. I quit writing. I quit blogs. I. Am. A. Quitter.

I’m smack dab in the middle of this crazy experience right now that is making me look all of this right in its fat ugly face.

I am going to college.

It’s just one class. Don’t get excited.

It turns out God moved us 3.95 miles from one of the best creative writing programs in the country. And after all this heartbreak, a new path might be emerging. I seriously want to puke just writing that, but I have to be honest. It started to seem a shame, a waste of some pretty divine orchestration.

So I just took the next indicated action, which seemed to be going to talk to someone, an advisor. I have one of those now. We talked about my options. I fed her the replacement phrase for the whole grades/intelligence bullpucky: “I can’t see myself taking a pre-algebra class so I can get a piece of paper. I’m 37 years old.” She sent me to the head of the creative writing department, to whom I shoveled out the same line.

She didn't seem to pay that much mind.

What she said was that I should submit some work. I happened to be sitting in her office four short weeks before the deadline to do so. I was to write a short story, something I’d never done before, and submit it to some professors who were teaching some upper division creative writing workshops. I was to include a letter detailing some of the other experience I’ve had in my writing life that was supposed to compensate for all those years of not going to college.

So I took the next indicated action. I wrote the story, though I hadn’t written anything new in nearly a year. I wrote the story, though I was steeped in great and pathetic sadness. The song came to me, as it always does, by magic, and I wrote the story.

I took my ass down to that scary and complicated building and found my way to the mailboxes of those professors and I put the freakin’ envelope in the freakin’ box. And then I walked out of that place real fast. And then I went on with my life. I’ve gotten very used to not waiting.

Turns out I got in. I found out unexpectedly, by the hand of a lovely woman who didn’t know I didn’t know. She congratulated me on Facebook while I was in Billings, surrounded by the very, very closest people in the world to me. The Universe loves me like that.

So. Here I am, The Quitter, on the eve of this new adventure. Scared out of my mind that it won’t work, that it’ll be another dead end, that it won’t lead anywhere else, that I'm fundamentally not cut out for this, that I’ll just be the old woman in a room with kids who’re on that track – you know, the one I’m not on.

Except I am on it I guess. And I’m of a mind right now not to wonder too hard where it’s going to go. If I think too hard about that, I might be tempted to quit.

Self-Sabotage

I’m seeing a pattern in my life that I’m sure has been prevalent since birth, only I’m just now noticing. It is this thing where I intentionally pull things down around my ears when I should be taking great strides forward. For me, it happens in one of three ways. I use these weapons in nearly equal measures, 1 and 2 on a frequent, low-grade level, and 3 as a grand gesture used every once in a while to really drive the point of my worthlessness home.

1. Using another’s creativity to fulfill me instead of my own. (i.e. watching too much TV, spending too much time on the Internet or reading in an unhealthy, life-ignoring way.)

This creativity squasher weasels its way into my life in very subtle ways. At first I’m just stealing a bit of time during my day, here and there. Instead of using time to write - whether it be a half an hour in the morning when the kids are still sleeping or around lunchtime when I’m taking a break from fake work to eat or for hours late at night, like now, when I have brain energy that won’t leave me alone and I have to get rid of it somehow - I get sucked into living vicariously.

When this shortcoming first starts to manifest itself, I’m careful to balance out reading or watching TV or computer time with writing time. I tell myself I just need to decompress a little, that’s all. I’ll just read for an hour or watch one show. Then I’ll write. Soon, though, I’m drawn into the abyss. Either I find myself reading excessively, wasting my way through the Hunger Games series in two days, or I’m abusing Netflix, watching Firefly episodes back to back until four in the morning.

Don’t get me wrong. Both Suzanne Collins and Joss Whedon are worthy of my adoration and obsession. They’re both mind-blowingly creative in ways that are so damn rich it feels almost as good to be hooked up to their energy as it does my own. Almost. It’s certainly easier. And if I could ever do anything that feels good in a healthy way, I’m sure I could regulate enough to just enjoy them instead of using them to harm myself. Alas, I’ve never been much of a regulator. And when obsession is in cahoots with low self-esteem in my life, it’s never pretty.

