Show up, pay attention, tell the truth, and ….

Maybe it’s because nothing is normal now … so anything that happens is going to occur to me as important and necessary (“this is exactly what I need!!”), or maybe it’s just because my life has always been a literary conceit and things always seem to line up according to some invisible plan, with the perfect thing coming to me at the perfect time … or maybe it’s because I have the tendency of a Textbook Manic to see everything in a grandiose “everything makes sense” way, dovetailing threads of sense and perfection all centering on me alone… maybe a mix of all three, but what has been happening lately defies description.

As I have said repeatedly: Someday I will tell this story.

My cousin Mike actually sent me a funny potential-title for the story I will eventually write about all of this – I will not share the title here, at least not yet, since it seems like bad luck. Even if the title ends up not working for THIS still-unfolding story, I must keep it in mind for something else. But there is a story here, a big one, and since everything is on fast-forward and I am basically just trying to keep up with events, I can’t really write about any of it yet. It is not in my nature to be coy, and it is also not in my nature to let things percolate, but that is what I am learning right now, and it is not easy, very annoying, and at times I feel like I am having a full-on nervous breakdown. At the same time, I am productive and busy, with only occasional moments of spinning-out into mania (you know, blasting a crazy email at Michael over an imagined insult, etc.) I am sleeping well, I am working out, I haven’t had a piece of bread since mid-January and that alone appears to have caused me to lose 20 pounds without even working at it. I miss bread, there are times when I want to gnaw off my own arm pretending it’s a French roll, but now that I’ve cut the cord, there’s no going back. More to do, and I am doing it, with fits and starts, and insecurities and all the rest … but the most important thing is nothing is stagnant right now. Nothing.

There is a bittersweet aspect to all of this, I suppose, because it seems like it has all happened too late. Too late to make a real difference. (The lesson of Tess of the D’Urbervilles?) Also too late to share with the one person who would have appreciated it the most. But the bittersweet-ness is also part of the experience. I guess that’s what it means to be a grownup.

Recently, for the first time in a long long time, I picked up a journal. I haven’t really kept a journal since 2002, I guess. I started my blog in October of 2002, and that started to take care of the writing impulse, when I got sick of stewing in my own experience privately, and just succumbed to the emotional exhibitionist that I have always been. But since January, I have started thinking about keeping a journal again. The blog is a performance-art piece, frankly, and I pick and choose what I reveal. It’s a difficult concept for some people to get, but whatever, it serves a need in me, obviously. What I write offline (in my book, in essays) is very different from what goes on here, and while I may seem to be very open, I am actually the opposite of an open book. My itch to start writing personally and in private again (for me, I mean, not for publication) came over me in January, and I haven’t been writing every day – not even close. Maybe once a month I’ll pick up the journal and jot down some thoughts. It is scattered, stream-of-conscious. I feel no pressure to explain, or catch my journal up to date. It is present-tense. Immediate. I don’t worry about narrative (for the first time in my stupid life I am not worrying about narrative). It’s kind of weird to be writing in a journal again. I feel rusty, almost shy. Anyone who’s ever kept a journal with any regular basis will probably know the weird feeling of which I speak. The journal is a book, that’s all, a blank book … but I look at it sometimes, hesitantly, thinking, “Okay … do I want to share this?” Not just with the book, of course, although the book does seem like a real listening entity (Anne Frank knew what she was about when she named her diary “Kitty”) but with myself.

For me, when I write something down, that’s when it is real. I have always been that way. And maybe if I hold off on writing about all of this, I will … what? Stave off the inevitable disappointment? Keep myself in the hovering space I am in now, where everything is still just a potential, as opposed to an actuality? I am not against actuality, but actuality brings its own sadness and loss. When everything is almost there, you feel like anything at all is possible. And, it must be said, with as little self-pity as possible: I am not really used to actuality. My dreams (in general) remain theoretical, unrequited, palpable (at times) to myself only. To have one of those dreams actually burst forth on this plane of existence – and take shape in the real world – to materialize? Sounds great, right? But since it’s all kind of new to me, it brings a sort of panic and exhilaration that I am just trying to be with, work with. So writing this stuff down before it becomes actual – is, what, a way of remembering for my future self what it was like BEFORE the chips fell where they may? It’s a chilling thought, because I am so used to disappointment (cue violins), and I steel myself for heartbreak without thinking about it. This is a Pavlovian response, and it comes from years of life experience that I will not discount or scorn, and I am working with it, doing my best to acknowledge it (yes yes hi, I see you) but move on anyway.

