Self-study requires mindful courage. It requires you to stand steady when you’re confronted with your own patterns and responses. It requires you to look through your initial reactions until you see their tender root at your center. When you are able to look with soft eyes, it’s easier for self-judgments to fall away. It requires great courage to remain steady while gazing into one’s own eyes. It takes great will to keep your gaze steady as you continue to open and open and open into absolute vulnerability.
Filmmaker Akira Kurosawa says, “To be an artist means to never avert your eyes.” Keep looking. Especially when you want to turn away. By standing steady, you’ll learn something new. And here’s the really cool part—when you learn something new, you can let something old go. Cast off what does not serve you.
Drop it.
Plink. Plink.
Into the red bucket.
There is no sorrow from the tree as it sheds its leaves. No sorrow from the clouds as they release their rain. Take the red bucket and scatter its contents to the wind. Nothing in nature is waste. What no longer serves you will sustain another.
Bow to what you cast away and rise each day lighter.
CHAPTER 22
Wake Up
Self-observation brings man to the realization of the necessity of self-change. And in observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening.
—George Gurdjieff
Keep the blinds drawn! Stay snug and warm under your down comforter. Ignore the footsteps you hear downstairs. Ignore the tapping of the branches on your windows. Turn the clock away from you so you cannot see its amber glow in the darkness. How many more hours do you have left until you must rise?
I don’t know about you, but one of my all-time favorite features on an alarm clock is the snooze button. I set the alarm for an hour before I actually need to get up so I can press the snooze button six times. After six times, I know it’s time to really wake up, no more time for lingering in the soft and squishy place of not quite sleep, not quite awake. This is a seductive place. I often feel like there are literal weights on my body, keeping me in bed longer than I should be. Pushing through those weights requires great willpower on some days. I feel like I’m swimming through warm honey, trying to break through the surface into the daylight.
I feel as though I spend most of my life in this between-sleep-and-awake space. I get lazy and want to just stay asleep. It’s easier. Requires no action. No warrior poses. No staring at my illusions and delusions, trying to slay them with the proverbial sword of enlightenment. Just sleeping, oh so comfortably, until something painful wakes me up. I’ve observed that the universe is pretty fast and furious when it comes to sending something painful to wake me up. I try now to pay attention to the first mosquito bite, rather than waiting for a ravenous tiger to leap into my life and turn everything upside down.
It’s easy to get stuck in the half-sleep/half-awake space. We’re busy. We’re in our cars a lot. We’re commuting from one place to another. We’re worried about our jobs, our families, our health care, and our planet’s health. We are taking care of aging parents or special-needs children. We are working several jobs and going to night school. We are campaigning. Organizing. Volunteering. Sometimes I catch myself midsleep and notice that I’ve done an awful lot on a particular day, but I have no clear memory of any of it. I sometimes notice when I’m driving that I somehow end up getting off at the right exit, but I don’t always remember how I got there or what was going on at the exits along my route. I’ve often joked about trying to figure out what part of me is paying attention when most of me seems to be asleep. Who was driving that car while I was remembering a trip to Virginia in 1980? Too scary to think about. I shake my head. Wake up, Laraine! Pay attention!
Times like the ones I just described are times when the mind has moved into the past or future, often into a place of anxiety over what could happen later that day or week, or what happened earlier in the day or many years ago. The mind has checked out and gone to a story line it’s comfortable with. It doesn’t want to pay attention to driving (or waiting in the doctor’s office, or reading, or taking a walk). It wants to be someplace else—not because I’m a bad person who doesn’t want to wake up, but because that’s what the mind does. Oh! There you go again! Gotcha! Come on back to now. And then, in the microsecond it takes for our mind to go wandering off again—gotcha! Come on back to now. And over and over and over. Your breathing practice helps to discipline your mind to catch itself. The soft eyes writing practice helps to reign in your mind. Learning to return to the page to follow the next right word rather than worrying about what you’re going to do in chapter seven helps your mind learn to catch itself. You’ll never still your mind. But you can watch it, and in the watching, you’ll find yourself changing.
The Writing Warrior cannot remain complacent. You cannot sleepwalk through your life. You cannot tune out your characters’ voices, the questions that pull at you in the middle of the night, the images you cannot erase. The Writing Warrior sets the alarm, gets up, and pays attention because there is no other option. You know that to turn your back on what you see is a betrayal of your writing.
During my yoga teacher training program, my teacher taught us the importance of not telling people in a yoga class to change their personal habits or behaviors. He didn’t want us to be attached to people’s behaviors—eating meat, not eating meat, drinking or not drinking caffeine or alcohol, smoking or not smoking; whatever a yogi is “supposed” to do didn’t matter. Through practice and through paying attention, habits and behaviors that no longer serve the individual will eventually fall away.
Wake up. The more you notice, the more you notice. And the more you notice, the fewer obstacles will block your path.
