A short piece of fiction I wrote as a character study a few weeks back and am now dedicating to all the mothers out there (and most especially to my own mother). You’re each more courageous than I can dare to imagine. Happy (belated) Mother’s Day.
-Jessica
Mother.
The word echoes in my head and I almost forget what it means.
Suddenly that word to which I had dedicated so much consideration trembles on the tip of my tongue — just another confused collection of consonants and vowels.
I’m supposed to be happy. After all, we’d decided it was time to start trying.
But as I stare at the pregnancy test quivering in my fingers I can’t seem to move past the word.
Mother.
I realize that I’ve no idea how to be one. Or how I got to here: alone in my bathroom, clutching the test and all I can think is that I’m not ready to be a mother — that I might never be ready.
And how is it possible that I would only discover this now — in the moment when life has already been planted, seed sprouting into embryo — a tiny clump of cells dividing and differentiating.
Becoming not-me. Becoming other.
I smooth my palm over the flat planes of my belly. It seems unimaginable that soon I will swell with new life.
“Gravid” — from the Latin “gravis” meaning “heavy”.
I have never felt so grave, so heavy, as I feel now, in this moment in which my life seems to be pouring from between my fingertips, even as life is re-born of a single flickering spark — poised on the brink of bursting into flames.
I fear that there will be nothing left of me but ashes when that flame has burned its way into the world — borne out from between my blooded thighs.
Mother.
The word rattles around inside my head and I can feel my atomic structures reassembling to make room for some newer, bigger person I must be becoming.
My hand presses firmly into the flesh of my belly, knowing that there is nothing to feel. The baby (baby!) is not yet bigger than a grain of rice — hardly larger than a dream.
Mother.
I roll the word across my tongue, stretch it out over my skin and am surprised to find that it threatens to fit — just barely — around the size and shape of what it already means to be me.
As always, I’d love to hear from you! What did you think of this piece? Leave your comments below.
How are you living your “one wild and precious life” (to quote Mary Oliver)? Do you struggle to do the things you want to do? Do you feel like you’re four steps behind where you want to be? Do you feel like you work and work and work but that your work never gets you anywhere you want to be?
This is exactly how I have felt for the past two or three years. Ever since I graduated from college I’ve been stuck in a rut that I know isn’t where I want to be, but from which I seem unable to free myself. It was a state of affairs that left me feeling frustrated and baffled and kept me from living my best life. Until recently, that is, when I read this article by Martha Beck, in which she writes:
“As every life coach knows, the way we do anything is the way we do everything. The same thoughts… torture me when I’m writing, emailing, even sleeping. I should be going faster, getting somewhere. I should have more to show for this. I shouldn’t have to double back, to revisit old emotional issues, to wipe the same damn kitchen counter every day. These thoughts burble along just under the surface of my consciousness every day. They make me slightly anxious—okay, some days irrationally terrified—and lend a driven quality to moments when I could be relaxed and present.” [[Emphasis mine.]]
And, you guys, it was like a thunderclap in my head as, with a whooshing sound, I realized something incredibly profound:
I do everything in my life with resistance.
Every single thing I do I treat as though it’s a struggle. Getting out of bed in the morning is a drag. Making my lunch is a drag. My day job — a double drag.
By the time I get home at night I’m so tired from dragging myself around all day that the things I actually wanted to do with my evening turn out to be… you guessed it, a drag!
Because my chosen after work activities (like my writing!) felt like a drag, I would often avoid them. And then I would feel terrible guilt for having avoided doing the things I was “supposed to” do. (Even if they only person who had decided I was “supposed to” do them was myself.)
But what if it didn’t have to be like that?
What if your life could be effortless and joyful instead of a drag?
What if you could make your life effortless simply by choosing to stop resisting what is? These questions have been plaguing me for the better part of a week — and I have to tell you, the results so far have been nothing short of amazing. Already my life feels lighter and more joyful. Already I am beginning to find space to breathe for what seems like the first time in years (decades even).
