[30 in 09/10] Some sort of manifesto.
I would very much like to talk about the two things that made me, and why. I am going to count this toward my September writing goal, because I am running low on creative juices at the moment.
Some sort of manifesto, or personal creed, or other such bullshittery
nonfiction, blathering, really
2200 words
How RENT and Writing Down the Bones saved my sanity.
First, some backstory [not too much, though]: I had an awesome childhood. Seriously; prior to the age of eight, I think things were downright ideal. All the bricks I needed to have put in place were slapped on down. After that, it gets messy. Disjointed memories; images of things I didn’t understand at the time; information I had no idea how to process. What it boiled right down to was a pre-teen with a shitload of insecurity, like, literally, not a secure environment; and then a truckload of hostility to mask it all.
So, coming into my late teens, in order to come out with any shred of coping skills or semblance of self, I had to bust two things: my anger, and my insecurity. And for some reason, I think sifting through a whole lot of writing and a whole lot of memories, it dawned on me like this week how I did it. What I fixated on; what I let in, to open me up again. To make me a healthy, passionate, mostly-adjusted person.
[download disc one & disc two]
First was RENT. I was sixteen, I think. And here, I will give you a few things about RENT:
- rock operas are inherently silly;
- the movie was pretty much awful;
- RENTheads can be unbearable;
- and, most importantly, “Everyone has AIDS” is probably one of the funniest scenes in any movie ever. Observe:
What I will not give you is that RENT is only these things. Anyone I’ve talked to about it loved RENT in that very same bone-deep, from-the-guts sort of way that I do. They’ve all got a story about how Jonathan Larson woke them up, somehow.
For me it was a coping mechanism; a way to be calmer about what I was going through when I first heard it. At the time, I’d been putting distance between myself and my problems, consistently clarifying: these are her problems, not mine. Because that is the healthy thing to do. The real thing that happens is: your families' struggles have an impact on your emotions and cognitive functioning whether you want them to or not, and it is your job to accept, process, and figure out how to find peace with how it’s affecting you.
And what I was dealing with was a mother so bogged down in Life and Fucked Over and Illness and Seriously, What the Fuck that should couldn’t be my mother. And she couldn’t be my mother to the extent that my father could no longer be her husband, and could no longer be my father. And after that things melted off the edges like soap under a hot spray, and I got lost in the cracks for a while before ending up at my grandmother’s, fucking furious and confused and feeling alone.
It took years of simmering, stewing anger before I heard:
Will I lose my dignity?
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?
And I EXPLODED with understanding. This is what she was living through; this is what she felt. This is her own personal fucking nightmare. The anger dissolved immediately and I felt like I could see some measure of what it meant that she couldn’t connect with me, couldn’t be what I wanted her to be. Who could, having to contend with feelings like that? Who could do anything beyond surviving? How do you even get out of bed?
To this day, literally, today, listening to “Will I?” reduces me to a hiccupping puddle. I can’t even convey to you what it feels like. I wish I had told her. I remember I made her a copy of the play. I never talked to her about it; I’m not sure she ever listened. Something I thought I’d have the time to get around to.
The story of that play rips at me. It brought me so close to her, and I never told her. I forgave her for everything, I understood, I stopped fighting so hard to have a normal mother and a normal family. I GOT why I couldn’t be with her, why I was suddenly without this strong family unit I’d always had. She was dealing with her own beasts, and recovering, and suddenly I understood, at the age of sixteen, what all children eventually realize about their parents: she was doing the best she could.
And RENT will always be long series of light bulbs going off, marking every moment my heart breaks that I couldn’t be what she needed, that I didn’t have any strength to give her, that ultimately she could not be saved.
How do you leave the past behind when it keeps finding ways to get to your heart?
It reaches way down deep and tears you inside out ‘til you’re torn apart -
How can you connect in an age where strangers - landlords - lovers - your own blood cells betray?
What binds a fabric together when the raging shifting winds of change keep ripping away?
One song before the sun sets
On another empty life
Time flies - and then no need to endure anymore
time dies
Look, I find some of what you teach suspect
Because I’m used to relying on intellect
But I try to open up to what I don’t know
Because reason says I should’ve died three years ago.
To people living with living with living with -
Not dying from disease
There’s only now
There’s only here
Give in to love
Or live in fear
No other path
No other way
No day but today
In truths that she learned
Or in times that he cried
In the bridges he burned
Or the way that she died
- Measure in love
The mind churns - the heart yearns
The tears dry without you
Life goes on but I’m gone
Cause I die without you
When you’re cold and you’re lonely
You’ve got one nickel only
When you’re worn out and tired
When your heart has expired
Every time I listen to it I relive every feeling I’ve ever had about her, and I feel time, and how it moves, and yeah. I choose to love. I make the decision. I love her, I love me, I love you, I love everything. Because it could be different. It could be worse. But it’s not.