My friend David said to me recently, “Even with everything that has happened, you still are like …” and he made a “gimme gimme” gesture with his hands. Like: Bring it on. Whatever it is. Bring it on.

I gotta be insane.

And the weirdest and most unsettling thing about writing in my journal right now is that (it’s hard to write about this without sounding self-pitying, so whatever, I’m going to stop worrying about it.) … so anyway, I write a paragraph in my journal, and this has happened a couple of times now, especially in the last couple of months, and I will become conscious of the blank pages ahead of my entry, and – like I used to do in high school, when I would be so wrapped up in some melodrama and I wondered frantically WHAT WILL THE FOLLOWING MONTHS BRING??, I flip through the blank pages, almost fearfully, looking at their clean white emptiness, and I wonder … holy shit, what will I be writing on these pages? What will I be saying in, say, August?

And the amazing thing is: I have no effing idea. Things are that up in the air. It has been years since I have had such an awareness of the unknown, of the possibility, of the truth that seriously, Sheila, anything can happen.

That has always been true, by the way, but in my 30s, I just was flat out unaware of it. Things settled, got rigid (much of this was my own fault, I retracted from experience itself). So the overall LOOK of my life did not change. I did not get married, I did not have a huge relationship, I did not star in an independent film, I did not become an op-ed columnist, I did not suddenly find myself working the poles at Scores. Any of those things would have been a break from the ordinary – the placid surface of life. But when I step back (and that’s one of the things that’s going on right now – I have lost the ability to “step back” – that’s what happens when things start accelerating) – all I can see is the sameness of it all. Compared to my friends who are buying houses in the suburbs, and having children, and changing jobs, and all of that. Comparisons are odious, and thankfully whatever envy there has been has been expressed – but also, you realize, in talking to your friends: You know, no matter what the outer circumstances, it’s all the same shit. We’re all in the thick of it. You may have what I want, but I also have some things that you want. And thank goodness we’re friends, basically, and can talk about this stuff.

But again, I don’t like to write from too far back in perspective, because it can make me sound too new-agey (which I abhor), or too “over it”, as in “We all die, solar systems collapse, suns burn out, seas dry up, life is meaningless”, and who the hell wants to read that shit. I don’t like to have too much perspective when I write, I guess is what I am saying – because it makes your writing general. You start to use the royal “we”, and even worse, you use it with utter certainty, as though you alone have the perspective to talk about all of humanity. “We all feel that …” “We all go through such things …” It is a terrible habit in writing, one of my biggest pet peeves – I have fallen into it myself. I am so attuned to it now that I notice immediately when the impulse comes up in me to say “we” when I write. Hmmm, I feel like saying ‘we’ right now … What would happen if I replaced ‘we’ with ‘I’ … Hmmm, much better, more personal, braver … It happens without fail. When I feel like writing “we”, I am hiding.

