Making things up
I came home from vacation with an idea for a mystery novel.
Yes, I fear I’m going to commit fiction.
You might ask why someone who writes for a living feels fear at the prospect of writing something. Simple: part of me thinks if I’m going to spend my precious time on writing, it should be guaranteed to produce income. I can noodle around with some other hobby that won’t suck away the writing energy I need to make a living.
And let’s face it: I’m a nonfiction writer. I studied journalism; I worked as a reporter; I write about true things. All the pieces are there, I just have to put them together in a way that’s both logical and attractive. When I think about writing fiction, my first reaction is, “What do you mean, I have to make things up?”
Of course, I have friends who are novelists, and their reaction to the idea of writing nonfiction is basically, “What do you mean, I can’t just make things up?” So clearly, the part of the brain that writes fiction is not attached to the part of the brain that writes nonfiction, other than some overlap in the actual language-producing regions. And maybe, if it’s a different part of the brain, the act of writing fiction won’t diminish the energy and motivation I need to write the things that pay my bills. Maybe I can think of it as creative play, the way I think of photography or cooking, two other things I do with no expectation they’ll lead to anything but enjoyment.
I also have a hard time with quitting. I have “winners never quit and quitters never win” burned into my synapses. I feel like I have to push my way through things until I’m good at them or they’re done, whichever comes first — even if doing so makes me completely fucking miserable. So maybe it would be a salutary experience to try something, just for the hell of it, and give myself permission to quit if I realize I’m not enjoying it.
Because I have this vivid image of a woman in a tattoo artist’s chair. She’s having a small but intricately detailed skull inked onto her left shoulder. She’s explaining to the tattoo artist that a girl needs something by which to remember her first skeleton. And I need to know what happens next.
Filed under fears, progress, Uncategorized | Comments (5)Brainwork
My ability to survive and thrive in my day-to-day life depends on two brains. One is the approximately three pounds of lumpy grey and white matter between my ears. The other, about 2.5 pounds heavier and also grey and white, is my laptop. They aren’t a truly redundant system — I haven’t yet figured out how to sync them, and let’s not even get into the mutual failover issue. But I’m equally dependent on each, for different reasons, and I fiddle with either one only with great caution.
Technically, it’s easier to muck around with the computer. If I don’t like the results, I delete the file or application and try again. If I mess up, I restore from my latest backup. If I really mess up, I always have the option of wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything from scratch, or if necessary trotting the whole shebang over to the Genius Bar at the Apple store. And if all else fails, I can move the contents onto a new machine.
With the so-called wetware, it’s not quite so simple. I can upgrade some of the software, so to speak, but there’s no such thing as migrating to a new cerebral cortex, so it’s taken me a while to get everything running smoothly. If you’ll pardon the nerdy analogy, I’m still resolving various conflicts and incompatibilities — but by and large, things are finally operating as they should, and given how much time and effort (not to mention cash) I’ve expended to get there, I’m reluctant to experiment.
I rely so much on my two brains that tinkering with either one of them makes me anxious. This week I’ve been tweaking both at once, which I consider brave and/or foolhardy, even though I pretty much know what I’m doing.
This afternoon, I’m wrapping up the complex and somewhat nervewracking ritual of setting up a new laptop. Each stage has its own attendant anxieties, from transferring data from the old laptop to the new one (What if I lose something important, like the article I’m writing that’s due next week, and can’t get it back?) to doing a total erase and system reinstall so the old laptop is ready for its new owner (What if I accidentally pass along the Quicken file with almost 20 years of my financial records?).
I’ve done this plenty of times; I know what I’m doing, and besides, the Migration Assistant in OSX makes it damn near idiotproof. And yet I still cringed last night when I put the system disks in the old laptop and told it to restore itself to factory-fresh settings, and again when I set up a seven-pass erase on the old external drive. Even with two other copies of my data, one on the new laptop and one on its new backup drive, I still had to push past that last tiny bit of oh no, what if I make a mistake that can’t be undone?
