Just Sing

Last week’s rant blog sparked a lot of response.  A writer loves her audience, sure, but in the long run, it would be preferable if a topic such as the systematic downgrading of women weren’t something that reverberated so well.  Sometimes a writer wishes a topic might not have a receptive audience.  When it does, though, honour it.

Thirty years as a trauma therapist, I’ve heard a lot of stories, sat in the same room with a lot of different fears.  It’s amazing how quickly those fears lose their substance or in some cases, at least become bearable because someone is listening.  Others require ‘treatment’.  Not so much a trauma-ectomy as doing trauma tai chi.  A working through the resistance until what happened is accepted as an irretrievable part of their history, but not something that eradicates them as a person.  That resistance works as a protection in the beginning, but held onto, it interferes with change. 

Hold that thought while I do my Appalachian story boreen thing again.

When I still lived in the US, over fifteen years and inside someone else’s lifetime ago, my large nuclear family congregated for some weekend or another.  My mother asked me to make the bed for my brother’s friend.  I asked why, when my friend had visited, I’d made the bed for her, but my brother wasn’t expected to do the same.  My mother stared like I was a crazy person.  I’d gobsmacked my mother in the days before I knew the word gobsmacked existed.  A bit disconcerting, since my mother was quite the force.  So I said, I’ll make the bed, but I want to understand why.  I didn’t get an answer.

Earlier this year, during rehearsals of my play, Cats in a Pipe, a similar thing happened.  The play takes place on a military base in Afghanistan during an attack, my four main characters stuck in the Prayer Room, like the mummified cat in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral had been stuck in an organ pipe.  As we rehearsed, the cast and director freely commented on the dialogue, mostly to improve it.  Sometimes, they commented on the content.  Sometimes they said, that’s a horrible thing to have happened.  Sometimes they asked me if such a thing could be possible.

When I said to them, that was based on a true story, five pairs of British eyes looked at the table.  Or the script.  Five British mouths stayed shut.  No one said now, that’s a horrible thing.  When they went silent, the one woman in the room, the one American also looked at her script and said nothing else.  I thought I must be in one of those places where Americans say too much for British ears.

And maybe that’s true.  I am a bit candid, even by American standards.  My lack of social grace makes people uncomfortable at times, but there are a lot of things out there that don’t make sense to me.  So I ask the question.  Like why I had to make the bed or why, as I said last week, Nick Griffen has carte blanche to say what he wants about women while Jinan Younis does not have the same freedom to complain about it. 

So back onto the main path again.  Resistance to the truth takes energy from the places it should be focused on, and puts that energy into stagnation.  We may think of stagnation as inertia rather than an energy sucker, but if you look outside your window at anything that’s alive, it moves.  Against all odds.  Put a rock on a plant and it’ll grow around the rock.  Unwittingly lock a cat in a room and you’ll open the door on chaos.  Put the same cat inside an organ pipe and well . . . most cat lovers don’t even want to think about it.

Which is why some voices are silenced, either by looking down at a script, or asking young women to take their cardboard placards down from an internet site, or battering and raping people until they make the choice themselves to stop speaking.

One of the characters in my play asks why the cat stuck in the pipe wasn’t heard yowling its head off.  The other three each have an answer.  Cats weren’t pets then.  Some people don’t hear distressed sounds.  Some distressed creatures are silent.  Or, minorities aren’t real people.  The hegemony doesn’t listen to its subcultures.  The oppressed have stopped talking.

Don’t let that be you.  Don’t drop your eyes to the script like I did.  Don’t tell yourself that you’re the loud American or are too young or may sound like a whiner, that something about your voice is why it should be silenced.  In Connemara, they have a saying that it isn’t about the singer, but about the song; even someone who can’t carry a tune is allowed to sing.  It gives the song life through expression.  And life is the opposite of stagnation.

My Long Overdue Rant

This has been one of those weeks plagued by a breakout at the idiot asylum.  Stuart Hall gets 15 months for sexual offences spanning 18 years.  Charles Saatchi accepts a caution for assaulting Nigella Lawson, not because he was being anything more than playful with her, but to make all the aggro go away.  Tom Martin wants to explore whether there’s a correlation between gold digging and why women are less funny than men.  And who can forget John Waters’ psychotic planet where Irish women tyrannise their menfolk and don’t really appreciate the inherent bliss which is pregnancy?  A bliss disconnected from the manner of conception or the viability of the foetus. 