The only solution is to knock it off. There’s something to be said for awareness. It helps to be able to see that I’m in this place. It makes the bouts shorter-lived. When I notice that I’ve, once again, been sucked in I am forced to stop. If I can’t do it by my own willpower, it helps if I tell on myself. If I say it out loud to someone else, it's not as easy to do it.

2. Veering off the path I know works. (i.e. being lazy.)

So this looks a lot like slacking. The dedicated writing time goes out the window. I’m sure I’ll have time to write somewhere in my day. I stop setting my alarm. I think when Dan’s alarm goes off should be early enough for me to wake up. Except that when Dan’s alarm goes off, then Dan is awake.

See, when I’m in a good place, I’m usually up at 5:00 or 5:30 because I can do my thing while the house is still quiet. I don’t just mean a lack of noise. I mean I am not battling with my family’s energy. They are three of the most compelling, pure, brilliant people I know, and when they’re around, I have trouble paying attention to anything else. Also, they need a lot of things all the time. When they are still sleeping – the heavy sleep they’re still in before the sun comes up – I can’t even feel them in the house. I can focus on getting my head right and spend some time preparing myself to write and then actually write in a disciplined, committed way. If I don’t prepare myself, sure, I can write, but it’s hard for me to get totally connected and I can end up writing from a self-indulgent, inauthentic place.

But if I do my morning pages, for instance, if I keep my commitment to write three pages longhand, stream-of-consciousness every morning before I do anything else, I can rely on that to free me from my weaknesses and blocks. I have to empty out the garbage before I can really access my mind in any kind of significant, unafraid way.

Then I can move onto the other tried and true tools. There are some books I read – two writing books right now, The Artist’s Way and Bird by Bird, and some other spiritual books. The Book of Awakening is a new delicious addition. Then some prayer and meditation and I’m on my way, my listening mind clear, purposeful in my intent. These are all 100% guaranteed tools that ensure my productivity and happiness, but I can’t use them if I’m holding weapons of self-sabotage in my hands.

3. Using circumstances in my life in order to feel badly about myself.

These circumstances always involve interactions with people who I perceive aren’t treating me right. Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist’s Way, calls these circumstances crazymakers. I can look back and see that every time I have come to a major turning point on this journey where I needed to be more trusting in myself and this process, have even bigger faith, I have brought circumstances into my life that confirm what it is I really think about myself. It appears to me like someone I have brought into the fold has betrayed me in some way. I internalize whatever has happened, sure that it has everything to do with me and what an awful, unworthy person I am, and proceed to bludgeon myself into not writing, or living, whichever the case may be. (see Bad Things Happen, 10/14/09)

Unfortunately, when I’m in a bad place, it doesn’t take much to knock me over. What Julia Cameron says is that as a blocked artist, I am pretty much willing to go to any lengths to stay blocked. Deep down, I’m so intent on not succeeding, so afraid of what that might really mean, that it really doesn’t take much to get me to throw up my hands and say, “Forget it! It wasn’t working anyway. I’m pretty much a piece of garbage. I was just fooling myself.” A mostly innocent comment, the tone of a Facebook post, the wrong answer if I ask someone to read my book, these are things I can turn into tools of self-destruction in seconds flat.

I feel like I came into this world being too much. Too sensitive, too loving, too open, too trusting, too out there with everything. These “too” traits are things that get me into trouble. If warped in just the right way, they are the character defects that place me in a position to be hurt with the crazymakers. I come on strong. Too much muchiness, if you know what I mean. If I vilify this trait instead of exalting it, it can harm me.

But there is that choice, to focus on paying tribute to this instead of using it against myself. Yes, this part of me may sometimes serve a darker purpose if I’m not careful. But a lot of the time it is exactly the thing that forges the bond. In the sustained relationships in my life, it is this effusiveness that draws people to me, that allows me to be fully myself. I think it’s also what allows me to tap into the collective unconscious and write things there’s no way I should be able to write effectively. It allows me to absorb and listen and express myself in a really powerful way.

When I am reflective about the way I work inside my life in a public way (i.e. blogging about my innermost ugly) I can trick myself into healing. When I say this out loud, it makes it much harder to allow myself to do these things.

Because as much as all of this is true, I am just as intent on succeeding. So there’s that.