Thankfully Stepping Out Of My Cocoon

Thanksgiving has been over for almost 6 days and I'm only just starting to readjust to being back on my own.  The last two days have been unseasonably warm, but a depressing grey, so that 2pm feels like dusk.  I've been eating left over turkey and sleeping too much.

Thanksgiving was a quiet affair this year.  We had one person come over.  I'll call him Bill.  I was very glad that he came because my brother was making a large feast for us.  Of all the people who could have come, I was hoping that Bill would be the one.  He's good friends with Samantha, my new friend.  And since she couldn't come, he was the next best thing.

Bill is in his mid 50s, he's short, shorter than I am (I'm average height for a woman) and he's quite slim.  Like Sam, he owns property in our town, but doesn't have much money.  He's very much into bartering with people and has a good memory for who needs what.  He is mechanically minded.  For fun he takes things apart and then puts them back together, maybe even improves things.  He's into science, too and does his own experiments.  On Thanksgiving he told the story of how he did an experiment to split an atom, just to see how powerful it was.  I can't remember the experiment except that it used water, but I do remember that he said it knocked him on his ass when he did it.  I thought the fact that he did that was extraordinary.  How many people out there do experiments like that in their free time?

It was nice having just the three of us, more intimate and relaxed.  I got to see a side of Bill that I haven't seen before, a gentler, even sweeter side to him.  Bill knows my story through my brother and through Sam and he seemed to be treating me with patience and kindness.  He also mentioned that he had gone through chemotherapy, though I don't know when.  He mentioned it in passing and I didn't want to grill him on it, but obviously he's had a brush with death and has lived to tell the tale, thank God.  Though he wouldn't thank God because he is an avowed atheist.  Maybe I'll ask Sam about Bill's story.  That's the interesting thing, that I've fortuitously tapped into a small social network of local people through my brother.  Most of them are in their 50s and have no children, are Democrats (Bill is a Libertarian), decidedly non homophobic and mentally and verbally quite sharp, if not actually mensa types.  Our town, because of the college and university here, is an oasis amidst Republican conservative Christians.  This group found each other at the local town bars.

I'm finding that they are very loyal to each other.  This past Saturday one of the group had an accident with a chainsaw--the chainsaw bucked while he was using it and it cut into the heel of one of his feet.  He was alone, but was able to call 911.  A helicopter took him to Rochester where he had an operation.  Sam told me about it yesterday on the phone.  The hurt man, Paul, lives just a few houses up the road from me; I remember the ambulance flying past the house with a police car right behind him.  I remember sending out a prayer, not knowing who I was praying for.  Today Paul came home, but Sam had gotten to his place earlier and brought dry wood and got a fire going and stoked it.  She also washed his dishes and cleaned up; I thought that was very considerate of her.  She stopped by my house afterwards.

I got her some coffee and we sat and talked for a couple of hours.  She was telling me about Paul who is mensa bright but who has a temper from time to time.  I met him in one of the local bars a long time ago and he was very bitter about his divorce.  Sam says he's still bitter about it.  That's a shame to be so bright and yet to get pulled into the blame game even so.  On the flip side, he must have really loved his  wife for it to hurt so badly.  But it was news to me that Paul has a temper because I just don't know Paul.  So Sam was giving me a window into a piece of his life.  That's the thing about Sam's group of friends, they've all bonded in the local bars over at least a decade if not more.  They've seen each other when they've been shit faced and stumbling home.  They've heard each others sad stories and triumphs.    They've also witnessed psychological breakdowns and relationship break ups.  Simply put, they've been vulnerable in front of each other and know a lot about each other and this part of the country.

For me, I see Sam as the gatekeeper for this community.  If Sam gives the thumbs up about me, then I will walk into a small viable community, a community I might wind up growing old or at least older with.  All my years of isolation may actually be ending right now before my eyes.  Now, how cool is my brother for sharing his friends with me and how cool is Sam for welcoming in a another lost soul into the group?  And she has been very welcoming.  She invited me over to her place this Friday and as long as the weather holds, I'm going to go.  It's a treat to go to someone's house and soak up their home atmosphere and especially a treat with Sam.  I believe she's a kindred spirit.  I have so much to be thankful for.  

Confession and Reflections

Thank you Karen and Anonymous for your comments.  Much appreciated.  I wanted to say that after I did all that writing yesterday I began having some psychotic symptoms last night.  It's embarrassing to admit it, but admit it I must in order to stay healthy and on track.  It's the same old story for me, I try something creative, do it halfway well and then start falling into the egotism of delusion.  Most people can safely fantasize, but due to the schizophrenia, I cannot.  I get pulled into the vortex of something that threatens to consume me.  So I talked into my taperecorder and then aloud to myself and tried to ground myself and then I got a good night's sleep and am feeling a lot better today.  Reading your comments, especially yours Karen, gave me further ground under my feet.  So if you can, keep the constructive criticism coming.  I'm printing out your comments and keeping them in a folder to review from time to time.  It's such a privilege to get your feedback and to read your insights into what I've written.