After 30 years as a trauma therapist, I am jaded.  Even my husband’s horror at these news items didn’t get through to me.  People are intrinsically stupid and I’m going back to my writing.  Then I read Jinan Younis’ posting, What Happened When I Started a Feminist Society at School. 

http://fb.me/2eCSL48E5 

What a brave woman.  After an incident of sexual harassment by strangers, she forms an organisation to help herself and her classmates meet the anachronistic challenge of misogyny.  Obviously this brings a backlash of abusive and threatening comments from male peers, because that’s what happens when women speak out.  Jinan’s school does what society always does to women – stops them from expressing that something’s wrong.  Out of concern for their safety, of course.  Yes, that makes a lot of sense.  Let’s not upset the dear misogynists lest they become naughty.

My 17^th year, the place where Jinan Younis is now, was done a long time ago, but her article reminds me that it’s just now happening for hundreds of thousands of young women and men.  And so this week, I’m setting aside my writing to share a few things that I’ve learned.  This is not empirical data.  These are anecdotal events from my years as a trauma therapist, that I pass along to those of you who, like my husband, still respond with horror.

First let me say that I am not an activist.  I don’t have the temperament.  Nor does my son.  When he transitioned, he said he wanted to live his life, not spend the rest of it trying to change society.  I told him about my mother, a professional woman with seven children who one day in the 1970s wore a pants suit to church where she was the choir director.  After Mass, several women in the congregation thanked her for breaking the dress code.  My mother said that she’d put on the pants suit without thought to the wider ramifications.  She was living her life, not making a statement.  The point being, I told my son, they’re the same thing.  For me, living my life meant being a writer and trauma therapist.  Which means I've gotten close and personal with victims of domestic and sexual abuse.

Domestic abuse.  This week, people have said more times than I wanted to hear that Nigella Lawson’s experience somehow outs the problem of domestic abuse.  The jaded part of me wonders how society hasn’t noticed before.  In many places such as Glasgow, there are whole courts dedicated to domestic abuse.  There’s not a Murder Court or a Petty Larceny Court, but there is a Domestic Abuse Court.  How marginal can domestic abuse possibly be when we need courts dedicated to it?

Domestic abuse is a complicated thing.  Abusers don’t smack a woman they meet in a bar and so she goes home with him to live a life of physical violence.  It starts very subtly and progresses in an insidious way, like a slow acting disease.  Most of my clients are remarkable women.  The organisers.  The heads of departments.  The gregarious barkeep who tossed drunks out on their ears.  The women first on the dance floor and last off.  The artistic.  The alluring.  The intelligent.  The compassionate.  Great mothers and educators.  The heart of the family.  The object worth attaining and possessing.  Someone so accomplished, as a matter of fact, it’s satisfying to destroy her.

That, in my experience, is the face of the domestic abuse victim.  Women who can survive decades of extreme physical and emotional violence, usually with the aid of some powerful drugs and no external supports, who, given 2 short years of therapy, are often able to resume their lives. 

Unfortunately, funding sources typically expect domestic abuse victims to get past 20 years of terror in 12 short weeks.  We acknowledge that PTSD in soldiers takes longer to address.  We have the research to show the correlation of symptomatology between domestic abuse and victims of war.  We also know that the psychological effects of abusive trauma increases exponentially to the level of intimacy with the abuser.  But hey, someone damaged in the ‘defence’ of our country deserves more support than the women trying to raise the next generation.

And now sexual abuse.  I once worked in a homeless shelter for women with an admission criteria of either a history of abuse or of substance misuse.  In the time I worked there, only one woman didn’t have an addiction but all of the women had a history of abuse.  The majority of them also had a history of childhood sexual abuse.  This can be the future for a sexually abused child.  Her life sucks.  Her whole life.  Not just the incident of sexual intrusion, but her whole, entire life gone in some pervert’s ejaculation.