Meanwhile, I’m also testing a couple of medications meant to reset my circadian clock when it’s been badly thrown off. Two or three times a year, I get turned upside down chronologically somehow, and I want a way to get myself back on local time in a day or two rather than struggling to function for a week as I inch my wake/sleep patterns forward or backwards by an hour or two every night. This is definitely not something I’ll be trying on a regular basis, mind you, but knowing it’s possible is a comfort.
I’m trying both medications now, when my clock is properly set, because I want to be sure they don’t make me twitch, puke, lose touch with reality, or sprout an extra limb, so that if and when I need them, I at least know they won’t make matters worse. I’m doing this with a doctor’s approval, but even so, when I swallowed half a white tablet this morning, I felt a rush of deja vu from last night. That niggling apprehension, that last tiny bit of oh no, what if I make a mistake that can’t be undone?
Filed under fears, progress, Uncategorized | Comments (2)The challenge of forgiveness
Let me set up a hypothetical situation for you.
Someone does something really crappy to you. It doesn’t involve torture, bloodshed, or imminent danger to life or limb — but it’s not a minor annoyance, either. Think cheating, stealing, lying to or about you, that kind of thing. To make matters worse, it’s done by someone you thought you had every reason to trust. And when you say, “Hey, what the hell,” this person you trusted plays the “you made me do it” card.
What do you do? Unless you’re a saint, you get mad, and you probably stay that way for a good long while. But then what?
To some extent, this is a universal experience. It’s probably not hypothetical to you. It’s not hypothetical to me.
To add insult to injury, someone who took advantage of my trust has noticed that I made the best of the betrayal, and now points to that as proof that it wasn’t actually that bad and, in fact, might even be considered as having done me a favor.
What do I do? I’m not a saint. I got mad. I’ve stayed that way for a good long while. But now what?
Because the thing is, I’m starting to realize that my anger is no longer serving me. Oh, it did at first. It gave me the strength to stand up for myself, to put an end to the bad behavior, and to say, “Do not do that again, or else.” But now my anger is becoming counterproductive.
It doesn’t make me feel better. It doesn’t undo the past. It doesn’t even elicit an apology; if anything, the other person has used it as an excuse to justify a lack of regret. Worse yet, rage keeps me perpetually frozen in the painful and infuriating moment that I discovered someone I trusted was entirely untrustworthy. As long as I continue feeling it, I continue defining myself as a victim — and more than that, I continue berating myself for not having known, somehow, that I needed to protect myself. That’s corrosive, even more damaging to me in the long run than the original betrayal.
And so I find myself wrestling with the terrifying concept of forgiveness. Yes, terrifying. I know continuing to be good and mad (understandable though it might be) is, as the saying goes, “drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” But my fear is that without it, I have no way to protect myself against a repeat performance.
That’s why I wish I could erase the phrase “forgive and forget” from the language. I think it does us all a huge disservice; it implies that forgiveness equals defenselessness. Forgiving bad behavior — or to phrase it in a way I’m more comfortable with, letting go of anger about it — doesn’t mean accepting it. As a wise friend recently said to me, “You can forgive a scared dog for biting you, but that doesn’t mean you have to let it bite you again.”
If I let go of my anger, am I excusing being treated poorly, or worse yet, agreeing that it was appropriate? Does forgiveness mean I have to pretend it never happened? Does it obligate me to give the other person the chance to hurt me again in exactly the same way?
No. No. And no.
Once you move an untrustworthy person to the periphery of your life, where he can’t do you any further damage, you no longer need the weapon of anger to protect you. Letting go of it is about switching perspective from “things to run away from” to “things to run toward.”
I don’t know precisely how to do that. But I know it’s necessary. And I know it’s possible.
What are your thoughts on forgiveness?
Filed under fears, progress | Comments (10)Still not perfect.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. – Voltaire
~~~
Well, hello there. I haven’t made a blog post in far too long, and I have no excuse.
Actually, that’s not true. I do have an excuse. I was procrastinating. And for the strangest of reasons: I was putting off writing a blog post because I really, really wanted to do it.
I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what that’s about — and to my surprise, it turns out to be connected with, yes, fear. I wasn’t too darn busy to get to it. I wasn’t enjoying the pleasure of delayed but inevitable gratification, the way I think happily in the morning about the delicious meal I plan to make that night. I wasn’t using making a blog post as a reward for completing a less enjoyable task. I wasn’t even grasping for ideas; I have half a dozen ideas stacked up and circling like airplanes over O’Hare in bad weather! I was just worried that I’d sit down and write something heartfelt, put it online, and realize nobody was interested.
