Life in 10 Minutes

Ten minutes is long enough to uproot your life, get caught in a storm, drink a cup of coffee, memorize a child's face, wash a sink full of dishes, recite wedding vows, fall in love with someone you shouldn't, eat a sandwich, remember a dream, call an old friend, sketch a figure model, read a chapter, listen to your favorite song, get on or off the train that will change the course of your life forever. Ten minutes is enough time to write something strange and beautiful and true without editing the strangeness and beauty and truth out of it. We all have ten minutes, many times a day, so it’s hard to come up with convincing excuses—even to our secret innermost selves—why we don’t. Ten minutes is everything we can't fit into a Facebook status, it’s slice of life, short-shorts, a Polaroid picture, a poem, a prayer.

What stories from your life can you write in 10 minutes?

Join me and writers from around the world as we write our lives, 10 minutes at a time.

Submit your 10 today!

10 Ways to Tell on Yourself

1. Tell everyone you meet that you're writing a book so that over the course of 20+ years of starting, stopping, starting over, throwing the whole thing out and starting again you'll feel accountable to the entire world and just keep going! Even when you're broke and everyone thinks you're insane!

2. Confess your deepest, most humiliating secrets to a sponsor in a 12 step recovery program because she promises that you will eventually stop destroying your life if you do. 

3. Practice writing the truth of your life in your most private journals, even when doing so forces you to relive in great detail certain episodes from your very recent Jerry Springer/Greek Tragedy past. 

4. Start actually sharing your stories, first in intimate groups of other writers and then in slightly more public forums, like, say first person columns on the internet. 

5. After 5 years of writing and teaching writing, when you are a) completely overwhelmed by all the stories you want to tell, b) blown away by the stories of your students and c) have recently been informed by a psychic that if you want to become an international bestseller you should launch a new website that will create the structure for your book, the answer's simple. Try everything else first. Feng Shui, essential oils, vision boards, diets, procrastination, bargaining, cleaning, pleading, self help books, prayer AND THEN launch your new website. Ask for help and be blown away by the quality and kindness of help you receive. Watch with wonder as your new site creatse the vessel you've been looking for to sail your writing and the writing of those around you for the last 10 or 30 years. Pinch yourself as it becomes something beautiful. Receive submissions that make you laugh, cry and praise Baby Jesus. Wonder what took you so long.

6. Feel like you are featured in the New York Times Book Review when the arts & culture editor from the local alternative weekly where you worked for years asks for an interview. As soon as he calls, forget everything you wanted to say but say some other things instead. Flush with pride when you appear in an article called Writing Flashes. Think, "at long last I know what Oprah feels like."  Check THAT one off your bucket list. 

7. FREAK OUT when you learn you won an award for which you will have to get your picture taken. Dry heave. Cry. Call all your friends. Listen as they talk you back from the brink. Have a good laugh when your husband says "well, maybe you could just stop thinking about yourself." HAHAHAHA! What a comedian! Pray that one day you can just stop thinking about yourself. In the meantime, take your pastor friend's advice. When the camera shoots, concentrate on what's inside instead of what's out. Pray that one day the two will come together and that you can just keep telling on yourself and asking for help until they do. 

8. At the award;s ceremony, stand on stage with women in heels and well known names, with make-up and money and prestige and feel your place as one of them, not better or worse, but as a woman devoted to her craft with both a lot of luck and a lot of determination, come hell or high water, rejection or failure or boils and frogs with sporadic health insurance and no guarantees, who has continued to tell on herself, to turn herself inside out, to search for her truth, one layer at a time. Cry as they call your name. Read your acceptance speech and feel, at least for that day that you wouldn't have one single thing about your life any other way.

9. Begin reading and transcribing 30+ journals no matter how badly you want to scream, sob, or make a large sacrifice to the Gods of Giving Up as you do. Keep reading even as you squirm from the discomfort of seeing yourself in black and white. Watch as the narrative arc, the internal structure, the plot line that carried you through- both your journals- and your life- begins to unfold. Recognize the incomparable beauty of the truth.



10. Keep telling on yourself and asking for help. Ditto, repeat. Keep telling on yourself and asking for help. Doing this doesn't guarantee you will become perfect or that it will be easy or that you are home free, but I do believe, if keep doing this, you are well on your way. 

PROMPT: Right Now I Am

Stolen from a coffee shop in Prague, 1995; Rediscovered while de-cluttering my study, 2015.

PROMPT: Right Now I Am. At the beginning of every creative nonfiction writing class I teach, we start with the prompt, “Right Now I Am…” We write for 10 minutes- nonstop- until the timer goes off. This is our imperial and holy dumping ground. We slough off the week, the day, the hour before when we couldn’t find parking, when we fought with our mothers, when our hearts broke again, when we heard the song on the radio that made us think of home. We write to get current, to get centered, to arrive. We write to process our day and our week, as a chance to see what’s we’re thinking and feeling so we can move forward with what we want and leave the rest behind. We use this ten minutes as a fireman’s hose, cleaning out the crowded gutters of our thoughts, packed in tight with dirt and twigs and sticks and the abandoned mobile homes of birds who’ve long since moved out. We empty our minds onto the page and in so doing, generate the prompts for what we will write about next. Sometimes we write gorgeous perfectly timed essays that tie up succinctly with a bow when the timer goes off. But that’s not usually the case. Usually we come up with a raw, messy, incoherent string of unconnected thoughts that miraculously pave the way to what we didn’t even know we were thinking, what we didn’t even know we needed to uncover. Sometimes this leads to poems or short stories or blog posts or the beginnings of memoirs or novels. Sometimes it’s just about the process, the holy act of slowing down enough to move our hands across the page.

What follows is a sampling of my own writing from the four classes I taught this week, Monday through Thursday. I have edited lightly in my translation from journal to screen, condensing in a few places, reinterpreting in a couple of others. But by and large, what you see is what I wrote in class.  As part of my commitment to allow my writing to breathe rather than to bury it, to trust my voice rather than edit it down to one measly scratched out word after another, I offer it now to you.

What would follow if you wrote "Right Now I Am..." and kept your hand moving for the next ten minutes?

Monday

           Right now I am ready to pack it in, to quit, to hand in my final letter of resignation. Who needs another writer, anyway? There is just so much HBO. Plus, I’ve discovered the frozen dumpling aisle at Tan A. There are so many good shows and so many warm blankets. Wouldn’t it be nice to just enjoy life rather than constantly vomit it up and study the contents? Would I get bored in a few weeks? Would I im-or ex-plode from the complete and utter lack of self examination? Well, I’d like to find out. Sign me up. Let me rot in my own decadence. Wretched excess. That was my tagline in my late teens and early twenties, only then I was talking about men and cigarettes and velvet dresses and whiskey. Now it’s flannel pajamas and frozen pork dumplings with ginger sauce and Flight of the Concords streaming on HBO to Go.