Christopher Hitchens has written about this from time to time, and I love his words on it, and try to keep them in mind. Whenever he sees some writer using “we” with regularity, his first response is (of course) a contrarian, “Don’t presume to speak for me.” But then again, I’m a contrarian, too. I dislike it when someone presumes to speak for me. “As women, we feel …” Yeah, I’m a woman, I don’t feel that way, so don’t presume to speak for me. “As women, we are brilliant at multitasking.” No, I’m not. I turn down the radio as I approach a toll booth. I can’t talk on the phone and cook at the same time. Disaster will befall me. “As women, we know that shopping is a potential cure-all for the blues.” No. I hate shopping. I like to get in, get out. Shopping actually CAUSES the blues for me. “As women, we can get frustrated when our hubbies care more about the football game than about being there for us.” First of all, don’t ever say the word “hubby” to me again, let’s just get that straight. Second of all, if my boyfriend tried to engage me in a deep meaningful conversation about our relationship in the middle of an October Red Sox game, I very well might break up with him, because he is obviously an idiot and doesn’t get it. Anyway, you get the point. All this “we” business makes me cranky. I’m a woman. I don’t give a shit about baking cupcakes, crafts, scrapbooks, handbags or window treatments. I don’t judge you if you’re into that stuff, more power to you, but the assumption that all women must be into that stuff because “we as women” all are like that, I am not down with in the slightest. So what does that make me? I have the same genitalia as Martha Stewart, but am I less of a “real” woman? Don’t presume to speak for me. It is insidious. It is also, much worse sin in my eyes, bad writing. I am with Christopher Hitchens on this one (as with so much else) 100%.

My desire to not get too far back from what is going on now is part of the tension of the whole experience. This is one of the lessons from my life which I have never really had a chance to put into practice, but I am trying now. When you only see things as cosmic (as I am wont to do), and everything making sense, and “oh my God, isn’t it perfect how this has unfolded” – when it all becomes the Big Picture ™ you begin to assign meaning to things (and even if you’re right, you don’t want to assign meaning too early) – OR you start to believe that things should work out according to the plan you’ve got going on in your head … and that if it DOESN’T unfold in just that particular way, then something is very very wrong. This is where I have been shattered in the past. It’s a terrible habit, and I think it comes, to some degree, from being a cerebral person, a brain-focused person (“We, as women, usually lead from the heart …” No. We don’t.), and vaguely uncomfortable with the physical world. Just bein’ honest here.

“But … but … it seemed so perfect,” I have said to myself in the past.

Well, maybe it was. And maybe it still is. But the outcome wasn’t what you hoped for.

Ouch. Tough lessons.

Everything comes back to Ellen Burstyn’s 4 rules for acting (which can also be 4 rules for life):

1. Show up
2. Pay attention
3. Tell the truth
4. Don’t be attached to the outcome

I wrote my thoughts on that here, so I will not repeat myself. All I will say is that these days I fluctuate from one to the other, being challenged, confronted – on every score. Wait – am I really showing up right now? What can I do to be more present? Oops, totally getting attached to the outcome now … take a step back. Wait, wait, things are happening too fast … am I paying attention? Pay attention, Sheila! Doh, just felt like gilding the lily, or just felt like putting forth my PERSONA as opposed to my real self … just tell the truth, Sheila, tell the truth.

I am the definition of high-maintenance, and I’m actually starting to be a little bit okay with that. Finally.

I mentioned here that I haven’t been able to read since February. I have had a book in my bag since I was 7 years old, so it’s been kind of upsetting, and very odd. Thankfully, I’ve had a ton else to occupy my attention but not reading has felt wrong. I broke the ice with the book Mike sent me, which was very good for me, because it wasn’t a straight narrative (again with the narrative??) – but pictures and fragments and snippets – very much like my experience of life right now. I could slide into that story, it didn’t make too many demands on me to focus … It was working on a subliminal level with my own life, it dovetailed perfectly. That’s obviously what I need right now.

I often wonder how this winter and spring will look to me by next year, but again, that way danger lies.

I’m trying to get back into reading other blogs now (not easy, nothing really holds my interest), and the other day I came across this post on Book Slut, a favorite site of mine, which I haven’t been able to visit for a while. That essay about Necessary Sins (a memoir by Lynn Darling) caught my eye. I don’t know why. I kind of care about Lynn Darling’s husband Lee A. Lescaze, for obvious reasons, if you know his background. But I honestly don’t know much about Lynn Darling, I know nothing about their story and the last thing I want to read right now is the story of a giant love affair, which ends with Lescaze’s death.