I’m finding myself sitting down to happily do tasks that I have resisted for years. Suddenly my writing practice, which I have struggled to grow into anything robust, feels almost effortless.
I used to fall into a trap where I knew I wanted to write, at least in theory. But whenever I had the time to write I would find myself doing something else — anything else.
If you find yourself struggling to achieve your goals, I invite you to ask yourself this question:
What are you really resisting?
Because what I now realize is that I was resisting becoming the person I really want to be.
Somewhere deep down in my lizard-brain I was still struggling to hold onto my vision of myself as I am/was: the good student, the scientist, the professional. I wasn’t allowing myself to set aside those old dreams in order to step fully into the person I am interested in becoming: the adventurer, the poet, the writer.
So if your dreams seem continually out of reach, or you’re always struggling but never really satisfied with your success, I invite you to question what it is you’re actually struggling against.
Because if you are like me, you might just find that you’ve been struggling against yourself.
And the only thing I know for sure is that that is a battle we’ll never manage to win.
I’d love to hear from you! What are you struggling with in your life? What seems to be holding you back? What is it that keeps getting in your way?
Do you want to tell a hero story or a victim story?
You get to choose.
I’ve been writing a lot of memoir lately. Partly, this is because writing memoir seems to be an important piece of my journey to tackle my decades long habit of hiding and my soul-crushing fear of being seen. Partly, it’s because memoir fascinates me.
When I set out to tackle the genre of memoir, the first thing I found myself confronted with is the flimsiness of the truth. After all, truth is what separates memoir from fiction.
Or is it? Memory is tricky and truth may be unknowable. Do I really remember the time I explained how lightning works to my mom at age four? Or have I just heard the story so many times I’ve reconstructed the memory based on the details of the story?
As memoirists our job is twofold. On the one hand, we vow to tell the truth as best we know it. On the other hand, memoir is not so much about the simple facts, the truths of our lives — memoir is about how we come to make sense of those facts, those truths. And because of this, every memoirist is faced with a choice:
What kind of story do you want your memoir to tell?
I’ve been participating in Anna Kunnecke’s Queen Sweep program for the past few weeks, and she has participants start by “sweeping” their stories. She encourages participants to move “from victim to hero” in the story of their own lives. She invites us to reconsider the way we talk to ourselves about our lives, to make the shift from “poor-put-upon me” to “kicking-ass-and-taking-names me”.
For me, the shift looks something like this:
A girl grew up. She did all the things she was supposed to do and just about killed herself bending over backwards to achieve success. In the end, it won her nothing except crippling exhaustion, a deadened heart, and a desk job she came to loathe more and more every day.
Sad, whiny victim-me is full of pouting and sad-faces.But what about hero-me? How does she see my life?
A girl grew up. She had a series of wonderful opportunities/adventures which led her to one of the best colleges in the country. There she got to study the mysteries of the universe alongside some of the smartest people in the world. After she graduated, she landed a job in her field that paid better than she’d dared to dream — and when it turned out she still wasn’t happy, she took matters into her own hands and set off on an adventure to redefine her purpose and reconnect with joy.
So, here’s the real question — whose story would you rather read? Because if I could only buy one of these stories, I’d pick the brave story of hero-me over the whiny, self-absorbed story of victim-me in a heartbeat.
It occurs to me to wonder whether this is all writing memoir is — the opportunity to meet your victim story on the page and discover the ways in which it’s actually the story of a hero.
Right now, I’m thinking the answer is yes — but feel free to chime in with your thoughts in the comments below!
And I want to make something else very clear — victim-story, hero-story — they’re not about whether or not you were a victim. They’re about how you choose to respond in the aftermath of your victimhood. No one escapes life without some bad things happening, and some people encounter more than their share of unpleasantness. These generally aren’t things we have control over. What we get to decide is how do we want to respond to the unpleasantness in our life? By choosing the hero-story over the victim-story we have the opportunity to re-empower ourselves and make courageous choices in the face of our circumstances.