What I’m saying is I’m afraid I’m capable of letting the beaurocracy and red tape of life blot out all of the meaning and joy, especially if it must be done without any more fancy cheese on a Monday morning when suddenly one must also wear pants. Why dear God, I ask, standing before a spreadsheet that unformatted itself once again, am I here? Is this all performance art? Can it possibly be enough, to write ten minutes at a time, twisting down through my soul and up out of my brain like a gigantic Q-Tip or those things that clean the spit out of tubas? I could roast on pleasure but I have to slow cook joy. I’m not sure if I’m still heading in the right direction or if my cows have all died in pasture. Tonight, I put the key back in the ignition.

What I’m saying is I must write to stave off a life of endless gluttony and sloth. Writing makes me quicker. It makes me start to answer my own questions. There is someone inside me who knows me so well but can only speak her mind when I pick up this pen. Wouldn’t it be nice to occasionally shut her up and turn the TV on instead? The true answer is, not for long. I would die of loneliness if I didn’t spend any time listening to the me inside of me.

Over the break we finished the floors and painted walls and I spent 3 intense, emotional, hard work days de-cluttering and cleaning out my study—photo albums, clothing, journals, stationery, knick-knacks, office supplies, CDs, cassette tapes, video cameras, a rat’s nest of random chords, filing cabinets packed with ten years of evidence that yes, we did pay the utility bill (eventually). I even got rid of a bag of bags! I hauled load after load to the Goodwill or the dump pile around back, the agony of separation only mildly less intense than the agony of togetherness. Since my room now has a floor smooth and clean enough for yoga and a window seat bare enough for my body and a candle, I have felt infinitely closer to my writing self, which is infinitely holier- and scarier- than before.  

Tuesday

            Right now I am shockingly nervous, even more so than the first night of Jewish cotillion when Roxanne’s mom got us perms and I was taller than all the boys except for Ezra who later went to Harvard and became a lawyer and now of course we’re Facebook friends. Why am I so nervous? I’m first-date nervous or aa nervous as the time I posed naked for a painter and on the way home bought a Family Sized bag of BBQ potato chips. How much of it did I eat? The whole thing? I’m more nervous than at the gallery show when I hung naked on the wall, not just for one person, but several dozen and here it is: because in that case I could see just what they were seeing. In this case I cannot. Am I the terrified first grader who got cobwebs in her hair standing against the brick wall at recess or the twenty-something who had to walk the line and recite the alphabet backwards even though I only had two screwdrivers, officer, I swear. How many did I really have? Six? Eight? The whole bar? It was always too many and never enough. Or, am I the woman who has begun to befriend pastors and priests, to speak her truth above a whisper? Am I nervous because I forget what I know, even what I can’t un-know, what was born in my marrow? Maybe because unzipping words can be more intimate than unzipping dresses and there is no way to rely on yesterday’s ambition, yesterday’s bravado. Red cheeked and trembling, I wish I were cocksure.

Wednesday

Right now I am thinking that a shower is a baptism and Planter’s Peanuts are communion and this English Breakfast tea must be the blood of Jesus because I sure am feeling born again. A little bit of energy has returned to the corpse that rolled out of bed this morning thirty minutes past the alarm, missing the boat on morning ritual once again. In AA they tell you that you can start your day over any time, so today starts again now, though the fire that chased me here has gone out. Not to say I can’t start a little fire of my own in a Kroger Sandalwood candle but the burned down house I wrote my way through so madly has been rebuilt and now I just want to live in it.  I’ve been fantasizing about never writing again but I know that fantasy, like every other fantasy, is unsustainable. The “I’d Be Happier Just Living Not Writing” fantasy. It’s like saying “No, really, I don’t need to lift my legs anymore, I’m fine just sitting here, completely immobilized.” And at first it is but then the pins and needles set in and you’re considering amputation when all you have to do is stand up on your own two feet. So I write and the fire inside fans, not wildly, but enough.

As I contemplate a more regular writing schedule, the “What Ifs” are battling the “I Can’ts” at a standoff with the “Who Cares” and “Why Would Yous” and all of the other combatants on the Isle of Complacency. I am betwixt and between on my travels to the Land of Commitment. What if I fail? What if I mortify myself? The already answered questions resurrect again from the dead. You’ll look a fool. You’re just like an obese alcoholic at an AA meeting the gym the first week of January and then by week two, POOF! You’ve evaporated.

Thursday

Right now I feel like I’ve woken up in my tent alone after a long, hard, dreary night to a bright, clear morning with a galaxy’s worth of blue sky and with a big ball of rising sun. And while I am thrilled for the break in the weather and the clear view of the footpath ahead, I’m equally terrified it will all be blown the fuck away. Because weather is fickle like that. Surprise! Tornadoes, monsoons, avalanches, depression, reality, ugly men and weak, watery decaf in the forecast ahead. Oh God, NO! I have to soak up everything good and right and true I can get my greedy hands on RIGHT NOW, carpe-fucking-diem, because yes, this too shall pass. The perfect weather I woke up to is a re-dedication to my writing process, a commitment at a deeper level to the writer who has lived a million years inside of me, sometimes an honored guest, sometimes a hostage tied up, starved and gagged in the basement. Why hello beautiful, brilliant, brave writer woman I said to myself this morning (although I didn’t really say it, I wrote it) and I felt so free! So righteous! So ready to launch and be brave and take all the risks and write all the things. And then nothing actually happened other than breakfast and a little tiny visit to my dear old friends in the land of doubt. “HAHAHAHA!” they said. “This will never last! You have HBO and frozen dumplings! COME BACK TO US!”  But my hand has touched closely on the pulse of something real, something burning, this commitment. Are you all in? I ask. Are you willing to go deeper with no guarantees, at no matter what the cost? Now all that’s left is to pray. And write. And pray some more. 

Warts and Awards

8th Grade Creativity Award, 1989

Theresa Pollak Award, 2014

Warts and Awards: One is an embarrassing blemish and the other makes you feel  really special. But which is which?

Winning an award is wonderful and horrible, amazing and awkward. It makes you consider all of the awards you have not gotten that your friends, neighbors, colleagues and other people who are better/prettier/richer/smarter than you have. It makes you wonder if you actually deserve the award you did receive or if you're really a skilled fraud that has managed to fool everyone in an elaborate game of make believe. My son illustrated it this way: "You didn't get an award mom, you got a WART!" And actually I have had a whole lot more of those. Not only did I recently have to ask the Kroger pharmacist where the wart remover medication was after not so subtley scouring the entire store without success, a few days later I accidentally applied it as chapstick. 

