Fear Schmear!

November 13, 2011 at 10:30 pm (Life Unfurling)

It’s funny.  My mom just commented on my blog and I felt, almost, resentful at first.  Disgusted. Embarrassed.  Abused.  “Who is she to read my innermost thoughts and comment on them?” I questioned.  “Well, young lady,” I had to say to myself, “you did put them on the Internet.”

Yes, yes I did.

Talk about fearlessness.

But, her comment, the glimpse of my own work through my mother’s eyes, made me go back and read (yet, again) what I had written.

“Lies!”  I shrieked.  “It’s all lies!”

Only after my husband and son came running into the room to find me huddled on the floor trying to choke myself with a mouthful of blue feather boa, did I realize that I’d gone too far.  It was not lies that I was telling.  Not lies exactly.

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Turn On, Tune In, Let Go

November 12, 2011 at 12:39 pm (Life Unfurling)

I am sitting in the “reading room” typing away.  Silas is standing in the sliver of light that is stretching from this room into the hallway.  He is standing at his easel painting in a Beatnikish turtleneck and a painter’s apron.  He is painting his first portrait.  He is painting a vampire.  Jazz is on the radio.

With my therapist, I’ve been talking about my core sense of self.  Who she is and what provokes her.  About what stirs up the superhuman, lets the divine shine through.  This core sense of self often seems buried, underneath scars, underneath layers of emotional fat.  Still, as I sit here typing, as my son is creating art in that sliver of light, as the Pandora is on Quickmix and all the right songs are playing, I feel her, that core sense.

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The Fix and the Trick

October 23, 2011 at 6:20 pm (Life Unfurling)

My family stopped laying the Scrabble tiles face down in the cover of the box because of me.  Because I always seemed to be the one to pick the “A” to start first and to find the exact letter that I needed. We now pick the tiles out of the bag.  Maybe that is how you are supposed to play anyhow.  Still, they believed—well, at least I believed and I believed that they believed—that, as I slowly waved my hands over the tiles, I had some innate, powerful ability to choose the letters that I needed.  Winning for me, we seemed to think, had as much to do with Scrabble smarts as it had to do with some clairvoyant magic.

Tonight, I am in the mood for pulling tiles, picking cards, reading tea leaves, throwing dice.

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Dare me.

October 21, 2011 at 11:11 pm (Life Unfurling)

Hello again, Dear, Dear World!

Let me start by saying:  I have not been lost and then found.  Lucille (the muse) has not forsaken me.  It is not my career (well, it is a little) that has forced my silence.

This lapse in voice (at least this lapse in my blogging voice) is attributed to the idea that I am going through some type of metamorphosis, am shedding my artistic skin, am examining myself and my motives and my desires and am putting certain fears to rest.

That takes a lot of work, moving from one hermit shell to the next.

(And, by hermit shell, I am not saying that I am bashful or secretive.  But I have, as I imagine all of us do, my social-face, and my personas, and the fears that keep me somewhat shackled. So, I am proud to say that I am moving into a roomier socio-psychological apartment.)

(Am I talking bull shit here, or do I make sense?)

(How do you like the excessive use of parenthesis?)

So…

I have been afraid to write here.  In this public domain.  Afraid, not so much of what you might think, but of what I might think about what I am thinking.  I have spoken of audience and how it is both motivating and intimidating.  I have begged for approval, have been asked to and have tried to forget my audience, and have wallowed in a bit of imagined-audience (meaning the people that I imagine to be my audience)-provoked despair.

Basically, I have lacked self-confidence.

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Control Freak

August 13, 2011 at 11:34 am (Motherhood)

Hallelujah! I’ve conned Silas into what we call the “nap trap”.  He gave up napping long ago, but sometimes, if I am tired enough, I can lay myself down and eventually (usually we’re talking at least a half an hour to an hour later) he will fall into slumber.  God or Destiny, or heck, maybe it’s Lucille, taps me on the shoulder to wake me up and Voila!  I have some writing time!

So here I am.  After a long enough pause.  (Yes, I sat down last night and stared at a blank screen for two hours…)  Still, here I am.

I don’t know how else to start but to say that yes, sometimes, I can be a control freak.

Of course, I noticed this immediately after writing the post “Fashion Police”.  (Hell, I knew it already.  But, let’s pretend that I just recognized it.) And, with this recognition, I have improved.  I now give Silas choices: this collared shirt or that one?

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Writing and Musing and Poems

August 5, 2011 at 11:02 pm (On Writing and Art)

Today

I randomly opened to this Bukowski poem in You Get so Alone at Times it Just Makes Sense:

take a writer away from his typewriter
and all you have left
is
the sickness
which started him
typing
in the
beginning.

Several Days Ago

There is nothing I have to say.  Nothing really.  I could say anything at all.  Be forewarned.

My husband and son have given me some writing space.  My husband is cleaning up the mess in the living room that I should have cleaned up today but instead paced around the house thinking up brilliant ideas.  My son is running around him in one of his many personas, laughing and being his little perfect self.  My son, in fact, has been kind enough to allow me space, in little tidbits, all day.  He spent an awful long time in the tub, for instance, while I sat on the toilet with my laptop.