Not up my alley, first of all – since I don’t know about the people involved, and I’m not a big memoir person (unless I’m already wildly into the person, like Joan Didion – I’ll read a grocery list if it’s written by her). But for whatever reason, that piece on Book Slut really caught my eye, in a way that is rare in my experience. In general, I “listen” to Book Slut (Jessa and her other writers) about books … we seem to be in sync, in terms of taste and interest. They have led me to incredible books I would not have picked up otherwise (lots of first novels, which I normally stay away from – but if Book Slut recommends it, I’ll probably read it).

The post on Necessary Sins ends with:

Her affair with Lescaze derails her career at the Post. And at 29 and 30 years old, she’s still lodged in the persona she’s constructed around herself: “a tatterdemalion creature composed of bits and pieces of old rock songs and half-remembered lyrics: hard-drinking, fast-driving, lawless, and irresponsible.” It’s hard thing to do, to shake the idea that “passion was perfect because it was unconnected to the real world, because it overwhelmed, at least for the moment, everything you were meant to be or were supposed to do, conferring the exuberant license of a snow day.” It’s especially hard if you’re a ambitious self-doubter and scared as hell about being an actual adult in the world.

According to her, it takes falling in love, getting married, having a child to shed these ideals. And it’s not entirely convincing that Darling does so all the way: “I didn’t know how to be married now that I was a mother, just as I didn’t know how to be a writer, or a woman for that matter.” Early on in the book, she refers to the Style section as “a study in the triumph of personality over character.” In Darling’s case, it’s not clear which wins out.

Before I even finished reading, I had purchased the book.

Again, do I really need to read something like this now? Is this where I need to go? I don’t know what about it called to me, but I needed to have it.

What interested me about the book in the piece on Book Slut was twofold:

— the sexual aspect of the book. My kind of content. I love honesty in that realm.
— the part of the book that focuses on “the persona she’s constructed around herself” – a concept that has particularly frightening and palpable resonance for me right now

Maybe a part of me thought about the book I just wrote, and my hope that I was honest, and open, and fair. Not just to the old boyfriends, but to myself. It is the kind of writing I love to do, the kind of writing that is hardest. But I honestly don’t know. It’s honestly not my kind of book at all.

A memoir of grief? A wife writing about her husband of many years who just passed away? A great love affair, remembered?

I gotta be insane.

I am reading it. Being pulled into it against my will. It’s a small book, not too long or dense, and I imagine I will finish it. Even though every fiber of my being is telling me to put it down. Put it down.

I feel strangely named by the book, in a way that hollows me out. I do not get a warm fuzzy feeling of recognition, like I do with some books, where I read about shenanigans and smile with nostalgia, like, “Oh, hey, I was like that in my 20s too!” No, no, because who she was in her 20s exacted a PRICE later, a price that, at times, was too high to pay. That 20 year old – she was playing for keeps. But how could she know that? How could she know the price that would be paid by the 30 year old for her folly? That these things are forever, dammit. The same thing happened to me. I can’t write about it, but now (after reading this book) I know I need to. Necessary sins. And yet, it was Darling’s great love. It was her great love. There was a ruthlessness in what those two did to be together, and was it worth it? She asks that question. She sits with it. But at the same time, it seems like the least important question of all.

The sexual aspect of the book is, indeed, wonderful, and she captures beautifully the time when you and all of your friends are still virgins and you have conversations about what “it will be like”, and if it’s important to “be in love”, and what will change after we have “done it”. It’s not as spectacular a book as, say, Year of Magical Thinking – Darling is not the writer that Didion is, but boy, are there passages here … Passages where I am tugged along, knowing it’s leading me into some pretty treacherous waters, but the prose flows so beautifully, so emotionally, that I can’t stop reading.

It’s making me cry.

Not for her loss, although I can feel her loss vibrating through every word. This man saw her. This man saw past the carefully-created persona, and instead of saying, “No thanks, I want no part of that”, he waited – he waited – for her to calm down enough so that she – she – could come out to play.

In the middle of all of this, lives were ruined. And dreams also came true.

I’m not done with it yet, and I have moments where I need to put it down. I can feel the tears start to come, the kind of tears that make me know I’ll be down for the count in a matter of moments.

Last night I read this. It is absolutely chilling how much I relate.