The truth is that I am a beginner and have to go through the slow,  careful process of creating a story.  I read in one of my writing books that often beginners are good at either the beginning, the middle or the end of a story, but not all three.  Right now, I think I have a sense for a relatively strong beginning, but whether I can fabricate a middle and end, whether I can complete what I started, only time will tell.  I also need to read a lot more short stories, of which I have many collections, and learn from those with talent and the skill of their craft.  All in all, I'm still very pleased with my early attempts and it feels so good to publish pieces of the work here in this blog.  That's a big step for me and opens the door to me letting other people in my life read my work and hopefully give me constructive criticism.

Anonymous, you asked what the difference is between showing and telling.  I'm not so sure myself.  I think showing includes more description and some dialogue.  I lay it out there okay, but I will have to learn to use these other skills.  I feel as if in my writing that I am making lists to describe the characters and sometimes that's overkill.  The stories I've read from other authors leave more to the imagination and are structured more ingeniously.  So I'll keep plugging away and see what I can learn from other writers, from you who read my pieces and from myself in trial and error.

Karen, I think you make some very perceptive points about "Cold Comfort".  I do need to add physical description and it is unclear the switch between the present and the past.  I don't know yet the answers to your questions.  I'll have to sit and brood about it.  I do know that I'm setting Johnny up to be a hero figure, but is he handsome?  My idea is that at twelve he is short and undeveloped.  His physical appearance changes radically at puberty, so much so that Jamie doesn't recognize him in the street later on.  I also think it is too easy to make him handsome.  It might be more interesting if he had imperfect (but perhaps endearing) features.  Maybe the reason he's drawn to beauty is because he's not striking looking.  On the other hand, Jamie is particularly attractive.  She stands out that way.  Two beautiful characters might be too much.

Anyway, despite the minor setback of my psychosis rearing its ugly head, I feel good.  As they often say in 12 step meetings:  Live and Learn.  Eventually, if I keep up with the writing, I would like to write about what it is like to be psychotic.  That's the ultimate challenge because I have to have insight into my own illness and sometimes I struggle with that.

Short Story Excerpt: "Mary and Jake"

Today has been a very productive day for me.  I started drinking coffee early this morning and began to work on "Cold Comfort" then I took a break and started thinking of another segment of my autobiographical novel.  This excerpt is about me as Mary Kelly and a boy I grew up with in Brooklyn.  I am so happy that I may have found my calling because these stories are coming out of me quickly and easily.  It's been a long time coming.  I wrote several short stories in high school, but since then very little. Now, after almost half a century of living, I feel as if I have something to say and a way to say it.  I know this creative streak won't last, but while it's here I will enjoy it.  The hard part is sticking with it for me.  I have a pattern, as you know if you've kept track of this blog, with starting creative endeavors very enthusiastically and then losing interest after a month or two.  What I want above all is to be dedicated and to have a good purpose in life.  This might be it.  God I hope so.  I've been drifting for so long now.

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"Mary & Jake"

Mary Kelly's parents had given her her own phone earlier that year.  So when the phone rang and woke her out of her sleep, she thought it was probably one of her friends, but instead a male voice said slowly and precisely, "I have an aching stick I want to put inside you."  There was a slight pause and then a click and then a dial tone.  The caller had tried to disguise his voice, but Mary knew who it was.  It was Jake Markowsky and it was his sweet sixteenth birthday.  He was probably drunk.  She couldn't imagine him making an obscene phone call to her while he was straight.  But, to Mary, his call wasn't obscene at all, even the language was gentle.  She felt an instant empathy for him.  She knew what it was like to sexually yearn for someone who was unavailable.  She had had a crush on him for years.  They almost became a couple when they were only twelve, but she had pulled away and let him go.  There had been too many available girls and not enough boys which made Mary feel badly about all the attention she had been getting in 7th grade.  That and her best friend Amy, who had gone out with Jake in 5th grade, still had a crush on him and Mary felt torn between having a boyfriend and having a best friend.  She chose the best friend mainly because Jake had not come forward enough, had not fully claimed her.  They were very young and Jake was still obsessed by his childhood love of sports.  If he had to choose between hanging out and playing basketball with his friends or getting his courage up to ask Mary out, he obviously chose the former.  He wasn't yet ready for the real deal, so he settled for a puppy love that fizzled out as Mary gave him the cold shoulder the next year.  The year after that they went their separate ways, she to a private school in Manhattan and he to Brooklyn Technical High School, which she later found out that he had hated; he wound up going to a private school called Friends in Brooklyn.