In other words, I had an attack of perfectionism.
I think a little bit of perfectionism lurks in the heart of all of us. After all, who doesn’t want — even a tiny bit — to be instantly and effortlessly good at everything, and to universal acclaim? But sometimes that desire goes malignant and grows wild. When that happens, it can turn into the compulsive striving and monomaniacal focus of the stereotypical control freak. But it can also do just the opposite and flip into a vicious cycle of “why try?”
Here’s how it works:
I worry about being judged and found inadequate.
so
I think the only alternative to being inadequate is being perfect.
but
I know I can’t be perfect, even at the things I’m very good at indeed.
because
No one is perfect. Even Nobel laureates, Olympic medalists, and great diplomats have failures.
yet
I don’t find that comforting
because
I feel Nobel laureates et al have earned the right to flop sometimes, but I haven’t.
so
I procrastinate, because doing nothing seems safer than exposing myself to criticism for doing something imperfect.
Avoiding doing things because I can’t do them flawlessly is like a baby thinking, “If I can’t skip the awkward toddling bit and go straight to a graceful run, why should I bother trying to stand up at all?”
There’s only one medicine for the “why try?” disease: deliberately choosing to do something in a half-assed way, or at least what I think is half-assed, and see what happens. To my surprise, what I think is “nowhere near good enough” looks just fine to other people. The draft I pounded out in an hour rather than revising every sentence three times? It didn’t come back for revisions. The photos I shot on the fly, snapping five times as many as I ordinarily would have? I nailed a handful of shots I probably would have missed otherwise. The awkward conversation I didn’t allow myself to rehearse in my head for three days straight? I didn’t have to be as eloquent as I thought I did.
And that’s why I’m going to post this right now and not allow myself to go back and tweak it later.
Filed under fears, progress, quotes, Uncategorized | Comments (2)The joy of fear
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. … You must do the thing you think you cannot do. – Eleanor Roosevelt
***
This quote is a touchstone for me; my main intention in starting this blog was to chronicle my attempts to follow Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and thereby become a stronger, braver, more confident version of myself. I’ve mentioned this quote to dozens of people over the years, and almost every time, the person I’m talking to brings up a time that s/he “felt the fear and did it anyway.” This week, though, two very different people who have never met each other responded to the quote in a very different, and (to me, at least) unusual way: both said that they were so stubborn and determined that they couldn’t remember ever thinking anything was beyond them as long as they tried hard enough.
I have to admit that I found this completely incomprehensible. Never felt intimidated or overwhelmed? Never endured insecurity or self-doubt? Never suspected they’d bitten off more than they could chew? Never worried about what other people would think or how they might react? Never feared the repercussions of going against the crowd? Never hesitated, even briefly, to say, “I wonder if this is going to work out”?
Never? Not even once?
That seems more than impossible to me; it seems superhuman.
But the flip side — being ruled by doubt — seems equally impossible. I confess that I’ve certainly hung back, kept quiet, delayed, denied, avoided, procrastinated, made excuses, taken the path of least resistance, or simply gone along with the crowd from time to time. The axiom about how the nail that sticks up gets hammered down rings all too true for me some days. Let’s face it: it’s a lot easier, plain and simple, not to do the things you think you can’t do.
But it’s also not as satisfying.
There’s joy in looking fear in the face. In standing up for yourself. In defending someone else. In risking rejection. In entering competition. In challenging conventional wisdom. In claiming authority. In setting boundaries. In examining your preconceptions. In defying your prejudices. In redefining your priorities. In confronting your phobias. In speaking your mind, as activist Maggie Kuhn said, “even if your voice shakes.”
Fear — not terror, but a healthy concern for consequences — is part of the human condition. It’s normal to think you can’t do something. It’s also normal to go ahead and give it a shot anyhow.
This week, find something you didn’t think you could do, and then do it. And come back here and tell me about it.
Filed under fears, progress, quotes, triumphs, Uncategorized | Comment (0)