We All Grow Up and Surprise Ourselves

A teacher told me once that everything's different the moment a writer professes aloud that they're a writer. That's all they have to do is just say it, let it roll around and feel good on the tongue and have the roof of the mouth approve and then the lips be shocked at its coming. They'll have silently penned a million good and bad words or maybe none at all, but it's this utterance that inexorably separates Her from the others. I was finishing my third year at university. He was teaching child studies but hosted book clubs in the evenings and cc'd me twice a week on his thread of writer's workshop group emails. He enjoyed poetry and Patti Smith, so I trusted his research on the matter and had known exactly what he meant when he talked about 'the moment'. I could never forget it.

We were driving in from the city that afternoon, Ryan and me, sunny and the kind of traffic that pulled the sky to the road. There was construction to my right - cones and light-up trucks and crushed pavement that'd be there until I got pregnant, I thought. Boxed in and surrounded by an hour more of orange, there was no place else to go except for right here in my seat and the man that I loved at less than arm's length. I heard myself tell him that from now on I was going to write and that it wasn't something that writers did but it was something that I did and that I wanted to keep doing. He didn't say anything back immediately, only smiled. And we began to move, and I noticed the cars push the clouds back up and I suspected that this is what it felt like to be high.

. . .

I always thought I'd have a classroom when I grew up. I didn't fall within the spectrum of patience enough to deal with children that weren't my own, but maybe high school, where patience didn't matter as much. I hadn't landed on a theme or a subject, (probably English) and I imagined what a closet full of teacher outfits would look like as a girl who was still accepting hand-me-downs. I figured the kinks of this and that and the other would work themselves out, as long as it was in my contract to handle assignments, an infinite amount. The neurotic wire in me got twisted early on, and this compulsion - albeit juvenile - drooled heavy at the prospect of sorting and shuffling papers. I practiced while I was at home. I learned to write large so that I'd have more of a stack to clink upon the desk, rocking them back and forth between my fingers so that the corners of each page lined up just right. I would give them a tap and then secure my index around the top for good measure. I'd assign thousands of homework pieces and the students would turn them in to separate piles. The more piles for clinking, the better. The day I changed my mind about teaching was the same day that I remembered the chronic illness I'd developed over stage fright, and similarly, it was around the time I learned that there was apparently more to the standard teacher's contract than paper-sorting.

I gathered my wits and, for a time, agreed that interior design work better suited my impulses. I was seventeen and knew nothing of the job save its inherent creativity. I would latch onto a style and tangibly fill up a space with ideas. Geometric bedside tables, thick-woven rugs that felt like drinking wine in Tuscany and weighty, brass bookends shaped like animals that I would never spend money on myself. There was so much potential in the emptiness and even more reward in its coming to be. There would be planning and art and it would be naggy as hell, but something that was once lifeless was now swarming with it. Maybe the overwhelming promise was intimidating or maybe I felt compelled to keep on with my search for work that I loved, but one way or another I woke up old enough to drink, lying beneath textbooks that wrote about humans and the reason we're believers in god and in bigfoot.

I was engaged to be married and had put on pounds or felt it heavier than usual. Curious about why the rain excited me more than the sun ever could and how maybe people that cry a lot feel safer when the clouds are low. I would wonder about the world and feel the sandbags at my feet, walking stiff and frustrated that I wasn't much of a talker. Observation led to more questions and more bricks and there was no place to shuck them. How do other people do this? I bet they don't.

THE GIRL ON THE PLANE AND MY TIME IN INDIA AND HOMELESSNESS AND MY HUSBAND'S LOVE FOR THE BEES AND MAYBE I DON'T HAVE AN ISSUE WITH TWENTY SOMETHINGS FORSAKING THE WESTERN CHURCH IN ORDER TO BE KIND TO THE TAX COLLECTORS OUTSIDE. These are the ones, the abstract terms, that I had trouble articulating but found great solace in speaking of through the senses. Like her red hair and broken marriage and how it smelled like sweat and street food there and the time that he turned the dying insect from its back and hoped to save it with a tiny version of his homemade sugar-water. I would zoom in on my fears at night and manage them through gritty, gory detail (more than I asked for), and it was the telling and remembering and grieving of those details that would rescue me.

I would observe and confess and think and then write and I began clinking papers together, shuffling and sorting and stacking like from when I was twelve. With a pencil in hand and nothing but white space to work with, I was moving furniture around a room until people felt at home inside. A rhythm of words and then sentences and eventually paragraphs that'll add up to the value of the environment and the benefit of standing in its furnished glory. It's planning and it's art and it's a gnat buzzing in my damn ear, but it was worthless before and now it meant the world. I was doing the very work my young self had promised I'd do, and I loved it and felt guilty that I had somehow gained access to this portal that let me enjoy what I did for a living, one most people can't seem to find.

. . .

 It scared the daylights out of me to admit it. Won't there someday be nothing left to write about? And I guess what I'm learning is that as long as we're all still being born and going to our graves, there's something new that can be, must be, said of it in the meantime. We can dance through it and suffer through it and preach through it or walk it like a ghost, but throwing away my shoes in Mumbai and watching through the window a garden bird eat from the feeder that my husband hung yesterday and weeping close to the toilet over my sick dog and maybe letting my children mattress surf down the stairs in our first home - those are the things that'll save me and the writer only intends to help himself, but if some unassuming guest gets taken for the ride, well then that'd be alright, too. There will never be none of it left to write about it and godspeed in catching it all while you can.

"We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."  Joan Didion