That was a discrete population of homeless women, so perhaps extreme, you say.  Remember what I wrote above.  The psychological effects of abusive trauma increases exponentially to the level of intimacy with the abuser.  In other words, it hurts more if you know the person.  Most sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by someone the victim knows or respects.  It’s how the predator works.  There is a bond of trust, so the child does what she’s told to do.  The predator has tentacles in the child’s life, can use knowledge about the child to control her or, in the case of celebrity paedophiles, their societal power to subdue her resistance.  Society colludes, hushes the child in the same way Jinan Younis and her classmates have been hushed.

How is that child ever expected to form a healthy relationship?  Sexual abuse objectifies her.  There it goes, self esteem, out the window.  You are nothing but an object.  A sexual object.  You give your body and you get love.  Or intimacy.  Or just physical warmth because let’s face it, without self esteem, what else do you think you're worth receiving?

Not only is the ability to have a normal and intimate relationship, sexual or platonic, permanently impaired by childhood sexual abuse, but often these victims are pathologised by the very institutions meant to treat them.  I have had countless clients with sexual abuse histories, both childhood and adult rape, who could not have their medical issues taken seriously if their sexual abuse history were known.  Headache?  Because of the rape.  Abdominal pain?  Because of the rape.  Antiphylactic reaction?  Because of the rape.

We didn’t listen to them then.  We don’t listen to them now.  We medicate them into silence.

So.  Stuart Hall’s eighteen years of sexual predatory behaviour equates to a 15 month sentence, only half of which will be served.  The poor old fart.  The fathers of Hall’s victims are horrified.  The brothers and uncles and husbands are horrified.  Men are horrified.  Women are horrified.  Why are there not laws to reflect this horror? 

I don’t know.  My poor pea brain can’t wrap itself around the fact that Nick Griffen can utter sexist and sexual things about Nigella Lawson and still have a job as MEP.  But there’s undoubtedly a correlation between people like Nick Griffen being allowed to speak and the silencing of women like Jinan Younis.  And we need to address it, rather worry about inciting the bastards.

Let the Dark In

Last week in the Writing Closet, we listened.  This week, we speak, but not of ordinary things.  This week we speak of our darkness.

What Happened.

Something’s happened.  Something you don’t understand.  You’re not the type of person it should happen to or you’re not the type of person who would do something like that.  It doesn’t make sense. 

People say things like, what were you thinking?  What did you do to make that happen?  Surely it’s not as bad as you say.  Why do you have to be so negative?  Why are you always such a drama queen?  They look at their watch when you speak.  They say that you’re weak.  On and on until you learn to stop speaking about it.  You pretend it didn’t happen and everyone’s happy.

It doesn’t have to be physically violent, although it could be.  It doesn’t have to be monumental, even, except to you.  What is your What Happened?  Can you say it out loud, to yourself, when no one’s in the room, no one’s outside the door?  Can you whisper, This Happened, and still feel yourself safe?

Touched cheated lied hit cut stole betrayed fired punched spied vandalised withdrew slandered provoked seduced abandoned changed you.

If you don’t feel safe, then perhaps today is not the day for you to continuing reading this.  Mark the page.  Come back when you’re ready.  Before you go, let me remind you, although you already know it, that we all have these things in our lives.  All of us.  There is a conspiracy not to speak of these things, yet these are the things a writer must speak.  But before she does, she must feel safe.  Only when you’re safe, should you write.

Not What You Are

One of the ways to help you feel safer is to separate the act from the person.  You are not what you did.  You are not what was done to you.  You may be a person who cheats on her partner but also loves that partner to distraction.  Who you are could explain the Why, but what you do, does not define the Who.  You may be a person being stalked by an ex-lover and you also help the parents of autistic children.  What happens to you is your history, not your talent.  You are more human and more normal than these experiences, held in secret, let you believe.

If you can speak about what happened and still feel safe, you will write it.  This is a given.  The trick is how you write it.  We’ve been taught to follow that sacred dramatic arc, come hell or high water, to reach a resolution.  Popular entertainment teaches us that this resolution should eclipse the What Happened.  Now I’m going to contradict myself.

Rather than eclipse it, think about embracing it.  Okay, didn’t I just write that you need to separate yourself from the What Happened?  Yes.  And if you separate yourself successfully, you won’t have to obliterate it.  You can change it into literature.  The dark, like the right side of your brain or your animus or your psychological shadow is bursting with energy that you can tap into it.  But how?

