Overly Honest
This, I think, falls under "Blogging nobody wants to read" - Sometimes I wake up and I'm not sure what to think, what to do, and then I sit down and write for a while and EUREKA, I HAVE IT!. That's what happened today, and though I'm sure no-one probably cares about the process, I can't just throw that writing away…that would be like painstakingly determining your exact favorite color and then forgetting the whole process so you could go back to wearing read. (BLACK, my favorite color has been black since I first could recognize the shades of it, and my favorite shade of it is the one I can stare at a moment and lose all sense of surface; it's a color that conveys depth, that makes it seem as though everything you paint it with can dissolve into infinity at a moment's notice. What's yours?)
Anyway, overt honesty below the cut. Perhaps if you need some of your own, mine will rub off? Or perhaps you'll waste ten minutes reading about someone else's insecurities and life-pathness. Time will tell! ;)
…That was a complaint people made often when I was a teenager. And I was "overly honest", in that I had no sense of when it was appropriate to say what I knew, and when it was best kept for writing or singing or mumbling to myself while walking. "Cops are bullshit," I would quite happily say in public; "Graffiti is more beautiful than plain concrete;" and "Every pro-life person is just a closet advocate of forced pregnancy, as long as it's not forced on them." I will never forget the time I said - I thought, innocently, because aren't churches places of introspection and contemplation? - that maybe we could help each other more if we just admitted that we were all here because we feared death, and that real Faith would be trusting in the Universe to kill you properly. That was the last time I was allowed in my family's church, and the first time I began to realize how severe the consequences of being Overly Honest can be. (I was thirteen.)
BUT HERE'S A SECRET: I'm no less honest now. The things I have to be honest or not honest about have gotten harder, however, and the lines demarcating what can and can't be pointed out have gotten clearer. When [you] tell me you know that having a baby with the guy you've dated for three months is destiny and bound to work, I still think YOU'RE RISKING DOOMING YOUR OWN KID TO KEEP UP YOUR STUPID HOPES; and when [you] tell me that you're a gawky nerd and have gotten comfortable with being unattractive, I still think DAMN YOU'RE HOT, I WISH WE DIDN'T WORK TOGETHER SO I COULD PROPOSITION YOU. And I've learned to smile and nod, for the most part. I can't lie, because unless I have no moral problems with it I'm a terrible liar (and what I mean by that is I am a kickass liar during a game of poker, but couldn't tell a convincing straight lie to anyone if I felt I was wrong to do so; I telegraph guilt like A.G. Bell), but I can say nothing. And mostly people are great with that.
This, more than anything, makes me convinced that I was meant to be a writer, to offend the whole human race on paper and largely abstain from them in person.
But - let's turn that sword inward (not that I often don't, but man, it's a sharper sword when the layers of skin and society between people aren't blunting it, and I have to be careful) - Writing has not been going well. It's my long-term priority; my (with any luck early?) retirement; my life's goal; and yet I repeatedly let other things eat it. I had hoped to have finished a novel by the age of 18, and it's OK that I didn't, because the reason was that my writing wasn't nearly good enough by then…I'd actually "finished" several books by that age, and thrown them away, recognizing that my skills just weren't there yet. But then my new goal was 30, and I missed that one for entirely worse reasons…Marriage, kid, divorce, and then the ridiculous grind to try and feed self and kid without going insane from the dismalness…it ate a decade, just like that.
And now that decade is over. It's been ten years since I sat in an Emergency Room, healthy-feeling earlier that day, wondering if this was it, if I would really die that young - and then waking up on a painkiller drip five days later, amazed that I hadn't. In that ten years I've done some writing, gotten lots of practice, but put nowhere near the work into it that I had to put into feeding myself and my family. …And it's no wonder that my personality is feeling "destabilized", as the professionals might put it…one's identity gets pretty tied up in a decade-long struggle, and maybe it's not too unlikely that it takes a little bit to realize the room has stopped spinning, and you're still here.
OK, so that's the Greek proverb: First, secure an income - Then practice virtue. That might not be such an important order for those who aren't responsible for the care of a wonderful, healthy, brilliant small child, but for me it was definitely going to be that path or nothing…all my writing would be dust if it meant I neglected her. So off I went to secure an income and a gainful future, that would provide for her life-experiences, health and education for the next decade (after which she gets to sink or swim on her own merits like the rest of us). That required, as I suspect it does for every adult at some point, more sacrifice and work than I ever suspected, but at this point I can safely say I got there. (Will the Universe let me stay here; I do not presume to assume - but I *am* here, and against some pretty powerful currents and chunks-of-driftwood-to-the-face too.)
And now I've been at it, collecting that gainful income, for a year. The Decade of 23 was officially over a month ago. And what of the Decade of 33? It starts in Boston, working a shockingly palatable job making a thoroughly adequate wage (with room to wiggle for emergencies, and enough savings to make that oh-so-important college fund happen). And where's my Plan to Write?
Well, the writing is there, but the plan needs work. I do write and submit short-stories regularly (so I have nearly, but not quite, a professional-level pile of rejections accumulated), and I plug away on some novel or another (really one of three, three that I've plotted and loved and know I need to write someday) at least every couple days…but it doesn't feel serious enough. Progress is not really measurable; goals are not in place that I can say I hit or missed. I'm still (and granted it's only been a month past this being completely appropriate) operating as though everything's in flux and it's all I can do to hold on and get to shore. But - and it's OK, I guess, that this is hard to accept; but "hard to accept" is not an out for us overly honest types - this IS the shore.
Let's be overly honest, then. I need a plan to get my writing to where I want it, and that plan has to trump everything else that is not Kid or Paycheck (or other one-off demands life might make that reasonably should take first place - but all plans have to include some room for getting knocked offline once in a while, and still succeeding, because that's how success almost always comes). I need to be viewing my awesome career as what it is: A ferry, to get me from stupidly distracting poverty to the dock from which I feel safe making the leap into full-time writing. I need to pick up fun things (like diving, taiji, and underwater hockey practice) where I can of course (because there's no guarantee that I'll make it all the way through the Decade of 33; nobody gets that), but the writing needs a more central place if I'm ever going to hope to actually get there. And let's face it, I kind of refuse to admit that I'll be doing anything else in the twilight of my life, besides writing and taiji. I certainly won't be managing datacenters! But for the last while - though only the last month is problematic in my mind - I've been treating that like The Thing I Do, and paying very little attention to where it should be heading.
So…I think that's this weekend. I sustained just enough minor injuries at Hockey (which was AWESOME!!) that I cancelled out on diving, figuring I needed the time to catch up on laundry and stuff more than I needed just-one-more-dive-this-year-pleeeeeez, especially if it would involve trying not to slow the others down in spite of an injury (they're all more experienced than me).
But I need this plan more than I need laundry, even. (OK…well, I really need laundry. But definitely after that!)
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.