So, while I am truly honored to have received a Pollak I'm probably going to have to wring my hands over it a little while longer, vacillating between feeling like the best person who ever lived and the worst. In the meantime, I'll try to remember what the hell I was up to in 8th Grade that landed me the magnificent trophy I recently unearthed in the shed, pictured above. I sure was creative at being a hormonal, angst ridden brand new teenager who announced to her mother she was ready to get her own apartment but couldn't apply eyeliner to the correct part of her face. Personally, I think I should win an award for winning two awards exactly 25 years apart.

Monday night I received the beautiful drawing with my name on it (above) after delivering the acceptance speech (below) that got me surprisingly choked up. Because as I prepared for my two minutes of fame the amount of love, support, belief, encouragement, collaboration and connection I've experienced and received in the last 2.5 decades is definitely something to celebrate. And I won't be going to the pharmacy to try to get it removed, further embarrassing myself in the process, anytime soon. 

Thank you so much to the nominators, judges and Richmond Magazine for the honor of this award. I must admit, my first thought after receiving the initial email from Harry letting me know I’d been selected to receive a Pollak, was Holy Expletive! Look at me! I am the Explective Expletive! Followed closely by “Geeez, too bad for Richmond Magazine...they must be pretty hard up to scrape out the bottom of the barrel like this” but that train of thought shows a lot more about how my brain works than the nature of the Pollak Awards.  Because the truth is some truly amazing and beautiful things have been happening in the Richmond writing scene for people of all ages, not because of me but alongside me. The Writing Room, Richmond Young Writers and the adult creative nonfiction workshops and retreats wouldn’t begin to be possible on my steam or sweat or imagination alone. There’s an embarrassment of people I’d like to thank individually and collectively for helping me create and sustain a small but rich pocket of the writing world here in my hometown. My beloved Richmond Young Writers partner Bird Cox (with a shout out to her new baby Ferris who threw up on my shoulder just this morning), my husband Stan who can do everything I can’t do and loves me anyway, my son Henry who redefines creativity for me every day, my rock steady bohemian parents and far flung family, my above average looking friends with high IQs, the writing, reading and bookstore community in Richmond at large and Ward Tefft and Chop Suey books in particular and last but not least Richmond Magazine for never failing to select inspired content- even- or especially when I’m a part of it. Thank you all.

And thank you to Harry Kollatz, Jr. for the beautiful article in Richmond Magazine. I can now cross "being compared to a Tom Robbins' heroine" off my bucket list.

Photo Credit: Sarah Walor, Richmond Magazine, October 2014

A Welcome Address to Young Writers

   

If you are a writer you may, once or twice before, have had a thought like this:

Writing sucks. I suck. My writing sucks. It’s too hard. I will be judged. I will be made fun of. If I write the truth I will be ex-communicated, disowned. If I write everyone will KNOW. Besides, everything has already been written before. Who cares what I have to say? Do I even care what I have to say? What’s the point? What can I DO with my writing? I’d rather be reading. Or eating. Or picking my nose. I’d rather be making money, even 10 cents an hour scrubbing vomit off the floor. I need to update Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, Ellio. Only my mom will ever read what I write and she will only compliment it because that is in her job requirement as my mother. I don’t want to live a lonely miserable life and die a lonely miserable death. I don’t want FAILED WRITER inscribed on my tombstone.

If you have ever had any version or iteration of these thoughts…CONGRATULATIONS! You are a writer. And the amazing thing is, just as you have the power to use words to convince yourself of all the reasons why you shouldn’t write you also have the power to use words to remind yourself of all the reasons why you should.

I write because I want to find out what I think, how I feel, why I believe and who I am underneath the makeup and the clothing and the skin. I write because writing is the best revenge and the best way around goodbye. I write because it’s is a vehicle for feelings that didn’t want to take the train. Writing is talking in a more colorful version of black and white. I write because it’s the grown up version of passing notes. I write because I’m tone deaf and I can’t sing but I want to be heard.

I write because I’ve found that even the littlest, weirdest, most obscure thought in my head, once written down, is somehow universal. I am my own scientific laboratory, testing ground, petri dish, experiment, lab rat, not only for how I feel but for how others feel, too. I am the universal I, the big and little me, the hole in the donut and the whole donut, perfect in my imperfection, unique just like everyone else. I write to fit in and I write to stand out. Like Lord Byron says, if I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. I write to feel better and to feel anything at all, good, bad, beautiful, horrible and so on, forever. 

Here are some answers to the question Why Do You Write? by 2014 Richmond Young Writers, ages 12-16:

I write because my pen holds the secrets of the universe.
I write because I don’t always like the endings of books.

I write because I don’t always remember everything.

I write because it’s a beautiful distraction from reality.

I write because it helps me express what spoken words can’t.

I write to bring characters to life.

I write to get things out of my head.

I write because I am capable of having an infinite number of ideas.

I write because no matter what else happens in my life, writing is always there.

I write because there are words flowing through my veins pleading to get out.

I write because I am the person I want to be when I write.

I write so I can see the world through someone else’s eyes.

I write because I am so manyy different people and so many different stories.

I write to give the voices somewhere to go.

I write because I cannot yet see a whole new universe.

I write so I can move everything from the tallest mountain to the tiniest speck.

I write because I can create and control an entire world.

I write because I like being able to go back and see how I used to think.

I write because it's a way to express myself when I don't feel like talking. 

I write because I feel like I'll explode if I don't pour my words out on paper.

I write to expose evils and celebrate the beautiful.

I write to share what I know and ask others what I don't.

I write because I can immerse myself in a different world. 

I write because writing helps me remember that there's life beyond high school and technicolor dreams beyond the black and white world.

I write to let my feelings out, even the ones I don't know are in me. 

I write to find a way to face emotions. 

I write because murder is illegal.

I write to make people understand why I am the way I am.

Why do you write? What does writing do for you? What can you leave on the page that you don’t want to take with you? What do you bring to the page that you didn’t even know you had? 