But here he was calling her up a couple of years later, not to ask her out, but to perversely ease his sexual frustration.  A weird kind of birthday gift to himself.  Mary had the urge to call him up right away at his parents' house, but what could she say to him, "Jake, did you just make an obscene phone call to me?"  She hadn't talked to him or seen him in a long time and she wasn't close to his family.  She didn't even think to call and wish him a happy birthday.  It just didn't work.  He had set them both up to fail by not coming clean to her, by not telling her that he still thought about her, still wanted to know her.  Mary thought about the call for several days.  It was bittersweet, sweet because she now knew that he was attracted to her, but bitter because she was pretty sure nothing would come of it.  He lived really close by, the next block down, but she avoided walking past his house ever since she had started high school.  That was her personality, to let people go and to avoid emotional conflict at all costs.  That and she was an awkward, self-conscious teenager who liked to pretend she was at least partially "cool", a weird kind of cool perhaps, but worthy of a certain amount of courtesy, even courtship.  She knew Jake wouldn't court her properly, instead he'd call her by her last name and nervously poke fun at her.  That's the way it was with the guys, they'd get into ranking each other out and then ranking the girls out, anything for a laugh and to get out of saying plainly:  hey, I like you, would you be my girl?  So, yes, Mary was disappointed with Jake, but she was also disappointed in herself.  It was the mid 1970s and feminism was still flowering.  She thought she should have had the courage to ask him out, the courage to at least walk by his house and say hi to him, but she was stubborn and maybe even a bit lazy.  Too much time had gone by and instead of hanging out in the neighborhood in Brooklyn, she was hanging out with a close friend in Greenwich Village after school and on the week-ends.

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Okay, that's it for today.  I don't think this piece is as strong as "Cold Comfort" mainly because it is autobiographical and I seem to be doing the telling thing instead of the showing thing.  But shit, it's a first draft and it gives me something to work with in the future.  So I'm very happy.  May it last....

Short Story Excerpt: Cold Comfort

Hi Karen!  Thank you so much for your wonderful supportive comment.  I think I've had a breakthrough. I've been working on a new short story all morning and I want to share it with you and whoever else stops by this blog.  But first I wanted to answer your question about what I meant by Alana dressing to her best advantage.  Based on my mother, Alana's figure would be more of an apple shape than the more classic pear shape for women.  So she is narrow at her hips, like a man, but modestly broad shouldered.  Dressing to her best advantage meant wearing tailored, sporty clothing, clothing influenced by styles for men, but flattering to women.  My mother was a teenager in the 1940s, so think of that style from black and white films of the time.  Narrow skirts and jackets with padded shoulders, etc...  A nice pair of pumps and maybe a stylish hat.

Anyway, here is the beginning of my short story.  The opening scene I wrote over a month ago.  It's stuck in my head, so I decided to work on it.  Any comments would be most welcome.

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"Cold Comfort"

The moment he touched her his months of planning suddenly became a reality.  All he knew was it was cold as death outside and she was warm.
"Money upfront" she said.  He dug his hand into his pocket.
"Not here!" she hissed and pulled his arm to get him to cross the street with her.  They slipped into an alley and then down a few steps to a door that was slightly ajar.
"In here--we've got to be quiet."  There was a small vestibule with a padlocked second door and a sign that read "KEEP OUT!!"  She put her back against the outer door to keep it shut.
"Okay, 15 minutes."

John had heard that she had run away from home the year before.  She was 16 then.  Home life had not been good to her.  The word was that her step father had been molesting her since she was 12.  Her name was Jamie Chamberlain and he had known her when he was just 12 and she was 8.  They had been at the same camp one summer.  It was the summer that Jamie learned how to swim.  Harry, one of the camp counselors, had paired him up with her because he had become a skilled swimmer the summer before, had won several races.  Harry had told him privately that she was afraid of the water because her father had drowned the year before.
"So, treat her gently Johnny.  Don't push too hard.  I'm telling you this because I've watched you the last couple of years and I know that you are good with the younger kids.  Patient and kind.  Older than your years.  I'll be keeping an eye out for both of you."

