Living like a writer?

We have writer’s notebooks, lists of writing territories, explorations, drafts, and poems. We brainstorm, share ideas, model ways to vary our syntax and diction, and how to edit. We share, comment, and reflect on our writing. We share storie, do freewrites and more. But as writing teachers, are we really living like writers?

A long time ago, I thought living like a writer meant you got paid to write and your writing got published. Then I got a job reviewing trendy technology. I was paid 20 cents/word to write a review of iPod-wired Levi’s jeans. By the end of it, I wanted to punch someone. Then I applied to teaching graduate school.

A shorter time ago, I thought living like a writer meant you looked at the world differently. On the sidewalk in October, there is a pile of leaves. Some people walk through the leaves without a second thought. Some people pause for a minute to marvel at the way the four o-clock sun slants through the clouds and makes certain colors pop. Some people walk slowly around the pile, squinting, noticing that if they move their heads two inches to the left, the reds cast a light glow over the yellows. A writer picks up a pen.

Both definitions are true, but it took a blog and a roommate for me to realize the element I was missing. I posted an early draft of my memoir, so early that “rough” doesn’t cover the lack of polished prose. In passing, my roommate said that it had a lot of potential, and I wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear. I wasn’t familiar with the fear associated with other people critiquing my writing. It had been three years, after all, since my last writing workshop. Even then, I focused on mainly fiction. This was TRUE. It was my mother, my wonderful mother, who’s in fantastic shape and still somehow needed emergency brain surgery. This was me, sobbing in front of my laptop, setting a timer for ten minutes and letting the fear envelope me as I tried to put it into words. This was less than two months ago, and my roommate thought she could just comment on it in passing, like it was nothing?

In an instant, I knew I would tell this story to all my future students. I ask them to share like it’s easy, like putting your thoughts on display for 27 people is easy, and I’m surprised when making participation 20% of their grade isn’t enough motivation? Sometimes my thoughtlessness alarms me. Sometimes I don’t know how 25 years and God knows how many tears haven’t taught me that it’s hard to put your feelings into words, and even harder to speak them out loud.

That’s what I’m missing. I love my students, but it’s not enough to write for them, and the 6.4 people who read my blog. To truly live like a writer, I need to write in a community of writers. A community of writers where I can swear, where I don’t have to conspicuously leave all the alcohol and sex out. A community of writers that aren’t 10-15-years old.

Most of the writing I’ve done in the past two years has been for my students. When I’m looking for an example of a quickwrite, I do it myself. I have dozens of lists of “My Writing Territories,” geared towards different groups and grade levels. I wrote my own “Relaxing Place” essay. But it’s been three years since took a writing class, three years since I wrote my thesis, graduated, and ended up back in middle school.

The single most meaningful teaching experience I’ve had this year is writing a memoir with my 8^th grade students. I used all the brainstorming and visualization techniques, half the drafting strategies, and found myself saying things like, “Show, don’t’ tell,” while revising my syntax. I found the common theme in a dozen rambly freewrites and stitched it together in a way that made sense. The experience of writing the memoir helped me process the experience I was writing about. I learned something about it along the way. It was too valuable an experience to keep to myself. Even though I assigned a pinch reader to take over when I felt the tears starting, even though I still cried while reading it to them, it changed the way I understand and teach memoir, and way I understand and teach writing.

It really made me question everything I know about writing. It made me wonder if, despite all the observing, writing, collecting, and sharing I do, I somehow was missing the point. Was I really leaving like a writer? Are any of us? Are we looking at the way the sun hits a pile of leaves and picking up a pen? Are we writing while crying and laughing and screaming into our computer screens? Are we hurling our words full-speed at the page like we expect our students to?

I don’t think I was living like a writer until I wrote that memoir.

Three days ago I asked a chronically-disorganized student to show me the Table of Contents in his Writer’s Notebook. He smirked, and said, “Fine, but let me see yours.” When I showed it to him, he said, “But, is it up-to-date Miss Wyner?” It wasn’t. Luckily, I managed to talk my way out of a detention.