We didn’t flirt – not in the way I defined it, anyway, hiding behind double entendres and practiced gestures, skipping between provocation and retreat, hoping to be followed but never found. Flirtation was the best of games, and I had always loved to play it with proper men like him, rubbing against their rectitude the way a yearling rubs the downy fuzz from his antlers against the bark of a tree. But this was foreign country to me. I felt no urge to conquer, no combustible alloy of anger and desire, no lie at the heart of it, none of the hollow druglike urgency that desire induced.

Instead we talked, and drank, and drank some more until it grew late and looking deep into each other’s eyes, we called for the check. Back on the street we smiled and said good night and got into separate cabs. What did he want? What did I?

It was not a question I had ever needed to ask myself. Desire in its own right had always been enough. Until then I was entranced by the mere possibility of passion, the way it created its own reality, set in motion by the beauty of a man’s forearm when he rolled up his sleeves or the way he raked his fingers through his hair. For such gestures, Virginia Woolf wrote, one falls in love for a lifetime. Or at least for a night. I loved the way the heart just turned and suddenly there was someone you wanted more than anything – or just as suddenly wanted no longer. I couldn’t understand why anyone ever got married. Passion was perfect because it was unconnected to the real world, because it overwhelmed, at least for the moment, everything you were meant to be or were supposed to do, conferring the exuberant license of a snow day. In some obscure way I knew it was an escape of sorts, a balm for anxiety and a way to delay the future, but that had never seemed like much of a drawback.

Now Lescaze had come along and screwed the whole thing up. I had tried to turn him into a character in my latest fantasy, but he refused to play the part. He didn’t have the kind of vanity that puffs up in the presence of admiration. I had tried to turn myself into a character he would find fascinating, but that hadn’t worked either. He seemed to look right through my attempts with a kind of amused patience, as if waiting for me to simply settle down and be myself. As if he had seen the good in me and was just waiting for me to see it too.

That was the difference between him and all the others, I realized finally. He offered me the chance to connect the dots between my public and private selves, maybe even to find bedrock. And heart in throat, I took it.

I remember the image from Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, of Grace’s mother with the bad heart: it was like an apple with a bruise that goes all the way through. I can no more get rid of my life story, and its long-lasting effect on me, than I can get rid of my freckles. Nor would I want to. There are bruises, wounds, injuries. Stuff left over, stuff left behind.

I have spent the last decade (almost) of my life trying to not think about the “injuries” too much, because, frankly, 1998-2002 wore me out. Wore me DOWN is more like it. So I retracted, armored up, and tried not to sit around inspecting myself for how much damage had actually been done. I wiped my hands, and thought, “Phew … I’m still here … Moving on.”

Then why, 8 years later, would I read Necessary Sins and feel, almost tangibly, the bruise going to the very heart of the apple and all the way through to the other side?

But maybe, in the end, none of that matters.

It would be a miracle if it ended up not mattering. It would be a fucking miracle if the fact that the bruise goes all the way through the apple doesn’t matter one little bit. I have tears in my eyes as I type this. It would be the “substance of things hoped for”, and even now, I retract, feel the anger coming up, the armor, against such thoughts. I write in my journal tentatively, detailing a little bit of this going on, a little bit of that, not giving too much away, even to myself.

Alice and the fawn, remember?

The best part of the fast pace right now is I honestly don’t have too much time to think about all of this.

Just have to wait and see. The blank pages of the journal loom at me, white, flipping ahead through them, dauntingly empty. And I wonder if Mike’s title-idea will end up being the right one for this particular still-unfolding story. Regardless, I’ll use it anyway. Somewhere. I close the book.

Try not to be attached to the outcome.

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

9 Responses to Show up, pay attention, tell the truth, and ….

  1. ted says:

    Excellent post, not from the neuro-psycho guy in me but from the reader in me. I love that you ended with Joan Didion, because that’s who I started thinking of as soon as I began reading your post about beginning to keep a journal again, for obvious reasons. How that woman wrote through that whole experience of her life is beyond me but…
    Why are Ellen Burstyn’s four points so hard? As I walked home today feeling generally good about the day I thought – don’t get too attached to this feeling because it’s going to change. Yay for you writing and reading. It’s one of the ways you live, so welcome back.