Play with What Happened

When the EDL went to protest outside a mosque in York, they were invited inside for tea and football.  This is what you have to do.  Invite What Happened in for a cuppa.  Sit with it a while, get to know each other.  And when you are safe, play.  And by play, I mean ground yourself physically in What Happened.  Let your body feel the experience while at the same time, maintaining your own integrity as separate from What Happened, just as you would do when immersing yourself in a character you’re developing.  When you do, it will give things to you.  Some of these things may give you insomnia, but you will learn to use them.

My current manuscript keeps me up at night.  Not because of structure and form, not because of plot and characterisation but because of the question, Is it ever right to kill someone?  Euthanasia.  Abortion.  Death penalty.  War.  Murder.  Is it ever right . . . This story is a blatant sublimation of What Happened in my own life.  Well, blatant to me.  There’s not a lot of killing going on in my life, but the creation of that question did come from What Happened.   And believe me, it’s a lot more interesting than What Happened, because it takes the themes of the personal events and puts them on a universal stage.

Which actually is the basis of most therapeutic approaches to trauma.  Research shows that regardless of the treatment modality, the most important factor to a traumatised person is reconnection to the broader community.  The sooner that happens, the better her chance of recovery. 

We are, after all, social creatures.  What Happened in your life belongs to the society of US.  Get yourself safe.  Invite What Happened in for tea and football.  Embrace it.  Share it.  Say it out loud.

Eva Ensler

For inspiration, read this interview with Eva Ensler. 

  //bit.ly/10bQg8Y 

Shh, listen . . .

I have a friend who cannot listen.  She’s not deaf; she’s wired in such a way that she cannot listen to someone else’s part of the conversation.  Not that she’s dismissive.  She’s a charming, intelligent, energetic person whose brain flits through synapses like a mouse tossed in the air by a cat.

If I use the phrase, ‘rabbiting on,’ she grabs the conversation out of my mouth by saying, ‘Speaking of rabbits,’ and then proceeds to tell me about how her cousin’s neighbour’s son, Todd whose name means ‘fox’ and that somehow relates to rabbits which is connected to what I was saying by . . . I really don’t know how. 

Three minutes into any conversation and she renders me invisible, even though I can be quite entertaining on occasion.  When she gets a topic between her teeth, there’s no stopping her.  She came to dinner once, homemade dessert in hand and while we were scarfing it down, dissected its failings.  Initially we tried to disagree but she was unstoppable.  As she trashed her contribution, a silent black pall fell over the group.  And then the Butler filled everyone’s glass and we drank deeply.

I’m a former professional listener and ten minutes with her exhausts me.  If you cannot listen, your environment will stop trying to access you.  Which is isolating.  Which builds up the stuff in you that you want to say.  Which makes listening harder, perhaps nearly impossible.

Imagine that.  If you couldn’t listen, imagine how much of your environment you wouldn’t take in.  Imagine how much of your environment would withdraw from you.  Imagine.  As a writer, if you can’t listen, what happens?  It certainly reduces your perspective to one – yours.  So how do you write characters if the only perspective rattling around in your brain is your own?

Well, most of us are made up of parts, but after a while, writing these parts will produce a certain sameness.  And if the only perspective inside your head is the inside of your head, then the only resolution of plot lines will be a reverberation of the same old same old.  Writers, artists, actors cannot grow if we do not perceive the otherness of the world.  Our art comes from the flint spark of what is us, crashing into what is not us. 

But there is another type of listening.  Listening to that old right brain of yours.  Remember, the left side of the brain is the language brain.  It goes forth into the world and because it is language, it tells us it’s the only ME you have.  But it always takes along the right side of the brain, the symbolic brain, the intuitive brain, the creative brain.  The right brain is a communicator, too, but it speaks to us in non-linguistic ways.  We have dreams, urges, intuitions, premonitions, creeped out shivers, anxious moments, inclinations. 

The UK based script writers in the crowd have had a flurry of contest deadlines these last two months.  For most of my writing life, I’ve done long prose, but the last three or four years, I’ve done script as well.  It’s a writing form that insists upon perceiving beyond oneself during the creation.  Scripts require other people in order to come into artistic being; that aspect makes it deliciously addictive.