And now, for a small inspirational game of Mad Libs (as completed by the young writers of the October 18, 2014 Ad-lib/ Mad-lib/ Surrealism Workshop)

Once upon a time there was an (ADJECTIVE) spicy child named (PLANET) Venus who wanted with all her heart to grow up to be a (PROFESSION) sewage worker, just like her favorite character and role model, (CHARACTER IN A BOOK) Darren Sharp. Even though she had to study (SUBJECT IN SCHOOL) math, (VEGETABLE) children, (PART OF SPEECH) prepositions, (MADE UP WORD) wockets and (SOMETHING HORRIBLE) mothers they read every (NOUN) dragon they could and practiced (VERB) skating whenever they had a spare moment. Even though lots of (ADJECTIVE NOUNS) slimy windows told her it wasn’t practical and she’d never make any (NOUN) racicoriphalatiroisous, she did it anyway. But then while it was (WEIRD WEATHER) cloudy with a chance of meatballs, (SOMETHING WEIRD) life happened. A (IMAGINARY CREATURE) jackal penguin appeared out of the sky just like in the movie (MOVIE) Princess Bride and began to dance and sing (SONG) Never Gonna Give You Up as if what she was doing mattered more than anything else in the entire (PLACE) library. At that moment Venus had an epiphany and began to (VERB) smell. Who cares what anyone else thought or said, even if they said (COMMON PHRASE) it’s raining men, Venus could still follow her dreams. She ended up writing (NUMBER) Pi (GENRE) horror steam punk even though she felt (EMOTION) curious and (EMOTION) agitated. It didn’t matter because she listened to her (BODY PART) belly fat. She was so happy to have created an original (ART FORM) swordsmanship that she yelled (SOUND EFFECT) eekcjreohwaerhohwheowed all the way home!

Shack Martha Stewart

The other night when I got home from teaching, ready for bed and bad TV, my husband started to sand the kitchen ceiling. From my position under the covers I could see white specks of sheet rock begin to coat the pots and pans hanging from their hooks, the stove top and burners (minus the one that had caught on fire that we’d thrown into the back yard the night before), the baskets of apples my son and I had picked at the orchard, the cat food, the coffee maker and every other conceivable surface within 100 feet, including Stan himself.

I got up for a bowl of store-brand granola with expensive organic whole milk (which I will not be entering in the food journal I stopped keeping last Friday) and padded across the plywood floor we let our son draw on with a sharpie until we get our REAL floor- that mythical unicorn of bourgeois renovation I’ve heard plenty about but am not sure will ever actually materialize. My footprints were visible behind me as if I had just tracked across a pristine sandy beach on a tropical island. I poured my granola, resolved not to say a word and pretended instead that we live in the out of doors. On a beach. In a snowstorm. God forbid I impede progress.

Because our house—like our mental health and our marriage—is nothing if not a work in progress. The front porch, living room, backyard, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and tool shed all under different states of construction. Merge this with my thwarted longing to craft, an allergic reaction to cleaning, a deep inner desire to hostess and an almost primal urge to feed people and make them feel at home—even in a home in which I feel at turns like a queen and the beggar on her knees outside the castle.

Recently, in one of my 12 step groups, I sobbed, “I want to get it all together but I just can’t! Everything is such a mess. I feel like Shack Martha Stewart!” A friend suggested I start a new line of items for the home available exclusively at the Dollar Store. I-Tried-to-Clean-But-Couldn’t-Air-Freshener. Too-Bad-We-Only-Have-Four-Places-To-Sit Placemats. Whoops!-I-Burnt-the-Hell-Out of -Dinner-After Dinner-Mints. I could even make Turn Your Hovel into a Home DYI video based on scavenger hunts through the attic for art to hang on the walls and the arrangement of potted plants almost guaranteed not to die. Truly, they do wonders. We named ours Plant A, Plant B and Bob.

Because I don't want my shame and confusion about how to run a home and be a mother while having a full-time life and a slew of creative projects stop me from ever letting anyone into the house again, I feel I should go ahead and set the record straight now.

If we invite you over you may have to sit on the arm of the ratty leather couch we found a few year's ago. You may get snagged by a booby trap and fall into the dungeon with the child-sized spider crickets. I might serve you the plastic baggie of poop brownies I inadvertently invented 4th of July 2013. Nothing you see will match, is probably second hand and may even be broken. If I apologize for the state of our house I am breaking my New Year's Resolution to stop apologizing for the state of our house. Because more than likely you did not come over to be awed by my ability to mop. Chances are you are more interested in connection and conversation than a shellac of cleanliness. It could be that you like strong coffee in a mismatched mug even if chaos and clutter reign around us. I just have to keep remembering that. 

The Art of Hitting Parked Cars

Part 1  

The first time it happens, laugh it off. Marvel at the four foot scar carved into the side of your station wagon, fresh like surgery. Praise God there are no visible scars on your husband’s truck and watch happily while he shows you the Bob’s Burgers clip of Tina hitting the only car in the parking lot while her father’s teaching her how to drive. Over and over and over again. Wait two months.

Part 2

Hit another parked car, this time a stranger’s in the grocery store parking lot. Don’t escape the scene like you used to woulda done when you were young and wild and drunk. Accept a hug from an acquaintance who saw the whole thing and listen while she tells you about the time she knocked over a motorcycle at church. Feel better…for a second. Leave a note AND page the driver of the black SUV at customer service. Exchange information. Note the miracle of having, not only insurance but a current insurance card. Feel like you are play-acting the role of responsible adult. Accept the kindness of friends and strangers who emerge from the the woodwork to tell you about the times they’ve had run-ins with stationary objects, ditches, trees, other seemingly stable forces of nature. Listen to two voices in your head: the one who finds you delightful and charming and the one who wants you dead. Cry for the next two days. Call yourself an idiot, wonder what’s wrong with you, how you could be so dumb, why anyone likes you anyway, full body sobs that take your breath away.

Part 3

Share at a 12-step meeting what a fool you are, still crying, shaken. Feel confused when a woman with spiky silver hair and kind blue eyes comes up to you afterwards and says, “Oh honey, I’m a perfectionist too.” Say back, “but I’m not perfect enough to be a perfectionist.” With a house and a body and a history like yours, how could you be?

Part 4

Three days later, appear on the news to talk about an organization you and people you care deeply about have worked really hard to create, an organization you are passionate about, that touches the heart of everything you know to be true. Feel the overwhelming support of the community that raised you, to whom you are now trying in some way to give something back. Outside of the green room and the bright lights and the cameras, in the warm glow of the day, feel carried by connection and belief and creativity and support. At a celebratory breakfast, heart still pumping with the adrenaline of live TV, glance at your phone and do a double-take at a screenshot of yourself in the outfit that looked so charming that morning in the mirror. Is that really you? Feel your stomach curl around the sinking knot of shame that spreads through your middle like hot spilled milk. Cringe. Breathe. Tell yourself to stop it right now, that you’re a feminist, that you’ve already dealt with this shit, that you know better. Listen to the two voices fight it out and stagger back as the loudest voice wins. Cry for the next two days. Call yourself a fat cow, wonder  what’s wrong with you, how you could be so shameful, why anyone likes you anyway, full body sobs that take your breath away.