CHAPTER 23
Perhaps You Never Did This, But I Remember It Just the Same
A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
—Edward de Bono
Once upon a time, a little girl and a little boy went to the playground to ride the seesaw. The little girl had brown hair and wore a pink fluffy snowsuit. The little boy wore a green fleece jacket and had one brown mitten and one blue mitten. The day was clear, though snow had just fallen the night before. The little girl and little boy were proud to be old enough to go to the park by themselves, now that they’d reached the very old ages of eight and ten.
“Remember?” said the little girl, now thirty-one, now never wearing pink. “Remember that day we got to go to the park by ourselves and you fell off the seesaw and tore your blue jacket?”
“I remember the park,” said the little boy, now thirty-three. “But it wasn’t me who fell off. It was you. And I never had a blue jacket. You always remember colors wrong. My jacket was red. Chicago Bulls red.”
I’ll bet you’ve all had a conversation like this one. This is a pretty benign event though, right? Kids fall down. Does it really matter if the jacket was blue, green, or red? Probably not. But what if this day was more significant than that? What if this was the day when a flash flood came through town, or a tornado, or what if it was the day when they found out their parents were getting a divorce? What if the little boy had been kidnapped that day, and all the little girl had was her memory of the jacket to tell the law enforcement officers who were trying to find her brother? What if, what if—the stuff of stories. Writers love the “what if” question. It sets us off on wild plot chases and wilder character interactions. Whenever we get stuck in a chapter, we can play the “what if” game and keep writing for a little while longer.
Memory is much more like art than science. Memory is not absolute. Memory has shadows and stories, just as individual words do. Just as “playground” doesn’t conjure up the same image for everyone, each person present at a particular event will remember different things. What we reme
mber is not based on a formula, but rather is a montage, or collage, of events that made it through our filter as somehow significant. This happens through triggers—things we’re attached to, things we’re repulsed by, and things we’re attracted to. If a song on the radio is an old Elvis tune, I might retain that memory because my dad loved Elvis and he’s dead and I miss him, so the Elvis song carries some significance for me. Maybe the song playing was “Blue Suede Shoes,” but after a few days I remember it as “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog” because that’s my own favorite Elvis song. Memory layers itself upon itself. It forms its own Gordian knot, which not only gets repeated over time as we “remember,” but shifts as we have more experiences and impressions and understandings about a particular event. Memories become colored by what our hopes and desires were for that particular experience, and by the effect that experience has had on us throughout our lives. Our memories also become colored by others who shared that experience with us.
When working with memory in your writing (and you are, whether you’re writing fiction, memoir, or poetry), understand that you’re working with not what happened but rather your perception of what happened. This is a very important distinction. Writers get worked up over the notion of truth and memory. Here’s the deal. Memory may never be “truth” as it relates to a specific sequence of events. What memory can be is an essential truth for you—an authentic expression of an emotional experience, rather than a literal experience. Here’s the rest of the deal—it doesn’t necessarily matter if you no longer know what really happened. What matters when you first begin the warrior work of self-study is what you believe happened. That story is currently affecting you. It doesn’t matter if it never happened in “real” life. If you believe it happened, then for our purposes, and for the purposes of how your body holds emotions and experiences, it did happen. Just accept that. Listen to your body as well as your memory as you try to figure out what makes you tick and why.
Amy Tan says, “I have a writer’s memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.” Because I’ve always adored story, and because I have always been resistant to change, I’ve spent a great deal of time hanging out in the frozen halls of memory. Working and reworking a memory until I’m truly no longer sure what happened or, sometimes, if it even happened at all. For me, remembering seems to take me further and further away from the actual event and closer to one of the following two options: what I’d have liked to have happened or the way the event has affected me. I instinctively want to arrange a series of events so it will have the biggest dramatic impact on me and my readers (listeners, friends, family). Life doesn’t always happen in the appropriate order to have the greatest dramatic effect on people. Also, if I unconsciously want to remain attached to a particular story line or belief system about a person, I can rearrange the events, and then stress the situation’s unpleasantness or pleasantness to suit my objective.
We exaggerate our stories without thinking about it when we’re not paying attention. It’s natural to want to be seen in the best light, to want people to love and respect us, to have a place to belong with friends and family. It takes a great deal of risk to not always be the star of your memory story. For true ruthless self-study, you must be willing to entertain the possibility that you’re not always doing everything right, or, if you tend to believe you are always messing everything up, you have to be willing to consider that you might actually not be the worst person in the universe after all.
Over many years, we exaggerate, reform, and erase our memories to build a story we live by as gospel truth. Holidays mesh together until you can’t remember whether it was Thanksgiving 1964 or Christmas 1978 when Uncle Frank threw the whiskey bottle across the room and smashed the vase your great-grandmother had brought all the way from Finland when she immigrated to the United States in 1924. Maybe it wasn’t even a whiskey bottle. Maybe it wasn’t even Uncle Frank. Maybe it was your father, and you don’t want to remember because your father’s been dead for ten years now and you really don’t want to think about anything he might have done that was less than upstanding.