 

Please notice me.

As I was driving myself toward these script deadlines, an unfinished prose piece kept intruding into my work.  I would put it off by promising to get to it when these essential, life-preserving deadlines were met, but the damned prose thing was like the Big Nose Dog when he needs to go for a walk – his chin on my knee, those deadly brown eyes boring into my usually impervious conscience.

My right brain was speaking to me and I wasn’t listening.  As a result, writing became an obligation.  I wasn’t having fun and we know how important fun is to a writer.  I sent a script to Papatango and Bruntwood, then pulled out my piece for the Verity Bargate.  I typed.  I deleted.  I took Big Nose for a walk.  I savaged weeds in the garden.  I sat in the hammock, stared into space.  I typed.  I deleted.  My play for the Verity Bargate was going nowhere.

Then I closed the script document.  Opened the prose document.  And wrote.  Hours and hours of highly energised writing which only stopped when the Butler came into my office and announced it was time to eat.  I’d listened to my right brain and I was having fun again.

Spend this week listening.  Listen to the racists who are pissed off over the Cheerio ad.  Listen to the endless commentary on Prince Philip’s private medical situation.  Listen to birds, the sound of motors and wind and the latch on the gate.  Listen to obnoxious children whining that it’s not fair and drunkards who know the meaning of life.  Listen to your mother’s advice, even though she’s given it to you 7032 times already and she’s really, really wrong about that.  Listen to your friend who never listens to you when she talks about Todd.

And when all that listening is done, listen to old right brain.  Or watch for it.  Or let it touch your muscles and skin.  Listen and you’ll know.  You will, I promise you.

The Step-Cat

When the Butler and I married nearly six years ago, his three kids still lived with him and his ex-wife hung upside down in a belfry across the football pitch from our house.  Certainly a challenge to any new wife, but eventually dealt with via a restraining order against the ex (who subsequently melted in a sudden rain storm) and an all-sales-are-final deal with a passing circus for the three kids.  The one challenge I hadn’t come prepared for was the step-cat, Binks. 

Fourteen pounds of muscle, claws, and pure evil dressed in a fur tuxedo who’d jump into a lap under the guise of affection and then draw blood.  The Butler doted on the beast.  Pud Pud, he called him, as if he were a crème brulee instead of the vicious killing machine whose favourite trick was attacking me in my sleep.  I’m not a gentle soul (ask the Wild Kids of Borneo, next time the circus passes through town) and Binks got many a flying lesson for the night time death raids.

Then the Butler went on deployment.  His lift came at 2:00 a.m. and I waved him off from the end of the drive.  When I turned back to the house, there Binks sat, gold eyes staring at me, the tip of his tail twitching. 

I am in control, his posture said, and I think you should die. 

Binks

 Fortunately my opposable thumbs were needed for important cat services such as letting him into the house and opening the cat food.

I might not be gentle, but neither am I aggressive.  I gave Binks a wide berth and went about my normal activities.  In the kitchen making dinner, the small black corner of cat ear visible just past the doorjamb.  Hanging up laundry, a feline silhouette at the end of the footpath.  Weeding the flowerbeds and two golden eyes peer through the dahlias like the German officer from Laugh In.  One night at the computer, I looked down and there he sat, not stalking me; being companionable.  I reached down and scratched his jaw.  No blood was drawn.

When the Butler came back from deployment in the wee hours one morning, Binks and I stood together at the end of the drive to welcome him home.  The military operation had ended for all three of us.

Here in the Writing Closet, we think of Binks as Sean Connery’s James Bond.  A black cat with a dinner-shirt-white breast, he’s poised, dignified, old enough to no longer have psychotic episodes.  He doesn’t have much of a voice, so his demands are meted out with silent perseverance.  He takes no issue with the neighbour cats and is often seen sitting on the lawn with local toms, pondering.

Binks & Bast ponder.

 Then we took care of my son’s cat temporarily.  A slightly built black and white female of a similar age, known to stare down attack dogs and sleep with a large pet iguana.  When Binks saw her, he did a pole dance on his scratching post.  She threw a glimpse of disgust at his embarrassing contortions as she sauntered by.  After several months and Binks’ many attempts, the most attention she gave him was to play footsie on either side of an electric heater.