I don’t know for sure, but I think that shifting your perspective about your life from victim to hero might just be the kind of powerful magic that has the potential to change everything.
So, which story do you choose?
Let me know in the comments below! And if you’re interested in reading something more on this topic I highly recommend this article by Anna Kunnecke.
And, if you’re feeling victim-y about something that’s happening in your life I invite you to ask yourself this: What action could I take in this situation that would make me feel like a badass?
And then go do that — because you deserve to be (and feel) awesome! (Example here.)
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about bravery and courage and what those things mean for me. I’ve written in recent weeks about my fear of being seen, which has been showing up a lot as I’ve begun to submit my writing for publication and also to work on my very first book. (Well my first-and-a-half book if we’re counting the 100 pages of a YA fantasy story I wrote when I was 12…)
Breaking the habit of hiding is something I’ve been talking about for a couple of weeks in my email newsletter. And it’s a subject I’ve been thinking about for months as I’ve been working up the courage to start writing my book (and now I have!).
There’s a piece of writing advice that circulates and which I’ve seen most recently in the article Writing from a Place of Fear over at Writer Unboxed. The advice implores us writers to “write the stories that scare us” — and I don’t think it’s bad advice.
But here’s what I do think:
I think that writing is hard.
I think writing that scares us is harder.
I think that writing our scariest stories takes more courage than we may be capable of.
And so I don’t think it’s enough to suggest glibly that all we need to do is “write the stories that scare us”. Perhaps this is the destination, the goal.
But between here and there is a whole lot of scary ground to cover. Before we can contemplate the visibility “on the page” required to write our scariest stories we must first work on our fear of visibility “off the page” in our everyday lives.
We must get used to the terror of being seen.
Terror is frightening and recognizing that we’re afraid doesn’t do much to make the situation feel less scary. So in order to work through the fear of being seen “off the page” we must do more than just recognize the fear is present. We have to take action to adjust and adapt and to face our fear squarely in the arena.
And, I think there are a handful of concrete steps that we can take to make the process go a little easier:
Start slowly. Start very, very slowly. It’s important not to start with steps that feel too big; it gets harder to start over every time fear beats us.
Begin by releasing old attachments and beliefs. You have to make space for new beliefs and habits.
Build trust step-by-step. There’s no shame in spending a while jumping off the low-dive before tackling the high-dive.
Make sure you’re ready. You’ll know you’re ready when the fear is almost (but not quite) outweighed by your excitement for what might happen next.
Jump a little before you’re ready. Don’t fall into the trap of waiting forever because you’re not “ready enough”.
I’ve done all these things in preparing to start writing my book.
I started slowly by writing and publishing short stories and poems here on my blog.
I done a lot of work on my limiting beliefs and developed strong habits around cultivating courage and supporting my writing practice.
I built trust by putting my work out there and watching as my world did not in fact fall apart.
I made sure I was ready by starting slowly and building trust.
And then I jumped before I was ready (when I still felt like screaming “aaaah!” even as I splashed the very first words across the page).
I’ll keep you posted on how it pays off! The hope is that if I grow my “off the page” courage by publishing here on the blog and submitting my work elsewhere for publication, I will simultaneously grow my courage “on the page” when I sit down at my desk to write.
So far it feels like the strategy is going to be a stunning success 🙂 (After all, I’ve just started writing a book! That’s a feat of tremendous “on the page” courage.)
If you’d like to read more about overcoming fear in your life, I highly recommend Lissa Rankin’s article, “Five Steps from Fear to Freedom”.
I’d love to know: How do you prepare when faced with something scary?
April means it should be Spring and yet as of two days ago I encountered snow falling in Boston. Apparently breaking the record wasn’t good enough!