We have to accept our memories with a grain of salt. Don’t worry that your memories aren’t always accurate. The awareness that they aren’t will help you see things more clearly. Part of what we’re working with here is our human desire to always be right. If you believe it was Uncle Frank who threw the vase and your relationship with Uncle Frank has been strained ever since, then what matters in your own development is what you believe happened. Your next step in ruthless self-study is to question. Are you sure? Why are you sure? Is there corroborating evidence? Is there anyone else who can substantiate your story? You’re the one who’s being affected by your interpretation of events. Keep that first and foremost in mind. Then hold to the possibility that your interpretations have been shaped by your unconscious desires. What story have you told yourself about your life that you might be willing to let go of?
I worked diligently on my autobiography from kindergarten through the summer of my seventh year. I had two volumes going by the time summer 1976 rolled around. Part 1 was called My Name Is Laraine and featured a colored-pencil drawing of my sister and me holding hands (something I can never remember us doing) and skipping down the street. It had chapters like “John Walker” (my first crush) and “Peanut Butter Cookies” (the snack we had in kindergarten one day).
Part 2 was called, appropriately, More My Name Is Laraine. Part 2 was mostly an outline for chapters to come, but part 1 had a narrative, which was accurate enough to help me remember that I had a frog cubbyhole in kindergarten to put my things in, and that I made a macaroni Christmas tree for my mother out of a toilet paper roll in first grade. I had assigned, in pencil on the cover’s upper-right corner, a price of $1.50 for each book. My dedication and acknowledgments page went on far too long. I was six and already thanking everyone I’d ever met for helping me with my story. I knew instinctively that no one’s story exists alone.
I worked on those books with devotion and ease. I wrote in my bedroom, with a blue No. 2 pencil. I was careful not to press too hard on the paper because I was certain that once the pencil reached the nub stage of its life, I’d have no more words. I always wrote with my door closed, facing a pink wall. I wrote dialogue and description, loving the quotation marks that to me indicated not just what someone had said, but what I had heard. It didn’t occur to me then that those might not be the same thing.
I bore witness to my life and all its minor scenes (the death of Gus, the black bubble-eyed goldfish; the visit to Daddy’s office where there were rows and rows of—imagine the joy—typewriters; scooping lima beans off my plate into my lap and then running to the bathroom to dump them in the toilet, starving African children be damned). I was sure, without anyone ever telling me, that it mattered to keep a record of my stories.
I wasn’t thinking yet about organization or structure or style. I was just selecting events that seemed the most meaningful and then recording them on the page. Not a whole lot of reflection occurred, beyond the “it was fun” or “it was yucky” type, but a foundation for a writer’s eye emerged. I have kept these volumes, along with boxes of diaries and journals, all my life. I cannot imagine throwing them out, even though I almost never look at them. When I do visit them, I don’t recognize myself, which I guess is an essential understanding for a memoirist. The “I” I am now is not the “I” who lived then. The “I” writing this will not exist in one more second.
In 2004, when I moved from Phoenix to Prescott, Arizona, at thirty-six years old, I looked back at my autobiographies. In previous glances, I’d been secretly proud of my ability to punctuate dialogue correctly at six, pleased as punch that I spelled almost every word right and that I used subordinating clauses naturally. This time, I saw where the narrative stopped—sometime in late July 1976.
I had a red-and-green diary from the fifth grade, 1978, but nothing from summer of 1976 until then. I had stopped. Where did the st
ory go if it wasn’t put on the page? Where did the experiences move to? What exactly happened? The last chapter in my autobiography is called “Daddy Had a Heart Attack.”
One Sunday in August of 1976, Melanie rushed into Laraine’s bedroom, shouting, “Daddy had a heart attack! Daddy had a heart attack!” And she jumped all over her.
When she got off, Laraine said, “Liar.”
“You want to bet?” Melanie said. “Vicki and Frederick are coming to stay with us while Mama goes to the hospital to visit.”
“Oh.” Laraine got up to see if Melanie was telling the truth. She was. Vicki and Frederick had just walked in the back door. “Oh no!” Laraine started screaming at God and then burst into tears. Vicki came over to see if she could help. But nobody could. Not even Mama.
And that was the end of my autobiography. I wish that, instead of knowing that end punctuation goes inside quotation marks, I’d known what happens to writers when they stop writing their stories. But if I had known that then, I wouldn’t have a story to tell you now, so as they say, it all works out for the best.
When I think about those weeks after Dad’s heart attack, I honestly can’t be sure what I remember and what I’ve been told happened. I don’t think anymore that it matters which is which. I think what’s more striking is my absence of emotions connected to the events at the time.
James Pennebaker, one of the early researchers in writing as a healing tool, wrote of the importance not just of recording the events, but also of reflecting on them and expressing feelings around them. Nowhere in my childhood autobiography chapter did I express a single feeling word. Nowhere did I reflect on the meaning of the events or on what I thought the larger impact of the events would be. This is perhaps not unusual, given that I was seven, but that, combined with the cease and desist order I apparently gave my writing mojo, assures me that this stopping of my narrative is extremely important in some way.
The Writing Warrior Page 12