But his loyalty to her never wavered.  Once when they were both outside, one of Binks’ pondering fellows wandered into the flowerbed.  A third black and white cat.  The female went for him, although he was twice her size (which to be honest, most cats are).  Binks flew to her rescue.  There I was with three black and white cats clawing and hissing, limbs and tails and fur mixed together, a glimpse of Binks’ eyes showing white with fear from the bottom of the heap, sickening me.  I clapped and yelled and stamped until the pal took off.  Our cats were ruffled but unharmed.

Binks & Bast help El Punko study.

Once my son took his cat home, we humans thought Binks needed feline company, so adopted a calico (tortoiseshell and white) kitten.  Calypso.  Binks was twelve at the time.  My advice, don’t ever do this to an older animal.  Calypso attacked and killed everything in sight and some things that weren’t visible to the human eye.  We’d wake to her in the dark above us, having climbed the posts of our four poster bed; or to Binks squeaking in outrage as she wouldn’t give him peace.  During her first heat when she was kept inside and unsuitable suitors roamed the garden, Binks took them on, his former pondering pals, and suffered a battle scar or two in her name.

Calypso & Monster

At fourteen years old, Binks has arthritis in his hip with subsequent muscle loss and is down to thirteen pounds.  When he darts across the garden, he rarely goes up a tree, often hugs it, looks to see if we notice, and if we do, hides under the peonies until the memory fades.  He wrestles with Calypso, ponders the garden with my son’s cat when she visits.  Often sleeps in our bed and never draws blood.  He’s the stable and sane animal in the household.

A few weeks ago, he developed runny eyes.  Off to the vet, a place he usually only goes once a year, having a dirty protest in the car on the way.  A few applications of drops and his eyes look better but not great.  A few days later, he starts to shake his paws and lose the hair from his dinner shirt.  Back to the vet, who thinks he’s over-grooming.  A few medications and we’re sent home.  Things worsen.  He’s got dander all over his coat, the hair loss increasing.  The Butler thinks we should get a gold medallion for Binks’ bare chest.

And so back to the vet.  When we put him on the examining table, he leaves scales from his paw pads on the metallic surface.  They do blood tests and take skin biopsies.  They consult with a feline dermatologist.  They argue among themselves.  We bathe him in case he’s walked through something toxic, canvass our neighbours for chemicals in sheds.  Binks loses more weight but still comes out each morning, leaving a trail of dander and hair to visit the litter tray, then stand silently in front of the fridge and demand milk.  Other than that trip, he stays on a chair in my office, shedding, losing more weight.  I groom him and bring him food several times a day.

Binks & Calypso then.

Binks is now just a little over eight pounds and nearly bald from behind his ears, down his chin, all along his belly to his tail.  His front legs have been shaved for the blood tests and skin biopsies.  He’s bare around each claw on all four feet.  And still he’s dignified in a Sean Connery’s James Bond sort of way. 

Yesterday they admitted him to vet hospital to do an ultrasound on his liver.  There are some shadows there, so they hope to build him up over the weekend to prepare for surgery on Monday.  It’s for diagnostic purposes only.  If he’s got a tumour, there’s nothing they can do.  If there’s no tumour, then they go on treating an illness they can’t diagnose.

I’m not sure we should let Binks have surgery, but I’m the step-human.  It’s the Butler’s decision, not mine and for this, I’m glad.  Because even though he’s ill, Binks is still there in his nest of dermatological debris, interacting in his dignified way, making the epic journey to the fridge every day.  If they find a tumour on Monday, I won’t be the one who has to say it’s over.  I can sit on the side and grieve, leave the hard decisions to someone else.

Big Nose gives his bed to sick Binks, with El Punko & Bast.

My very first memory is of a cat.  This is true.  A wet night in Texas and a young cat wails to be let in.  I’m two years old and stand in front of my father who sits on a bench.  I pat his leg and he bends over to meet my eyes, a smile on his face.  I point to the cat on the other side of the screen door, ask my father to let the cat in.  I don’t remember the rest but I’m told that the cat, a stray, came in and gave everyone but me ringworm.