As much as I look forward to warm weather and the day the dry skin on my hands finally, finally manages to heal without the assiduous application of hand cream, I can’t help but hold some fondness for this topsy-turvy springtime weather. Spring never lasts long in Boston — we seem to go from snow flurries one week to t-shirts the next, so this time next month I’m likely to be singing a different tune.
And on that note, here are this month’s book reviews!
Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.
The Fire Starter Sessions by Danielle LaPorte
“A revolution is a way of being that becomes a significantly better way of doing. And it shifts and lifts people up along with you and keeps the universe on the edge of itself. A Course in Miracles defines a miracle as “a shift in perception”. Revolutions can feel miraculous.”
While Simon Sinek’s book was a satisfying and intellectually convincing read, I think The Fire Starter Sessions may actually be more useful when figuring out what to do if you’ve lost track of your WHY. And as someone still emerging from the battlefield of a total loss of WHY, it’s a subject that happens to be near and dear to my heart.
“You will always be too much of something for someone: too big, too loud, too soft, too edgy. If you round out your edges, you lose your edge.”
For me, this was a transformative book. Full of wisdom and straight-talk, Danielle LaPorte manages to both inspire and cut the crap. I liked it enough that I’m even considering buying myself a copy to keep — a state of affairs that’s basically unheard of. It’s worth mentioning that the Kindle version is crummy — I’m sure the book is beautiful in print, but there are a lot of aspects to the layout that don’t translate well to Kindle. FYI.
It’s always hard to tell when a book feels transformative if it’s the book itself, or if it just happens to be the right book at the right time. I’d guess it’s usually a combination of both — a good book at the right time is probably the most common recipe for brilliant breakthroughs. In any case, this one really worked for me!
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
“People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realize. You see someone in school every day, or at work, in the canteen, and you share a cigarette or a coffee with them, and you talk about the weather or last night’s air raid. But you don’t talk so much about what was the nastiest thing you ever said to your mother, or how you pretended to be David Balfour, the hero of “Kidnapped”, for the whole year when you were thirteen, or what you imagine yourself doing with the pilot who looks like Leslie Howard if you were alone in his bunk after a dance.”
This month I also read Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. The friend who recommended the book to me said that it was the “unofficial novel of The Toast” (if any website were to have a book for a mascot it would be the Toast!). Amusingly I found my feelings on the Toast pretty well reflected by my feelings about this book — which is to say my feelings were mixed.
The book is about two girls who become friends when brought together by a combination of circumstance and WWII. One of the girls works as a pilot for the British Air Transport Auxiliary and the other is recruited by the British intelligence service as a spy. The book is the story of their friendship and of their intertwined fates when a covert mission goes awry.
The beginning of the book triggered two of my biggest pet peeves — on the one hand, the POV was third person limited (i.e. told from a single character’s perspective) and yet STILL she had verbatim knowledge of conversations at which she was not present. The reasons for this tie in to my second peeve — which is that we are probably supposed to conclude that she is making these conversations up, and yet it’s never clear to the reader what exactly she’s lying about or whether she’s lying at all and I found that irksome. (Plus, she’s entirely too glib about her capture and torture at the hands of the Gestapo.)
However, with that said, the book did grow on me as I went and the second half of the book clears up a lot of the mysteries and irritations of the first part. By the time I managed to get all the way to the end I found I was almost willing to forgive the book its inauspicious beginning.
The Best American Short Stories 2011, edited by Geraldine Brooks
“You wind up at an after-hours club Bix knows about on Ludlow, crowded with people too high to go home. You all dance together, subdividing the space between now and tomorrow until time seems to move backward.” — Jennifer Egan, “Out of Body”
As part of my ongoing literary education (the best way to learn to write great stories is to read great stories!), I picked up a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2011, edited by Geraldine Brooks. I’ve never given much credit to anthologies — I often find them hit or miss, likely because a great short story is harder to write than a decent novel. I find even collections of the “best” tend to be rather uneven in terms of quality.