Part 5

Call your mother and tell her how you feel. When she asks, “Do you blame me for this?” say, “you and all of western civilization.”  Nod and laugh and cry when she says, “Honey, remember when everything in your life used to turn to shit? It’s not like that anymore. These days, you’re falling up.  The only person left who hates you is you. Maybe what you’re really afraid of is success, of loving your life, of actually letting yourself be happy.” Laugh and cry and cry and laugh when she sends you the cheesiest, worst, most beautiful video in the history of the world two minutes after you get off the phone. Watch it again. Turn it up.

Part 6 

Pull the survivor out of the car, lay her on the stretcher. Show her the damage, real and imagined, the body of the car, still intact. Whisper, pray, beg, coddle, tease down the knowledge locked in your head as it makes its way through the jungle of what you think and know and believe to your heart. Hold your own hand, bandage your wounds. Take steam baths. Don’t save the good salts for later. Try on the eyes and brain and words of everyone you know. Write it out again and again. Blindly stab the ghosts, swaddle the babies. When the voice gets loud, get louder. Wake up laughing. Notice how beautiful it is to be happy, instead of the other way around. Get back behind the wheel; drive in a different direction; avoid impact. Treat yourself the way you would treat anyone you were learning how to love.

The New Normal Looks Kind of…Normal.

Each year as I approach my birthday I look around to take stock of the changes I have created or endured. So far this year I have not worked on a cruise ship, had a baby, backpacked through Europe, modeled in the nude, detoxed from drugs and alcohol or tried to overhaul every single thing about life as I know it.

           But this week, I did call to have a ding in my windshield repaired before it turned into a cracked-out emergency—and no one had even thrown a pumpkin through it. After that, I scheduled a check-up even though all of my limbs are firmly attached, my head is not on fire and I only have a low-grade sense that I will die…eventually. I asked my husband to help me pick out some new running shoes. (What?! Did the word RUNNING come out of my face?!) To top it all off, I asked my family to have a sit down dinner. At the table. 

Clearly, these changes are more of the tip-toeing down the graduated steps into the pool one inch at a time rather than cannon-balling off the diving board variety. So incremental, I almost haven’t noticed anything's different until bam! suddenly I am underwater swimming through the legs of strangers. Or, as the case may be trying to get my family to sit down together at the table for dinner.

The impact has been just as profound.

At our first family dinner, my husband announced that he had eaten lunch five minutes before and that he was not hungry. "Not" and "hungry" rarely if ever show up together in my personal lexicon but that’s another blog-post. However, he obliged me by sitting at the table with a glass of water, enduring my pronouncements about the importance of togetherness. When I reached out to hold hands for grace, my son looked at me as if I had asked him to climb on the table, beat his chest like a gorilla and toss about his own feces, possibly an activity he would have preferred. “WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A NICE SIT DOWN FAMILY DINNER AND WE ARE GOING TO LIKE IT,” I screamed as they stared on in wonder at the new-super-human-mom-wife-woman before them.

 Growing up, my mother did cook and we did say grace, but most often from a table cloth on the floor because all of the surfaces in the house were too cluttered for plates. On the evenings I was with my dad, we either circled a loop of fast food chains or, at home, ate with our TV dinners on our laps on one of the couches he assembled from parts in the alley while watching Mr. T. Though I have had thousands of beautiful family dinners during and since that time, for some reason these are the ones that have engraved themselves most deeply in my neural coding.

Even though dinner with proper plates and utensils and topics of conversation was a bit bizarre the first night, we did it again the second. My husband cooked. And it was just a little less weird. In fact, it was absolutely wonderful. It was as much of a marvel as the other people on the Greyhound cross country or the Euro-rail  from Prague to Budapest. In the right light, my own family contains as much mystery and intrigue as the Seven Wonders of the World. 

            For the first time in my life I'd rather prevent than invite drama. However, I have noticed that the more “low-key” I want to be, the more high-maintenance I actually am. The longer I stay sober the more work it takes to stay that way—not just physically but mentally, emotionally and spiritually. I used to pride myself on my ability to roll out of bed--or sleeping bag--and stumble into the next adventure (read: ill-advised drunken escapade) all fancy-free in the clothes I’d slept in the night before. I was always ready to go! Now I require a full teeth-brushing, clothes that don’t smell like the sewer, some form of exercise, a decent helping of healthy food and no less than 17-87 interactions with any number of 12-step programs ending in the letter A.

This year as I walk-- not stumble-- into 39, I have found myself wanting more family interaction and less performance art, more day trips into the country and less surreal dream sequences through the bowels of the underworld. I hope to God I always have both, but for now I want to spend as much time as I can witnessing and appreciating and discovering the world that is right in front of my face, the world I would be an idiot to miss.  

Brook Road Academy Commencement Speech, June 2014

First of all, thank you so much for asking me to be here today. I consider the opportunity to speak to a class of graduating seniors who have managed to survive the entire length of high school, along with the parents and teachers and staff who have survived along with them, right up there with speaking to Oprah or God.

Thinking back on my own graduation, I honestly can’t remember if there was a speaker or not. I can’t remember what it felt like to walk across a stage or receive my diploma. I do remember the same feeling of relief that comes after finishing a very, very, very long book. I remember that I finally knew more than my mother and that I had at last achieved immortality. I remember believing with conviction that some combination of a new hair color (purple, red or Mountain Dew) and getting as far away from home as possible would turn me into the person I’d always wanted to become.

I was halfway right. Dying your hair the color of Mountain Dew does change everything.

Of course, what I wanted to change was the world but I did not yet know how to really change myself. Even then, however, I knew what I loved—words and stories—and like the oil that kept the temple fire burning much longer than it should have, that little fire stayed alive inside of me too, despite all the things I did that could have put it out. And we’re not talking a little drip here, but full-on fire extinguishers. I know you guys are all perfect angels, but I was rebellious and experimental. What would I have wanted someone to tell me at my own high school graduation? What could I have heard?

I could have heard that it was going to get better and that the people who had told me that the high school years were the best of my life were lying. You are about to graduate. And I mean it when I say congratulations. This is no small accomplishment. It appears that Brook Road Academy is an excellent school with the finest teachers around, but please, don’t believe anyone who tells you that at 17 and 18 you have already reached the pinnacle of your life and that it’s all a slow miserable decline from here. You have not lived out your glory years which will end this week with your coursework. While I hope that this has been a challenging fulfilling time in your life, your best years, I believe, are yet to come.

When I was in elementary school I played a game with my girlfriends called “Fresh Out of College.”  In our elaborate game of make-believe, we had perfect jobs, perfect boyfriends and perfect hair because, guess what? Once we had that degree we would live happily ever after, amen.  