Binks & Calypso now.

I’ve spent my life making cat memories, have met some extraordinary cats, and come to the conclusion there are no ordinary cats.  You could say I’m rich in cat memories so shouldn’t be so selfish, but I just didn’t think Binks and I were done yet.  There is something more enduring in a love you have to earn, even if it comes from a cat.  An intimacy and a bargaining.  It’s a joint effort that either party can back away from at any time.  When neither of you choose to end it, when something else comes between you such as a dodgy liver, then an invisible hatchet cuts away at tender parts of your emotional being.

Bink's empty chair.

Tonight we go visit Binks.  Both my son’s cat and Calypso have had overnight stays at the vet hospital so we’re well versed in its ignominy.  Sean Connery’s James Bond deserves better than this but to be honest, we’re not ready to let him go.  As long as his cathood still looks out of those golden eyes, I don’t think I ever will be ready.  I count on the Butler who was brave enough to make this decision for his own father whom he cherished; will surely do the right thing by Binks.  A shadow lurks on the edges of this, of what happens to the two of us as we grow older.  A whisper that I may have to make these decisions on my own in the decades to come, and not for a cat or a dog.  I wonder where the bravery comes for living life.  I wonder if I have it at all.

Keep the T-Bird

Twice this week, I’ve read that we physically need creativity, play and rest.  Considering that last week, I posited the mental health issues of writers, this is good news.  The caveat here is that when we downgrade writing from creativity and play into work, it’s like what happens after Daddy took the T-Bird away.

http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.html

A few months ago, Amanda Palmer used her TED talk to urge the arts community to give their work back to the people, asking for only what we need.  Then Palmer paid her local front bands with hugs and beer, which drew comparisons between the financially successful musician and the record labels she meant to combat. 

What Palmer suggests does appeal on an emotional level, but practically speaking, someone has to pay for our beans on toast.  In response to Palmer’s TED Talk, Cord Jefferson writes that the voice of American journalism now comes from the ‘trust fund babies’, as entry level jobs in the field have dried up in favour of unpaid internships.  To build a writing portfolio, the budding journalist must have financial back-up to allow her to give her words away.  Not only does this practice silence voices from lower economic brackets, usually voices of colour, but it devalues the work of writing.

http://gawker.com/5989280/when-people-write-for-free-who-pays

This dilemma isn’t the sole prize of writers.  The entire crop of fledgling artists face the choice of putting all their eggs in the arts basket or having a day job while trying to enter the arts work force through an after-hours doorway.  A young friend of mine who chose the former path, still lives with his parents, puts all his energy into breaking into his field, and says he has no social life outside of contacts in the arts community.  While we can admire his dedication, this time of his life isn’t balanced; it forces him to make decisions about his life that his age peers in other professions don’t have to make, and pressures him to succeed or give up his chosen career. 

Doesn’t sound much like creativity, play and rest.  More like grappling for survival.  While the general consensus outside the creative community is that artists should live a life of deprivation in order to create, I say, bullshit.  There are things we can do to lobby for more support of the arts, a long but needed process.  In the meantime, let’s also take care of ourselves. 

Creative people are great for thinking outside the box.  Ellen Langer in her book, On Becoming An Artist, suggests we remember to ‘pursue art for life’s sake’.  As a writer, you know the feeling of your senses opening up in order to transform external stimulus into art.  Creativity makes us more aware of our life, which improves its quality, but also lets us see possibilities and solutions that a non-creative approach doesn't illuminate.  The trick is to step outside the box, but not lose sight of the practicalities involved.  In other words, pay the front bands more than hugs.

Brené Brown writes in The Gifts of Imperfection that we should make a list of things that we think will improve our lives, then reduce from that list the number of ‘accomplishments and acquisitions’, replace them with things that provide ‘joy and meaning’.  Once we’ve adjusted the list, it’s important that we also implement the list.  In other words, do we really need to submit work to forty-five magazines in the space of six weeks or would we have better mental health and practice greater creativity if we only wrote one kickass piece in that time? 