The next day, I walked into my seventh grade class and held my notebook opened for them to see. “This is my homework,” I proclaimed. I showed them my two pages of memoir explorations, and explained that my half-page detailed list about Franklin Park wasn’t something I thought I would continue writing about, but I thought I might keep working on my exploration of swimming pools in my life.

A girl who often tells me how annoying she finds me looked up from her detailed schedule of scratching hearts into the table and said, “Wow. That’s really cool that you did that.”

Later, I let her teach me how to jerk. I failed. We all laughed as I tripped over my feet trying to do an alarmingly simple dance move. Life goes on.

HEART OF MY HEART

HEART OF MY HEART
LKW

I was five the first time a boy stomped on my heart.
He divorced me two weeks after our recess wedding on the playground and I thought I’d never get over it. When I told my mother, she didn’t say a word. She just picked up the phonebook and called his mother. I giggled on her lap. Already, the pain was fading.

***

The next time my heart broke I was 14. I don’t remember how it happened; I just remember how awful it felt, the days fading into one long grey streak. Self-doubt consumed me as I tried desperately to figure out what I had done wrong. One afternoon, my mother joined me on the couch. She cradled me like a baby, rocked me back and forth, and stroked my hair. I cried awful, hiccupping sobs. I cried so hard I could barely breathe, so hard it sounded like I was dying, gasping for breath.
As she wiped the streaks of mascara from my cheeks, I was surprised to see sadness in her face. "What's wrong Mama?" I asked.
"Heart of my heart," she said softly, "Don't you understand? When you hurt, I hurt. Your pain is no different from my own."

***

Ten years later, I held her hand carefully, trying not to interfere with any of the IV tubes. Around me things beeped, gurgled and swished, an onomatopoetic paradise. It was 9 a.m. on Valentine's Day, 2010, and I had left the apartment so fast that I had forgotten socks. Her brain had started bleeding, and no one knew why. They were able to fix it, but no one knew the extent of the damage. I couldn't think about it, it was too painful. An hour earlier, when the surgeon had come to talk to my father, I had fainted in the middle of the hallway. No one had noticed.

When she woke up it was worse. Seeing her helpless was nothing that could adequately be described in words. The helplessness I felt was worse. I saw her in there, trapped behind swollen eyelids and a bruised mind. She writhed in the cheap hospital sheets, trying to hurl herself off the bed. My mother, who couldn’t sit through a half-hour sitcom in our den without getting up at least five times to do various things, was confined to a bed. There was a falseness to the situation, a bad aftertaste like cheap soda leaves on your tongue.

She couldn’t talk for days. When she could talk, it was in bits and pieces. My mother, the woman who instilled a love of words in me, could only say about ten of them. It nearly killed me, seeing her like that. “I…” she would trail off. “I just can’t… I don’t… I…” I didn’t know if she wanted me to stay or leave. I didn’t know if I should make flashcards and have her point. I didn’t know how to help. I’ve never felt so powerless in my entire life. I felt like my soul was going to faint, and leave my body standing there, staring, vacant, not knowing what to do.

As time passed, she spoke more fluently, but there was still a halting quality to her sentences, as if she needed an extra second here and there to find the words. Every time she stopped, every idea she couldn't say, tore away at me in little pieces. Every time her eyes sparked with an idea and then welled up with tears when she couldn't express it, pain consumed me somewhere between my chest and shoulders.

A week later, she was doing what the doctors called “waxing and waning.” Some days she could talk almost normally, and some days she could barely get a sentence out. On one of her good days, she told me it was like being imprisoned in her own mind, and we cried. She said, over and over, “There’s no way you could ever know how awful it was,” and she was right: I’d never had brain surgery; technically, I didn’t know what it was like.