Unfortunately, I learned the hard way, like so many other people I know that receiving a piece of paper, no matter which one it is you have set your sights on-- a high school diploma or a college or graduate or masters degree or a driver’s license and registration or the deed to a home or a marriage license or a birth certificate—none of these are a guarantee for happiness. Buddha, Jesus, God, Krishna and the Tooth Fairy won’t come down and sign a lifetime-of-bliss warrantee on the dotted line. Your high school diplomas are wonderful landmarks on the maps of your life, but they are not the final destination. In fact, I have found there is no destination on any map or any other piece of paper that can tell me whether or not I have really, finally, actually arrived, although recently having my face made into a shrinky dink and hung in an art show that took place in a local bathroom did come close.

When I was 23, I came home to Richmond after travelling through New York, Italy, Colorado, Arkansas and Alaska. I was nearly broke and felt broken. So far I had successfully used my expensive liberal arts degree to wait tables, scrub toilets and vacuum hairballs out of hallways. I was a failure.

It was a beautiful spring day but I sobbed into my pillow with my mom and my cat Felecia at my side. “Mom,” I wailed. “I have no money! I can’t get a job! I am the biggest loser in the whole entire history of the world!”

“Honey,” my mom said back. “Look at Felecia.” My cat purred next to me like an Egyptian Queen, licking luxuriantly between each of her outstretched toes. “Does she have a job? How much money is in her bank account?

“None,” I had to admit. Felecia yawned up at us and then settled in for a cat-nap. I had to admit, being so divine day after day must have been absolutely exhausting.

“That’s right,” said my mother. “She makes no money and spends her day doing next to nothing. And she’s perfect just the way she is. You are a human being, honey, not a human doing.” And then my mother went on to tell me, as she had before, that my worth was not determined by how much money I made or the line items on my resume. And for some reason on this day I was finally able to hear her.

Learning to believe that I’m OK just as I am, that I’m not the sum of a list of numbers or grades---that I can trust and love myself no matter what kind of job or money or friends or clothes or car or husband I have---has been, I think, some of the biggest ongoing work of my lifetime. It’s inner work, work that is hard to see or measure or evaluate or grade. But it’s this inner work that has allowed the outer work to happen.

What I do has begun to come into alignment with who I am, but this did not happen because the road was straight and smoothly paved and I drove a cherry-red two door Dodge Challenger. Driving five hundred dollar Hondas with no windshield wipers, misreading directions, stumbling out of the car and scraping my knees on the pavement, flat tires, construction zones, speeding tickets, high tolls, traffic jams and even traffic court and driving school have all been elements my path has been made of. I’ve been rejected from schools and literary magazines, laid off and passed over for jobs I thought I had to have.

But as Samuel Beckett famously wrote: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."  

Accepting my failures, leaning into my weaknesses, learning from my mistakes, and taking the circuitous, bumpy route, it turns out, has been the charted course towards a life beyond my wildest dreams, one which is truly beginning to happen, thorns and warts and fender benders and all.

I am now lucky enough to have a job where I spend my days listening to other people tell their stories while also having the opportunity to write my own. I have come to believe that the power of sharing who you are, whether that manifests as a poem or a song or a letter or a garden or a meal or an invention or an equation or a computer program is a better gift to the world than a stack of credentials behind your name or the total dollar amount in your 401K. 

I would like to share with you now a poem that says so beautifully things I want to know that I’m still inclined to forget.

Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

So, right now, whether you are going to on to a big college or a little college or no college at all, whether you are interested in words, stories, social justice, animals, science, the environment, documentaries, car engines, mechanics, computer engineering, video games, internet privacy, censorship, Africa or Kling-on, whether you intend to wear a blue collar or a white one, to work with your head or your hands, I hope you learn to make the big decisions with your heart. And I hope you know, as hard as it is to believe, that each of you right now are just as perfect as my cat Felecia.

The best years of your life are not over. Your story doesn’t end when you walk out of these doors. This chapter simply must close to make way for the next. May your best years be yet to come, may the force be with you, and good luck.

Prompt: I Am

I'm in the dressing room, trying on wings, halos, horns, fangs.

I am the rooms of my house and their ghosts and their graves and their inhabitants, borrowing bodies.

I am the girl watching herself run wild and free across the meadow on the television set while eating cheese puffs and sour patch kids on the couch.

I am in the cross hairs of maiden and crone, as predicted by the ceremony my mother held in her backyard when she turned 50 and I turned 21 while her neighbor, Ed the Trucker, watched from his back fence.

I am the stack of unsorted papers growing on my desk like rings inside a tree, but faster.

I am finding a little more freedom in a little more structure.

I am the first flash of connection between head and heart and hand.

I am not sure the frame always fits the painting.

I am in search of God not Church.

I am the one who stayed and the one who, despite the blood contract, the unspoken agreement sworn to forever, got up and walked away.

I am the text my husband sent while eavesdropping on a conversation at the Jewish Community Center: "After 50 years, wife and I are starting to understand each other."

I am the phone call I make to him ten minutes later to make sure he's still there 13 years after impact.

I am Mary Magdalene texting Judah.

I am the whale that forgot to spit out Jonah.

I am the senior citizens in Fit and Fab shaking their booties in slacks and sweaters.

I am the boat motors covered in snow on the picnic table, disemboweled from their boats.

I am the yoga pose just out of reach, the one the body found instead.

I am changing even as I stab at the page with words woefully under-equipped to describe how.

I am the baby tooth waiting under the pillow for her fairy, the wisdom tooth evicted from her childhood home.

I am the face in the mirror that says, "I know you. You're alright. Yes, you can stay."

Narrative Model: Inhabiting the Dangerous and Beautiful Landscape of Mary Chiaramonte

Old Love Like Light, Acrylic on Birch Panel
June 2013

I first met Mary Chiaramonte when I was asked to write about her show, In The Land of the Strangers, for my blog in February 2012. Her work hooked me instantly. I've never had a fine arts vocabulary and I've given up on the language of literary criticism completely but I know a good story and a beautiful body of work when I see it. In a stroke of luck entirely my own, Mary was willing to barter a creative nonfiction class for a drawing I helped envision. In this I was doubly blessed. I got to imagine a land of danger and beauty in which I was the central character (the narrative in my head illustrated, finally!) and I got to hear her stories....rich, disturbing, lush, gorgeous terrifying landscapes and characters drawn with words. As a bonus, one afternoon in the late spring she laid me out on the ground between her house and the woods (where she regularly chases down and photographs coyotes) posing my arms and hair this way and that for a painting. Within a few weeks, Mary had completed both pieces, confirming the grass-is-greener assumption I love to cling to, that masterpieces in the realm of art are faster, easier and more fun to create than any kind of writing. 