[amazon.com]
The second important thing to happen to me was Writing Down the Bones. I first read it when I was twenty. I’d been writing since I was eleven, but this is what took it to another level for me; this is when I made it a way of life. I have given away so many copies of this book to people who I hope will find something in it that will save them the way it did me. Years later, I have realized: I did everything Natalie Goldberg told me to. I allowed it to shape my writing practice and my world view, and it literally made my life livable, at a time it absolutely was not.
Before this book I was drowning in anxiety, a need to be something better - phoenix rising from the ashes or some other bullshit melodramatic re-enactment of my Past, blargh I’m embarrassed to even admit I thought of it that way - but I had this frenzied, overwhelming desire to get away from my own life. From everything that was Holding Me Down and Suffocating Me and Defining Me. I was in New Zealand, as far as I could get from it all. I was unsettled. I was somewhere, and now I had to be someone.
I cannot even tell you the hysterical anxiety. I can’t even think about it, it is so scary. I used to operate in panic mode, all day, every day. My paper journals are terrifying. BE SOMETHING BE SOMETHING HURRY UP, BE THE BEST, etc. And then just dissolving into sobs of crazy. Yikes, kids. Yikes.
I’m not saying this to be obnoxious or to needle for sympathy; I am saying this to give a contrast between how I was even six years ago and how I am now. And I feel like what you know of me is generally what I am: I am happy, I am grateful, I am full of love. I am inspired by pretty much all things. I am intensely aware of my surroundings. I tap into the emotional content of whatever is put in front of me.
The transition from hysterical crazy to zen-like inspiration was all through Writing Down the Bones. I cannot even tell you how much relief I felt in molding myself to Natalie Goldberg’s easy guidance. There was such an exhale, such a settling of dust on the battlefield. It was a very matter-of-fact dictation of the same themes over and over again: You are important. Your life as you live it matters. Your details are original. No one else can be what you are. Be grateful for that, and now do the work you are meant to do: fill notebooks. Write outside the margins. Practice. Practice. Think. Notice everything. Read, and practice. That is all you have to do to feel whole.
And for me, she was right.
There is such intense peace in knowing that out of billions of people, there is a unique light in my mind [and more importantly, also in yours]. There is something no one else would envision. We might share words but the star map of associations leads us to completely different emotional experiences, and therefore completely separate interpretations, and that is fucking beautiful. And therefore, always and forever, I will have something to write. And all of the things in my life that have happened exist for me to write them. And through writing them, I will understand them, and I will know more about myself, and why I am different from you. And I will love you even more, and I will love me even more.
One of the most important things I’ve ever read comes from this book:
Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all the winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent, really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is now we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.
These two things freed me. I did everything these two works of art told me to do. I invented who I am based on them; learned forgiveness and passion from Jonathan Larson, and learned of my own value and how to write from Natalie Goldberg.
At the time, and up to now, I had no idea. No idea why I am the way I am; how I came out of a Veritable Hot Mess all starshine and squishy on the inside. And now I realize that sometimes I feel let down that I am so off the map I can’t get others to join me - like I’ve gone too far in the other direction.
So often, I feel myself elbow-deep in a conversation about something I LOVE and realize I’m alone - that the other party is nodding-and-smiling. Some cruel inner moment where I have to clamp down on my feelings and float back up to the surface, where they are waiting for me.
Even more often, I feel when I’m being indulged: like I’m a thought merely being entertained. Sometimes people get an oh-you quality to their tone with me. And little else in my life causes the let-down that that particular feeling does. Oh, you.
Sometimes I want to throw things out of frustration of not being able to connect way down deep with someone, in this glowing fiery hot ball of crazy I’ve got.
I feel let down when I find people can’t understand why I’ve chosen writing.
I am off the deep end. I realize. But I am tired of being laughed off. Being patted on the head when “He Lives in You” makes me burst into tears. Someone go there with me, and feel it. Let it fucking wrench your heart open. Someone listen to the Arcade Fire’s “Intervention” and fucking lose your shit in a relevatory panic with me. Someone be so obsessed with Life of Pi that you can’t even articulate the places it hits you. There are so many times I’m speechless, so often I get completely overwhelmed and cry at a Kings of Leon concert, and I just wish the person next to me would do more than shift their weight.
But I’m never not grateful. Bummed out, absolutely. But I’ll never forget how thankful I am that these two things entered my life at exactly the right time. I wish you were here. I’d give you my copy of Writing Down the Bones, and make you listen to Neon Bible with me until your heart exploded. Passion is catchy.