  2. Cara says:

    Astonishing, a lot to absorb but my goodness, I love your writing.

  3. De says:

    I have so many thoughts on this behemoth of a post….so beautiful and real….but I must ask the most important question: are you writing in a Moleskine??

  4. red says:

    De – ha!! Love that you asked that – My moleskine – From cousin Mike!! Actually, the Moleskine he gave me is small – I use that for my To Do lists (a mile long now) … I bought a big huge blank book from Barnes & Noble for my new journal.

  5. red says:

    Ted – Oh, thank you, thank you. I would love to hear the neuro-psych response, too. Didion’s ability to be in the moment – in that grief – is nothing less than a miracle, and will be a gift, for generations to come, for people who find themselves in similar surreal situations. That’s the thing about grief that I didn’t know: it’s surreal. That is why you need patient friends, people who let you be self-involved, who remember WHY you are going off the rails … Nothing is normal. Nothing is normal and will never be normal again.

    I do wonder what this time will look like to me in the future, but frankly, the thought gives me pain – so I don’t dwell.

    Right now it is happening. Right now I need to ‘show up, pay attention, tell the truth, and not be attached to the outcome’ – yes: so so difficult! Didn’t she just nail the human condition??

    Love you – hope to see you soon.

  6. Ann Marie says:

    What a wonderful post. Thank you for sharing.

  7. Catherine says:

    There’s so much to mull over here, truly. I can’t really process it all at once. But I did need to read those 4 rules – I’m gonna write them out and stick them to the front cover of my current journal. They’re just essential, I think.

    Also, it gives me a little thrill (too strong a word? probably) to hear that you’ve been picking up a journal again. I mean, whatever, its none of my business – but like I said before, the diaries are what initially attracted me to your site. And I know exactly what you mean when you talk about it seeming awkward or strange after a long break.

    I stopped writing in my journal for the whole of March. It wasn’t a conscious decision, I went for a few days without picking my diary up and pushed it out of my mind. This wasn’t to do with any external circumstances, I wasn’t more busy than usual, I had lots of times in the evenings and during my commute which is when I usually tend to pick up a pen. I just kind of forgot about it. And if somebody had asked me, y’know, ‘Hey, Catherine, how are you doing these days?’ I would’ve shrugged and smiled and said I was doing fine. But I wasn’t fine, actually. And I was surviving, y’know, I was getting on with my daily life, but something was a little off.

    And then one day, I completely snapped at my sister over a really petty incident. Totally overreacted. Ended up really hurting her. Another family member took me aside and told me, gently but firmly, that there was clearly something up and I should figure it out, talk to someone, whatever. I realised I was a mess. There were changes that needed to be made in my life and I wasn’t willing to start making them. Externally, everything was business as usual. But internally…oy! By leaving my journal in the top drawer of my desk and never opening it up, I was closing off that contemplative, questioning muscle that would’ve helped me move on, make changes, etc. I was just totally neglecting that inner place – again, not willingly or consciously. At the time, I wouldn’t have been able to say this.

    But last week, I started up again. So weird, even after just a month off…the tyranny of the blank page. I felt super self-conscious, restarting. Like, how do I begin? Do I apologise to the journal for neglecting her? What?!? But I got over that hump, after a few pages of really messy writing.

    And yep, things are starting to look up. Internally of course, but externally too (I got a new job!). It’s painful, sometimes. It forces me to think about things I’d rather not. But I need it. And it’s a handy indicater for my life, too. If I’m not journalling…it’s a fairly unambiguous sign.

  8. jayne says:

    You know, I really think if you would just take up needlepoint, everything else would fall into place.

    Thinking of you lots….

  9. Fragmentation, Fitzgerald

    I am still not able to read like I used to. I try to just “go with it”, if I feel like reading – but the impulse comes over me intermittently, randomly, and I certainly do not have the…

Comments are closed.