"No way," she was quick to assure me. "I didn't just whip this out. I sweated and cried and painted til my fingers bled (blood, sweat and tears.)"  But still, I like to imagine that while I was at my desk wrestling down the creative process, shredding my guts for a story, agonizing over a plot or line of dialogue, trying to allow my voice as a narrator to live on the page without a steady stream of doubt and second guesses-- that while I continued to navigate the complicated and sometimes treacherous terrain of a wife and mother and woman who lives with addiction and sometimes want to overthrow every single thing that is good-- Mary blinked, waved her magic wand and created me in a way I would love to be seen, in a way that I would love to see myself. 

Because both pieces feel like an interior world made real, drawn from the outside in, short cuts that tunnel past the periphery and straight through to the world of story. Will I remain asleep on the frozen ground clutching reeds in the snow as above or watchful and submerged in a mountain lake encircled by snakes as below? Will I wake up, come to, swim to shore, arise from slumber, save myself or be saved? Do danger and risk arise from the landscapes I inhabit or the choices I make that keep me there? I have to work these answers out for myself, but Mary's work poses all the right questions. As my favorite art does, whatever medium it takes. The drawing graces my writing room and the painting will hang on a wall of the Eric Schindler Gallery for a show that opens this week, on Valentine's Day. Originally, I was going to write a post about the fine art of fighting or learning to love myself or the idolatry of chocolate and roses or the myth of the brave knight on the white horse, but on this occasion I find that art speaks louder, and more beautifully, than words. 

The Valley, pencil, July 2013

           "New, slippery, lithe and young, the chorus we wrote that went unsung."
                                                         --Mary Chiaramonte 

"Love Song: New Paintings and Drawings by Mary Chiaramonte"

Opening: Friday, February 14, 7-9 pm

Show runs through March 8th.

Eric Schindler Gallery

2305 East Broad Street, Richmond, VA

Gallery Hours: Wed-Sat, 11 to 5pm

I don't want to be rich, skinny or famous.

AT LEAST NOT ALL OF THE TIME.

And not to the extent to where I don't want what I do have: ample thighs, a creatively stitched together life and a vibrant local community.

New Year's was always my favorite holiday and not just because I loved stumbling face first into the gutter with my best dress on. Because I did! I loved the wandering, stumbling, reckless, drunken adventure that replicated so many other nights of the year...but with semi-high heels and glitter! Until I had to wake up the next morning.

Wishing that I was a new person in a new place surrounded by new people with a new personality and new clothes and a new face and a new brain and a new plan to act out that would make me rich! skinny! and famous!

On New Year's Day, no matter how hungover I was or how bad the other days of the year were, the opportunity to turn over a new leaf in a brand spankin' new calendar made me tingle. 1/1 was an annual opportunity to reinvent myself, start fresh, clear the slate, pretend a large part of the night or year before had never really happened and wallllllah! Everlasting eternal over the top happiness. It was such a hopeful 24 hours.

But then 1/2 would roll along and I'd be right where I left off on 12/31 but worse because I was 3 days older and even further away from achieving my very fucked up goals for success.

I'm not sure exactly when or how the idea that I can be who I am and like it, that I do fit into this package that is my life and my skin began to sink in, but I know I can't find the exact moment in any of the pages of my calendar. Maybe it was around the time I started looking at my addictions (getting rid of a few, trading in some for others) or when I began to put in the slow, hard work required to build the stuff of life that has brought me actual joy-- the very stuff I overlooked when I had my eye on the top rung of the imaginary ladder. The day in, day out, 365 day-a-year work required to acquire bylines and best friends and more black in the bank than red. Taking more creative than destructive risks. Asking for help-- and accepting it. Revealing my shame and mess and tangled knots rather than pushing them down and wrapping them up. Because that stuff, the stuff I used to snub-or fear- kicks ass. Every day of the year.

The truth is I still wish I could squeeze into a tiny pair of skinny jeans and find my flawless face plastered all over People Magazine for small portions of the day, but not all of it. Right now I would rather find ways to actually love my actual self than invent ways for people I don't know to think they love who it looks like I am. But that's just today. We'll see what tomorrow brings when it gets here.

Unedited: A Series of Snapshots From My Journal

            Yesterday I had an episode with my book that nearly convinced me to shut it down. If it had been a terminal patient I would have pulled the plug. The only thing I still liked about it was printing it out and fastening it together with those mega file clips from Office Max. Everything else filled me with despair and loathing. This is the same book that a few months ago I knew to be a bestseller. The only thing that brought me back from the edge was drinking generic apple juice out of Pumpkin Dreams mugs my mom got at the thriftstore for 15 cents, orange pumpkins and black cats painted by an old geezer that the orange cardboard boasts to be one of our greatest American Folklorist. That, and decorating the backyard with severed hands from the Dollar Store. My cousin calls Five and Below the Dollar Store for rich people. The two foam swords she found there have been Henry’s favorite birthday presents so far. For the 5^th or 95^th time I thought that I should be homeschooling and growing root vegetables in my backyard instead of wallowing in despair with my manuscript. Would I be happy then?

My 3^rd grade son’s parent teacher conference has abruptly transformed me into one of those mothers. The pushers, the fretters, the freaker-outers. ME. My son’s teacher, Mrs. X, fast paced and gorgeous, is in her mid-twenties and has more energy than a 6 month old golden retriever. “Your son,” she told us, “is very bright. He’s making straight A’s. But he’s figured out how to do only what’s required of him and nothing more. He’s figured out the minimum requirement.”

            “Oh God,” said my husband who looked like he hadn’t gotten a haircut in 3 years. “That’s all I ever heard in school. That I wasn’t living up to my potential. That’s me to a T.”

            “And how old were you when you stopped doing the minimum requirement?” asked Mrs. M, staring at him pointedly.

            “What time is it now?” asked my husband who dropped out of college, is half way through renovating our kitchen, plumbing the bathroom and digging out a new driveway. He looked at his imaginary watch.

            And there I was, terrified for the future of my bright boy who is currently in the 3^rd grade making straight A’s. All the boys I’ve ever loved before him—totally genius level, fucked up under achievers flashed before my eyes. How do I get my son to want to do more than the minimum requirement when that’s all we do ourselves? When he’s already announced he’d rather be homeschooled and live on an island off the grid never paying taxes? The answer, I think, as I settle back down into this moment is to love him and do nothing else, nothing else at all. Nothing else is required.