That remains true of this collection. Some of the stories were breathtaking and had me careening through the pages like I’m drowning. Others left me cold.
“You don’t know what hurts more: the swirling moral turbulence of the book or the belated discovery that everything you thought about it was wrong. You missed it all: register, mood, irony, ambiguity, subtleties of characterization, narrative arc, even basic plot points. You can’t read. It’s like finding out, at thirty, that you’re adopted.” — Richard Powers, “To the Measures Fall”
A few notable highlights:
By far my favorite story was “Out of Body” by Jennifer Egan, and which I was delighted to discover is excerpted from her book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. The story is a stunningly-wrought example of a second-person POV that really works and I loved it and cringed with it and had to take a few moments to sit with it after I’d finished. I’ll definitely be reading the book, so keep an eye out for that!
I also enjoyed the story “Housewifely Arts” by Megan Mayhew Bergman, about a woman (a mother) who takes her son on a road trip to go see the parrot that once belonged to her own (now deceased) mother because she wishes to hear her (mother’s) voice. I found the story to be a fascinating and artful exploration of motherhood as she considers her simultaneous identity as daughter to her mother and mother to her son.
I enjoyed the second story I’ve quoted as well (“To the Measures Fall” by Robert Powers), which makes two stories in second person that I loved! The thing that’s fascinating about Powers’s story is the way in which it explores a woman’s changing relationship with a book (To the Measures Fall by Elton Wentworth). One of the best things about being a reader is that sometimes you come back to a book many years later and find it’s nothing like the book you remember. Robert Powers captures this experience beautifully in his story.
As a student of writing and literature, I was especially thrilled to discover the contributor’s notes at the end of the book — which I found a fascinating peek into other people’s writing processes, as well as an interesting look at how the ideas for the stories came about.
The Fear Cure by Lissa Rankin
“There’s a wonderful line often attributed to Anaïs Nin: ‘And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.’ I understand that the risk it takes to blossom takes a lot of courage. This is your invitation. What will it take for your longing to outweigh your fear of the unknown? What will it take for you to find the courage to blossom?”
In The Fear Cure, Lissa suggests that our Western culture operates under the guise of what she calls the “Four Fearful Assumptions”:
Uncertainty is unsafe
I can’t handle losing what I cherish
It’s a dangerous world
I’m all alone
She suggests that we replace these limiting beliefs with what she likes to call the “Four Courage-Cultivating Truths” and guides the reader through a series of exercises to write their own personal “Prescription for Courage”. The truths she suggests are:
Uncertainty is the gateway to possibility
Loss is natural and can lead to growth
It’s a purposeful universe
We are all One
While I am agnostic regarding the factual accuracy of some of these “courage-cultivating truths”, I do feel that approaching life from such a perspective would encourage me to acts of greater courage. What about you?
I’d love to know what you’ve been reading. If you’ve read any great (or not-so-great) books lately let me know in the comments!
Tired of waiting for my monthly wrap-ups? I talk about what I’m reading each week in my email newsletter.
I really enjoyed reading Danielle LaPorte’s 
this month. Danielle LaPorte walks the woo-woo line a bit, but the crux of the book is about getting really clear on your WHY (I read Simon Sinek’s 
by Elizabeth Wein. The friend who recommended the book to me said that it was the “unofficial novel of 
, edited by Geraldine Brooks. I’ve never given much credit to anthologies — I often find them hit or miss, likely because a great short story is harder to write than a decent novel. I find even collections of the “best” tend to be rather uneven in terms of quality.
. The story is a stunningly-wrought example of a second-person POV that really works and I loved it and cringed with it and had to take a few moments to sit with it after I’d finished. I’ll definitely be reading the book, so keep an eye out for that!
. I’ve been a huge fan of Lissa’s work, ever since I was introduced to her work through her previous book, 
.