What I couldn’t figure out how to tell her was that I did know. The way it felt, watching her, helpless, was a kind of torture I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It felt like being ripped in half. I thought of all the times she told me she felt my pain, all the times she cried when I was the one breaking, and right then I realized what she had meant. Never before had I wanted, so much, to take someone else’s pain. I wanted to lie down in the bed next to her and have her pain transferred to me, injected into me in huge doses, pushed into my body by IV, to get it out of hers. When I was 14 she told me she could feel my pain, and it took me until 24 to realize that link went both ways. Heart of my heart. I finally understood.
I don’t know if I’ll become a parent anytime soon. I don’t think I’m strong enough to take on a lifetime of feeling my child’s pain, a lifetime of wishing that pain was inflicted on me instead. If I can, one day, I will.

***

Wouldn’t it be the greatest gift of all, to truly take on someone else’s pain?
If only we could.

An Open Letter to Naturally Thin People

You know who you are. You casually walk into the employee lunchroom with leftover Burger King tucked under your arm, a dollar in your pocket to buy Sunchips from the vending machine.

When we went to college, the rest of us agonized over our weight. The dining hall became a veritable fat factory, full of cholesterol waiting to seep over the tops of our high school denim. We spent 20 dollars a week on diet coke, celebrated the invention of Propel, and sloshed through puddles on rainy days all in the name of keeping our highschool figures. In the end we all failed, some more tragically than others, but we stood united in our defeat. We moaned and groaned together. We joked about Lindsay Lohan's cocaine diet, but knew we were only half-kidding. We tried crazy fad diets and failed.  We planned group shopping trips as soon as bubble dresses became the style, thrilled they hid our ever-expanding lovehandles.

Throughout all of this, you stood off to the side with your 4,000-calorie brownie Frappuccino from Starbucks. You nodded in all the right places, said, "Damn, I know, right?" and wiped the whipped cream off your chin. You were never mean about it. It was simply a part of life that you didn't understand.

Our older friends, wiser, somewhat worse for wear, told us, "Don't worry, guys don't like girls that skinny." They pointed at you discreetly and said, "She's built like a boy. Men like curves. Men like women that look like women." And it pacified us for the time being, but on some level, we knew it was a lie. Because when given a choice between flat-chested Kate Hudson and gargantuan Kirstie Alley, who do you think men would choose?

Thousands of dollars and dozens of weight loss programs later, we're still struggling. Some of us have bins in our parents' attics, full of jeans we haven't been able to wear in five years. We should just throw them out, but that would mean defeat, so we don't. We let them accumulate dust, dust that we will one day, hopefully, get all over our hands in our haste to open that bin.

This is a message for all the women who can still drink frappuccinos on a regular basis: Your time will come.

It might be ten years after college graduation. You'll wake up one day and realize that you have to suck in your stomach to button your skinny jeans. Maybe it'll be after your first child, and the weight you gained won't slide off you like the freshman 3.2 you gained. Or maybe you'll be like Sienna Miller, and realize one day that, despite being skinny, your skin flops around your tiny bone structure and you look worse than some fat people.

I say this not with anger, but with the quiet realization that what goes around comes around. Maybe it's Karma. Maybe taking it for granted will be the catalyst for your downfall. Maybe it's like diffusion, and the bad luck will gradually spread out.

When it happens, I'll be flying down the esplanade with Muse blasting in my earbuds. When the proverbial fat hits the fan for you, that's where I'll be, in my rosy-cheeked, muscled glory. My ass will be carved from steel, my quads will be almost too strong, and my arms will finally not look like string beans. Maybe I'll still have a miniature spare tire, but I'll be a tan, ripped, golden God so I won't care.

When you stagger into the gym, I will help you. I will politely remind you that Converse sneakers are not workout attire, and I'll even show you how to work your core. I will throw out your Frappuccino.

So enjoy it while it lasts, thin person. Your time will come.

And until then, at least my boobs are nicer than yours.