Some sort of manifesto, or personal creed, or other such bullshittery
nonfiction, blathering, really
2200 words
How RENT and Writing Down the Bones saved my sanity.
First, some backstory [not too much, though]: I had an awesome childhood. Seriously; prior to the age of eight, I think things were downright ideal. All the bricks I needed to have put in place were slapped on down. After that, it gets messy. Disjointed memories; images of things I didn’t understand at the time; information I had no idea how to process. What it boiled right down to was a pre-teen with a shitload of insecurity, like, literally, not a secure environment; and then a truckload of hostility to mask it all.
So, coming into my late teens, in order to come out with any shred of coping skills or semblance of self, I had to bust two things: my anger, and my insecurity. And for some reason, I think sifting through a whole lot of writing and a whole lot of memories, it dawned on me like this week how I did it. What I fixated on; what I let in, to open me up again. To make me a healthy, passionate, mostly-adjusted person.
[download disc one & disc two]
First was RENT. I was sixteen, I think. And here, I will give you a few things about RENT:
- rock operas are inherently silly;
- the movie was pretty much awful;
- RENTheads can be unbearable;
- and, most importantly, “Everyone has AIDS” is probably one of the funniest scenes in any movie ever. Observe:
Click to viewWhat I will not give you is that RENT is only these things. Anyone I’ve talked to about it loved RENT in that very same bone-deep, from-the-guts sort of way that I do. They’ve all got a story about how Jonathan Larson woke them up, somehow.
For me it was a coping mechanism; a way to be calmer about what I was going through when I first heard it. At the time, I’d been putting distance between myself and my problems, consistently clarifying: these are her problems, not mine. Because that is the healthy thing to do. The real thing that happens is: your families' struggles have an impact on your emotions and cognitive functioning whether you want them to or not, and it is your job to accept, process, and figure out how to find peace with how it’s affecting you.
And what I was dealing with was a mother so bogged down in Life and Fucked Over and Illness and Seriously, What the Fuck that should couldn’t be my mother. And she couldn’t be my mother to the extent that my father could no longer be her husband, and could no longer be my father. And after that things melted off the edges like soap under a hot spray, and I got lost in the cracks for a while before ending up at my grandmother’s, fucking furious and confused and feeling alone.
It took years of simmering, stewing anger before I heard:
Will I lose my dignity?
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?
And I EXPLODED with understanding. This is what she was living through; this is what she felt. This is her own personal fucking nightmare. The anger dissolved immediately and I felt like I could see some measure of what it meant that she couldn’t connect with me, couldn’t be what I wanted her to be. Who could, having to contend with feelings like that? Who could do anything beyond surviving? How do you even get out of bed?
To this day, literally, today, listening to “Will I?” reduces me to a hiccupping puddle. I can’t even convey to you what it feels like. I wish I had told her. I remember I made her a copy of the play. I never talked to her about it; I’m not sure she ever listened. Something I thought I’d have the time to get around to.
The story of that play rips at me. It brought me so close to her, and I never told her. I forgave her for everything, I understood, I stopped fighting so hard to have a normal mother and a normal family. I GOT why I couldn’t be with her, why I was suddenly without this strong family unit I’d always had. She was dealing with her own beasts, and recovering, and suddenly I understood, at the age of sixteen, what all children eventually realize about their parents: she was doing the best she could.
And RENT will always be long series of light bulbs going off, marking every moment my heart breaks that I couldn’t be what she needed, that I didn’t have any strength to give her, that ultimately she could not be saved.
How do you leave the past behind when it keeps finding ways to get to your heart?
It reaches way down deep and tears you inside out ‘til you’re torn apart -
How can you connect in an age where strangers - landlords - lovers - your own blood cells betray?
What binds a fabric together when the raging shifting winds of change keep ripping away?
One song before the sun sets
On another empty life
Time flies - and then no need to endure anymore
time dies
Look, I find some of what you teach suspect
Because I’m used to relying on intellect
But I try to open up to what I don’t know
Because reason says I should’ve died three years ago.
To people living with living with living with -
Not dying from disease
There’s only now
There’s only here
Give in to love
Or live in fear
No other path
No other way
No day but today
In truths that she learned
Or in times that he cried
In the bridges he burned
Or the way that she died
- Measure in love
The mind churns - the heart yearns
The tears dry without you
Life goes on but I’m gone
Cause I die without you
When you’re cold and you’re lonely
You’ve got one nickel only
When you’re worn out and tired
When your heart has expired
Every time I listen to it I relive every feeling I’ve ever had about her, and I feel time, and how it moves, and yeah. I choose to love. I make the decision. I love her, I love me, I love you, I love everything. Because it could be different. It could be worse. But it’s not.