Today there was something about the cold and the light and the cast of trees in the afternoon and the quiet and the loneliness of that quiet. I felt a burning need to make things cheery, to have the feeling of a fire in the stove, a hearth, I desperately wanted a hearth and I didn’t know how to create the feeling of having a hearth on the outside of myself, much less on the inside without drinking something, swallowing something, putting something in my mouth to raise the bar on the thermometer and brighten the wick. It useda woulda been whiskey or wine and I’d already had coffee, tea and hot chocolate—I couldn’t drink one thing more and then a friend suggested instead of triple or quadruple fisting it I take the time to breathe. He further suggested that I think of the most loving thing to do for myself that I could and I burst into tears that exploded out of me like logs going up in flame and I wept for how many people I truly miss and old cold afternoons long gone filled with people I may or will never see again and I cried and cried, even on the way to the bus stop, grateful it was mostly redneck dads who wouldn’t ask how I was feeling and then suddenly I felt better and my eyes were clear and the day was bright again and I hugged my son and walked my dog and I did have one more cup of coffee with hot chocolate mixed in—but that’s just because I was already feeling better.

I felt like a different person on the way up here, like I’m changing. I thought “This is the person I would have been,” but here it is the person I am. I stopped and took pictures, turned the radio off. Missed my son and called him. Felt the intensity of music and driving down country roads the way I always feel it, so that I think I may explode but another mile passes and another and I keep on living. This is when I feel the passing of time most—with a soundtrack and a road. I miss everyone I’ve ever loved and even the ones I didn’t love. And now there are so many different kinds of bird song—up high and then down low and then the bellows of the cows across the river. I used to think only people with no internal world listened to birds but now I think the opposite is true. I’m glad I took a walk down to the river this morning—saw the fog and the trees and the mountains and trains and bridges and the tumbling rural countryside of Virginia that gives back to me a part of my childhood self I had at my grandparent’s house and all those summers camping with my dad in the Blue Ridge that made me feel at least 50% country girl even though I grew up in houses and apartments in the city and the suburbs.

 I feel about our writing day the way I felt about the Ropes Course when I was 17 and took an Outdoor Adventure class at the community college with S. A mixture of anticipation and terror and in the end there was too much bad weather and our trip was cancelled but we did get to go camping and spelunking. I never did take that plunge off the cliff with the rope but in some ways I may as well have for all the thinking I did about it in advance. And now it’s time to take the writing plunge again and I feel like I’m at the start of a river or a road that splinters off in a million different directions and I could choose any one of so many and what if I choose the wrong one? All of the writing teachers say that in the end it’s about trusting your own voice, following your own nose, not living in the Hell of Second Guesses and Self Doubt so I’ll try to remember that as I ascend the cliffs of writing today. I thought on my walk, if I don’t have the patience to sew the first stitch when presented with a dress form how will I make the lines out, one at a time, for a book?

One Head of the Hydra

          

          When I was little, I held 12 step recovery meetings with my stuffed animals. Buffalo Bear and Papa Smurf were trying hard to be good while the long skinny strung out looking ventriloquist, Charlie McCarthy, tried again and again to quit smoking. By the time I was 8, I’d called my best friend and told her I was going to be her sponsor. I’d grown up in recovery rooms and conventions halls with coloring books, crayons and a determination never, ever to be like my parents or their weird group of friends who talked about resentments and wrote out gratitude lists. At 13 I wrote an article for a local teen rag about how I was going to break the cycle of addiction, at least in my own family. The buck stopped here! I was “creative” and I didn’t want my creativity to be confused with getting drunk or high. Less than a year later, I found myself on the floor of a band apartment downtown swigging Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill from the bottle, wondering when and how I could do it again.

            

               From that night, my drinking progressed. I learned how to sneak out, which convenience stores sold to minors—or which adults hanging out in front of convenience stores would sell to minors. Drinking felt as natural as diving off a cliff into deep, cold water when you’ve been just a little too hot, too exposed and too uneasy with your land legs for too long. I stopped feeling like a nerdy, awkward freak and began to feel like my best self—daring, flashy—and whatever else might pass for cool.

              In college, drinking became my major, my thesis, my religion, my revelation, my final project. I was stopped drunk driving but managed to recite the alphabet backwards (something I can’t do sober!) and was let go. One Easter I caught my head on fire trying to get into a bath with candles and a bottle of Jim Beam, but was sort of able to hide the burns with a what-was-left-of-my-hair combover. I did all of the things a girl trying to live life with instruction from a few cases of Manischewitz, Mad Dog 20-20, Wild Irish Rose, Carlo Rossi, bottom shelf vodka, any kind of whiskey and boxes of cheap red wine would do. The list is long: use your imagination! Between the ages of 20 and 23, I tore my way through a couple of countries, states and boyfriends before landing back home, broken and broke, wondering how I’d gotten myself into yet another Jerry Springer/ Greek Tragedy hijinks. I decided to try therapy.

“You could try a meeting,” my mother suggested. “They’re cheaper than therapy.”

“But do you have to think you’re an alcoholic?” I asked.

“You can wonder,” she said.

With just the right amount of ambiguity, I went to my first meeting—without  stuffed animals or crayons. I picked up a white chip with every intention of giving it back. This could not be me—or my life. I was different. I was special! I was wrong.

That was 15 years ago today. I haven’t had a drink or done ANY recreational drugs since that Friday morning in October when I walked into a church basement and not only felt surrounded by familiar faces because I knew them, but because I’d earned my own seat among them. The ride since has been wild and bumpy with switchbacks, trap doors, surprises, a million characters, stories, side-stories, diversions, discoveries and journeys I couldn’t have begun to imagine—even as far out there as I went trying to find the world and God and love and myself at the bottom of a bottle.  

Since getting sober, I have done my best to direct my risk-taking behavior towards positive-artistic-creative kinds of risks rather than getting-drunk-and-hitchhiking-in-the-middle-of-the-night kinds of risks. As sure as I was that not drinking would lead me straight to the convent (even though I’m Jewish), sainthood has yet to happen—thank God. The good news and the bad news now, is that for better or worse I have the chance to feel all of my feelings. And that has its pitfalls! Who wants to feel everything? Addiction is like a hydra—chop off one head and two (or 768) more sprout in its place. I have an addictive personality that will latch on to anything. And has. And will. Don't try to take away my other vices! I quit coffee last spring and it was the worst 36 hours of my life. A lot of the time, my smaller self is the bigger part of my self. My first thoughts are rarely divine. But I have a better chance of showing up and participating in my life—without puking!—than I did before. I have a better chance of cultivating my intuition and my relationships and my writing than I did before. I get to remember what happened last night—even if I still can't remember where I put my keys. 

I keep my own gratitude lists now—at the top of which is the chance to show who and what I am, even if exposing that soft, tender underbelly is more terrifying than jumping off any of the cliffs I threw myself off before. Over the years I've found that turning lights on in a room to illuminate everything is scarier than turning them all off, but it's far more productive. In fact, it's the only way I've been able to see the hydra-- much less attempt to slay it, one head at a time.