Writing is time travel

Writing is time travel

I have traveled through time to give myself the loving forgiveness I needed.

Writing is a portal 

To other worlds I don’t believe I have access to until I write them down.

When I was 12 it was a funny voice box that I put my mother’s regurgitated demon voices into and made into something that got to have a life outside of her. Outside of my fear for her. Writing is an exorcism.

Writing has taught me that what I know to be true is what I know to be true.

It has frightened me realizing that others inside of me, beside, behind, and just over my head have things they want to say on my page. Writing is a duty.

I’ve never seen my ego so swollen and puffed up and shining. I’ve never seen it more bruised. 

Writing is a mirror. When I move through the world all day absorbing the thoughts, gestures, and feelings of others I come home and take my jacket off and sigh, ah yes, this is me. Still. Thank god. 

Writing gave my sensitivity a job. As a child, I knew things I didn’t know I knew. I was already a survivor, a big thing adjusting to a small body that was forgetting more and more all the time. I could stay very still and quiet and know what each tone of silence meant. I could sense things coming into the light from an out of focus place based on the tones of voices two hours before a meltdown. I knew what everyone needed before they knew they needed it. I was obsessed with things being okay because they seldom were. I was nostalgic before I was old enough to be nostalgic. The flecks of familial survival were on me like freckles. On the long, dark days of my mother’s depressive episodes I would stare at photos of people in my family who were still alive and just cry because I missed them. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to be somewhere alive. I was, and sometimes still am, upset by tiny details. Strip malls and suburbs make me incredibly sad and hopeless. Writing allows a site to transmute everything I think and feel. Writing called everything I saw and felt in my hyper-vigilant state ‘a gift’. An “ear for dialogue” or “attention to detail” or “character development”. I learned people to keep myself safe. I learned patterns before I could get myself out of them. But writing gave me power. It gave me perspective and permission to make up new possibilities I wanted to feel, make up feelings I wanted other people to feel with me. It allowed me to tell some stories in ways I wished they’d happened and others in ways I wouldn’t wish on anyone, not ever. 

Writing gave me attention I so wanted and needed. I wrote my first story in 1st grade, in Ms. Buted’s class. It was about a lion in the circus--that’s all I remember. Our classroom was in a bungalow conjoined by an accordion divider to another classroom. I don’t remember my deskmate. But I remember when Ms. Buted asked me about the story--she had a look of surprise and joy in her face and it was about me. About something I wrote. That year in Ms. Buted’s class was probably the year I remember most of any of my primary education years. I know this because we had at least two different classrooms and I have a handful of memories in both. I remember the guest talk we had on ‘smoking’ when one of the smallest kids in class answered the question correctly of what second hand smoke was. I remember El Nino ripping through the electricity of the school in our second floor classroom and watching the winds blow the trees through the large ceiling window of our building lining up against the wall. I remember my friend crying because she lost her mother. She was my desk mate one of those days and I remember how proud I felt to have clean tissue in my pocket, which Ms. LeJender made all of us carry in our pockets before leaving for school. I remember getting the speaking part in our school skit “Hey Black Child,” I remember how terrified I was to speak in front of everyone and how I so wanted to speak in front of everyone. I remember failing to deliver my lines after being prompted to twice in front of the cafeteria turned auditorium of my entire school. 

Writing later gave me clues about my life and who I was in comparison to the lives of others. Recognizing other people’s shame--in their body language, in what they wanted to draw my attention to. What people hid from me or lied to me about made me curious about what I looked like to them. Our shared shame about certain things made us the same class identity sometimes. Other times the absence of other’s shame or refusal of shame gave me a high horse which I rode home and looked at all my nice things on. As a child similarities were found in what our mothers said ‘no’ to us about when we asked, if we were spanked or whooped (and how we were spanked or whooped). In my house if my sister got in trouble, we both got spanked. There was no solo-whooping in our house. I believe it was an attempt to create ‘fairness’ but it only made us deeper anti-allies. As a child differences were found in whether or not we were embarrassed by items of clothing or crust on our faces, or how we smelled as a reflections of the smells of our own houses. I took all of this in then despite not yet having the language for it. 

Writing taught me joy(?) I’m not sure this is true but therapy helped a lot. Writing did push me to ask about the miracle of options, though. Sometimes I teach a lesson on joy. I ask folks if they’ve ever read a book that moved them to tears--a sad scene, the death of a character, etc. and most folks raise their hands. Then I ask folks if they’ve ever read a book or a story that moved them to joy, just manic and dizzy with joy. A lot fewer folks raise their hands--some folks raise their hands halfway because they’re almost sure they have, they just can’t recall exactly when or which book but give them a moment. Writing joy has been my biggest challenge. To write about joy I have to experience it. I have to embody it--whether foreign or at home within me. And preferably I have to embody it multiple times and relatively deeply if I want it to be contagious when I write it. But how to do this when joy is corny? Stupid? “Cognitive dissonance”? Missing perspective? Inaccessible to others? Written about wrongly? Experienced wrongly as not actual joy because actual joy is… 

How do you write about joy when everything inside you sees it as a vulnerable state that puts you in danger of harsh critique, abandonment, simpleton making? How do you write about joy when you are the one who is miserable and anticipating all of the comments and critiques of other miserable people on the internet? You try. If there is anything I know about writing. It is this: when I stick my hand out, I am apprehensive nearly every time--thinking maybe it’s really stopped this time because I’ve been away so long. And I’m kicking myself because really this was ridiculous and before I know it someone and something warm reaches out for me too. And I am relaxed into this familiarity once again. With gratitude. 

With writing I am reminded that I have a home somewhere else. Many somewhere elses. Real homes in the mind palace of my past. There are always places where I belong. I want this for all of us. 

****I need to create and share art to process. I make it and sometimes I put it out half baked because I need to practice feeling comfortable with my ass hanging out. Because I need to practice remembering that the standard for creation doesn’t have to be so based in finality, completion, perfection. I need to create and share in order to trust that people will make their own decisions about what they choose to read. If they don’t like it, they can scroll on. We each have a choice about what we consume and I am challenging myself to spend more time with what resonates, what connects. When I put myself on a high seat, whether to critique my own work or another’s, I can’t create. The stakes are too high. I’m being hard on others and even harder on myself. Perfection does not exist. I embrace that. I lower those impossible stakes. I give myself permission to try in the field of vision of others. Misery is natural but sometimes only one option.