(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!