[amazon.com]
The second important thing to happen to me was Writing Down the Bones. I first read it when I was twenty. I’d been writing since I was eleven, but this is what took it to another level for me; this is when I made it a way of life. I have given away so many copies of this book to people who I hope will find something in it that will save them the way it did me. Years later, I have realized: I did everything Natalie Goldberg told me to. I allowed it to shape my writing practice and my world view, and it literally made my life livable, at a time it absolutely was not.
Before this book I was drowning in anxiety, a need to be something better - phoenix rising from the ashes or some other bullshit melodramatic re-enactment of my Past, blargh I’m embarrassed to even admit I thought of it that way - but I had this frenzied, overwhelming desire to get away from my own life. From everything that was Holding Me Down and Suffocating Me and Defining Me. I was in New Zealand, as far as I could get from it all. I was unsettled. I was somewhere, and now I had to be someone.
I cannot even tell you the hysterical anxiety. I can’t even think about it, it is so scary. I used to operate in panic mode, all day, every day. My paper journals are terrifying. BE SOMETHING BE SOMETHING HURRY UP, BE THE BEST, etc. And then just dissolving into sobs of crazy. Yikes, kids. Yikes.
I’m not saying this to be obnoxious or to needle for sympathy; I am saying this to give a contrast between how I was even six years ago and how I am now. And I feel like what you know of me is generally what I am: I am happy, I am grateful, I am full of love. I am inspired by pretty much all things. I am intensely aware of my surroundings. I tap into the emotional content of whatever is put in front of me.
The transition from hysterical crazy to zen-like inspiration was all through Writing Down the Bones. I cannot even tell you how much relief I felt in molding myself to Natalie Goldberg’s easy guidance. There was such an exhale, such a settling of dust on the battlefield. It was a very matter-of-fact dictation of the same themes over and over again: You are important. Your life as you live it matters. Your details are original. No one else can be what you are. Be grateful for that, and now do the work you are meant to do: fill notebooks. Write outside the margins. Practice. Practice. Think. Notice everything. Read, and practice. That is all you have to do to feel whole.
And for me, she was right.
There is such intense peace in knowing that out of billions of people, there is a unique light in my mind [and more importantly, also in yours]. There is something no one else would envision. We might share words but the star map of associations leads us to completely different emotional experiences, and therefore completely separate interpretations, and that is fucking beautiful. And therefore, always and forever, I will have something to write. And all of the things in my life that have happened exist for me to write them. And through writing them, I will understand them, and I will know more about myself, and why I am different from you. And I will love you even more, and I will love me even more.
One of the most important things I’ve ever read comes from this book:
Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all the winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent, really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is now we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.
These two things freed me. I did everything these two works of art told me to do. I invented who I am based on them; learned forgiveness and passion from Jonathan Larson, and learned of my own value and how to write from Natalie Goldberg.
At the time, and up to now, I had no idea. No idea why I am the way I am; how I came out of a Veritable Hot Mess all starshine and squishy on the inside. And now I realize that sometimes I feel let down that I am so off the map I can’t get others to join me - like I’ve gone too far in the other direction.
So often, I feel myself elbow-deep in a conversation about something I LOVE and realize I’m alone - that the other party is nodding-and-smiling. Some cruel inner moment where I have to clamp down on my feelings and float back up to the surface, where they are waiting for me.
Even more often, I feel when I’m being indulged: like I’m a thought merely being entertained. Sometimes people get an oh-you quality to their tone with me. And little else in my life causes the let-down that that particular feeling does. Oh, you.
Sometimes I want to throw things out of frustration of not being able to connect way down deep with someone, in this glowing fiery hot ball of crazy I’ve got.
I feel let down when I find people can’t understand why I’ve chosen writing.
I am off the deep end. I realize. But I am tired of being laughed off. Being patted on the head when “He Lives in You” makes me burst into tears. Someone go there with me, and feel it. Let it fucking wrench your heart open. Someone listen to the Arcade Fire’s “Intervention” and fucking lose your shit in a relevatory panic with me. Someone be so obsessed with Life of Pi that you can’t even articulate the places it hits you. There are so many times I’m speechless, so often I get completely overwhelmed and cry at a Kings of Leon concert, and I just wish the person next to me would do more than shift their weight.
But I’m never not grateful. Bummed out, absolutely. But I’ll never forget how thankful I am that these two things entered my life at exactly the right time. I wish you were here. I’d give you my copy of Writing Down the Bones, and make you listen to Neon Bible with me until your heart exploded. Passion is catchy.