  

 Okay, so one piece doesn’t pay the bills.  I don’t suggest that we eliminate the accomplishment and acquisitions list.  We subdue it slightly.  We change our focus from what we do, to what we experience and feel.  From what job we hold, what awards we win, what publications we’ve broken into, to who we are as people, what voice we cultivate as writers, what stories we tell, what messages we relate, how well we create, play and rest.  It is the creative person’s equivalent to an athlete’s fitness regime.

Research from the National Institute for Play in California shows that play shapes our brains in a way that promotes empathy, helps us understand complex social interactions, underlies creativity and innovation in the arts, science, maths and more.  

http://www.nifplay.org/contactus.html

What that means is play makes us higher functioning human beings who can understand the internal life of others better, move successfully through difficult social situations, think outside the box AND communicate this information in an artistic way that can be understood and assimilated by other people.  Creativity, play and rest could actually be the salvation not just of writers, but of the race.  

Go forth and ply your trade.  Write, submit, worry about deadlines, build your writing history.  But play.  Be silly.  Laugh.  Crack silly jokes.  Dress in costume.  Sing in the grocery store.  Hang on to your T-Bird.  Have fun, fun, fun while eating your beans and toast.

How Big is Your Brave?

Notice the guy in blue plaid.

Being a writer can make you feel the most universally unwanted person in the world.  When your friends get shortlisted and you don’t, or the writer of that crap play wins an award you deserved, when you start the morning with another email rejection that spells your name incorrectly, all you feel fit for is lying spread-eagled on the floor and having a good ol’ wail.  

Go ahead.  Give yourself fifteen seconds of despair.  We’re creatures of expression, after all.

 I once read an article that said the mental health of writers isn’t great.  We spend a lot of time by ourselves creating fantasies, without the intermittent positive response or even a pay cheque to keep us going.  We have to ignore the constant rejection, improve our craft without losing our voice, yet still be able to hear the truth about our work.  It takes a particularly fine sorting skill to achieve all that. 

Apparently the difference between us and other artistic media is that in addition to the isolated nature of the work, we don’t have a tangible product unless we’re published.  No song to hum to ourselves.  No still life to hang on the wall.  Just a ream of paper tucked in a cupboard or a file on our desktop.  We have to believe in the intangible while living in a materialistic society.  What do you suppose the end result of that’s going to be?  It doesn’t take a mental health professional to see creature-of-expression plus no-audience equals spread-eagled-wailing. 

Big deal, eh?  Every life has sorrow built into it.  That’s a fact, right?  Well I say, anyone who believes that life only gives what we can handle, that person isn’t really paying attention.  Sometimes life punches back too hard and changes who you are.  Sometimes that change isn’t for the better.  Sometimes it damages you in ways you’ll never recover from.  That’s not something any of us want to have happen.

Happiness isn’t a passive activity.  When you see the laser dot of ego destruction on your chest, get to work.  The first and easiest thing is to ‘reframe’.  In other words, don’t let your mind downslide into negative thought.  Your friend getting shortlisted or winning that award?  Not about you.  The inability for someone to spell your name right when they’re crushing your dreams?  That’s about them.  Don’t interpret the world as out to get you.  At the most, the world outside of our immediate circle is indifferent to us.

When you do get knocked down, promise yourself to get back up again.  Eventually.  In due time.  When the wailing is done.  Keep this promise to yourself.  Do Not Give Up.

Check out your social environment.  Do the people closest to you support your writing or do they invade your writing time, not show up to readings, ‘inadvertently’ shred your latest collection of poems?  Do you meet with other writers?  Do you attend literary events in your community?  Do other writers know you in the flesh or only on Twitter and Facebook?  If your social environment is failing you, rethink it.  You are doing one of the most challenging things in the arts world.  Social science confirms this.  You cannot do it if you don’t have a warm and loving nest.  

Now comes the hard part.  Know in the depths of your marrow that you have the right to be here.  You have the right to express yourself.  You deserve to be heard.  You contribute something to this world that no other person, writer or non-writer, contributes.  You are your contribution and this is the only time you have to offer it.  Right here.  Right now.

Okay, so now watch this Sara Bareilles music video, Brave.  While you’re watching it, pay attention to the guy in the blue plaid shirt.  That’s what you’re striving for.  An unreserved commitment to enjoying your own expression.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUQsqBqxoR4

Show me your brave.