So, although I have been deep in thought, wavering between jubilation and anxiety, it has been a very good day.  A day dedicated to thinking.  To change.

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Fashion Police

August 3, 2011 at 10:28 pm (Motherhood)

This is not a resurrected post, but one that combines past work and present.  I am slowly getting my voice back!  Enjoy!

Years ago, I wrote the following:

The morning we went to the ENT, we had to get up rather early. My husband couldn’t go with us to the appointment, so he decided to help out by getting Silas ready. With Paul, “helping” means a 57% chance of Silas’s nighttime diaper getting changed and a 97.5% chance that Silas will get correctly strapped into his car seat.

If we were to err on the side of the majority, Paul’s help-out routine would be close to acceptable.

Except, I never take Silas anywhere in his jammies unless it’s absolutely necessary. Actually, I need to take that statement a step further. I never take Silas anywhere in clothes that don’t match… well. Okay, I need to go further still. I make a plan for Silas’s next-day outfit every evening. I plan these outfits according, not to the weather, but to whether or not the cut and color scheme will maximize his attractiveness. And, no, I’m not kidding.

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Little Life-Altering Epiphany

August 2, 2011 at 11:53 pm (On Writing and Art, Resurrected Posts)

I wrote this post on my former blog when Silas was 15 months old.  I am including it here because it deals with writer’s block and with epiphanies both of which I am currently experiencing.  As you will note, I need to get back in this saddle.

So, while I flounder around starting posts and stopping them mid-sentence so that I can edit, edit, edit my content, so that I can double-check to make sure that I am saying what I am meaning to say, so that I can verify that I am writing something worthy of this brand of instant “publication”, I am, by all stretches of the creative imagination, not writing at all.  (In fact, I just started to delete this sentence and then stopped myself and forced myself to write it before I could read back to the beginning and delete the whole damn thing.  Where are thou, my self-confidence???)

So, I have, just recently, in the last few days in fact, experienced a little, life-altering epiphany.   And, yes, like most life-altering epiphanies–or at least like most of my life-altering epiphanies, because I have had so very many, you know– the burst of mind-numbing enlightenment was completely obvious.  Beyond obvious.  Let me fill you in…

While perched on the toilet– I admit that I often feign constipation in order to fulfill my literary yearnings– I revisited the introduction to Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott.  In her opening paragraph, she discusses a childhood filled with books and with people actually reading them.  She talks about a writer father who sprawled across the couch every evening after dinner to read, read, read.  She writes about how the whole family would retire to their favorite reading spot and about how, on occasion, their house was also filled with, perhaps better than books, her father’s writer friends, who would, to Lamott’s dismay, occasionally pass out at the dinner table. Ah!  How I wished, with all my stupid heart’s desire, that I could be living that life.

Living that life?!?  You’d think I was envious of someone who built a 4-acre palace on the back-side of a cumulus cloud.  I mean, golly, turning my back deck into the Playboy Mansion may be a little beyond my reach, but living in a house in which people stretched out after a good meal to enjoy a good book?!?

Yeah.  I’ve been spending my time desperately yearning for the easily possible.

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A Kick in the Butt!

August 2, 2011 at 3:25 pm (On Writing and Art)

I just received a very pleasant kick in the butt.  An enjoyable slap in the face.  A lovely pull of the rug from under my feet.

And, you, lucky you, are privy to this kick, this slap, this rug pulling.  Just read Kim’s comment on my last post.  Yes, the comment in which (and I am paraphrasing here) she implores me to stop whining (she didn’t say whining, that’s all me) and seeking out approval.  Write, she says.  Write for you.  Just write.

She is absolutely correct.  (She even went so far as to say that I frustrate my audience with my lack of confidence.  Hoo-yah!)

I could go on and on about when and how this happened to me: this shift into needing constant approval, this inability to write without the audience in mind, this lack of confidence.

But, I won’t.  I will spare you.

Instead, I will focus on a turn around, a lesson, an unfurling if you will.

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More audience. More writer’s block.

July 30, 2011 at 8:14 pm (On Writing and Art)

I have been very busy and I cannot write.  I’ve spent several nights staring at a blank screen wanting to connect with you but feeling unable to do so.

When I cannot write I feel imprisoned by my own skin.  By my own brain.  By the helplessness of humanity.  I feel inadequate and empty.  Mediocre.  Unbecoming.  Banal.

When I cannot write I am nothing.

Or, so it seems.

This is not as dreary as it might appear.  I am being a little dramatic.  But, when I am busy I am something: mother, friend, partner, wife.  It is only when I sit down to create something—some  reflection, some story, some poem, some post– and cannot, that I feel empty and alone.  A shell of a woman.  A shell of an artist.

Writing is a solo act.  Until, of course, you have your audience.

Here comes that promised answer to my question!   (If you have not been reading my blog, the question has something to do with why people feel the need to seek out an audience.)

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