The first thing Johnny noticed about Jamie was that she was beautiful.  Even as a little boy he had been drawn to beautiful things and people.  Sunsets, shells, animals and flowers, but mostly the face of his mother.  He learned very young not to talk about beauty and beautiful things because his older brothers had skewered him when he tried, labeling him a "momma's boy".  And, in a sense, that's what he was, being the youngest of four brothers.  By the time he was twelve he had proved himself to his family by doing well in school and by excelling at soccer and swimming.  He still loved his mother dearly, but followed his father's taciturn example.  He only spoke when he had something to say, the rest of the time he remained a silent bystander.  He learned by watching.  He watched his brothers making rambunctious mistakes.  He learned not to do as they had done.

If Jamie had been closer to his age, Johnny would have steered clear of her.  He had made a habit of falling in love with the prettiest girls in his class and then got tongue-tied with extreme shyness when any of them was assigned the seat next to him.  He hated the feeling so much, that feeling of being vulnerable and struck dumb, that he overcompensated by focusing on the work at hand and had gotten the reputation of being a know-it-all.  He hid behind that persona and acted as if he were coolly indifferent to girls.  Little did his classmates know that he was a closet romantic.  So when he saw Jamie for the first time at the lake an hour before lunch, saw the golden brown ringlets of her hair and her wide green eyes, her serious, stubborn mouth, he knew he was safe because she was only a child, a child who had lost a father, a child who needed his help.  That suited Johnny; he liked to be of help, especially to misfit kids, those kids who were awkward and tongue-tied, too.  If she had been a beautiful, spoiled child, conscious of her beauty, he would have lost interest, but instead she came across as very, very serious, a watcher like himself.

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Okay, that's it.  I hope you enjoyed it.  I'll be working on it for the next few days and posting more scenes here.  Till then, what do you think John does when he gets Jamie alone in that vestibule after he's given her money to have sex with him?  To be continued....

Tinkering With Fiction

This cold has loosened its grip and I felt better today.  Quite a relief.  I did fiction writing today, some of which I would like to share with you.  Just a page.  I tinkered with it, but mostly it's in its first draft stage.   The main character, Alana, is based on my mother.

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"Alana"

It was nights such as these that she wondered why she had ever married Aidan.  They would go to parties and he would drink like a fish.  At the end of the night she would have to drag all six feet of him to the car and then drive them home.  Quite a feat for a petite 5' 2" woman.  She had only just learned how to drive. Aidan had been her teacher, a lousy one at that and again the thought of divorce had crept into her mind.  But it was the 1950s and divorce was no easy matter.  So she decided to stick it out.  He didn't drink like a fish because he was an alcoholic, like his father, but because he had the habit of blindly drinking what was put in front of him.  Maybe it was that he was nervous in social situations.

Alana knew how to drink slowly, hard liquor with soda or ice.  She had seen her parents get "piss drunk" when she was a teenager and, quite frankly, it disgusted her.  She blamed her mother's sister Mae, who had been a flapper as a teen-ager in the 1920s, as being a bad influence on her parents,  tempting them to drink.  Alana didn't always have the most sympathetic nature.  She couldn't see and didn't care that they were trying to have fun to counterbalance their hard, working class lives.  The upwardly mobile Alana and her precocious little brother, Billy, had agreed in childhood to stand together against their intelligent, but rather coarse parents.  They particularly stood united against their father, an Irish American salesman.  Of the two children, he favored Alana and mocked Billy, who was his wife's favorite.  But just because he favored Alana didn't mean he was easy on her, far from it.  She was a very good student, but if she got an A grade in one class, he said she should have gotten an A+.  Nothing she did was ever good enough.  She found too quickly, that she didn't like her father.  Not only was he outspokenly racist and bigoted, he was clever at it and seemed to enjoy cutting her and her brother down to size, too.

She had chosen Aidan to be her husband because he was nothing like her father.  Yes, Aidan drank too much at parties, but the rest of the time he was smart, smarter than her father, and cultured and upwardly mobile like herself.  She had been introduced to him by a mutual friend around the time that Aidan was graduating from Columbia Law School.  He was handsome and this meant a lot to Alana, who was hyper critical of her own looks.  Physically, to her great dismay, she took after her father who had a large head, short neck, a beaked nose and a short waist.  Then again, Alana had thick auburn hair, attractive grey/green eyes, shapely hands, arms and legs and she was slim.  She learned to dress to her best advantage.  Like her father, she had an eye for fine clothes and shoes and was willing to part with a chunk of what income she earned in order to get them.  As a child during The Great Depression, her mother had made nearly all of Alana's and Billy's clothes.  So naturally, Alana wanted fine store bought clothes, the kind she saw and envied on other little girls in school.  By the time she was a teenager, she knew she wanted all those material things she had been denied growing up.  Aidan was the first man who had showed the promise of being able to provide for her on a big scale.  She didn't think she could go wrong marrying a lawyer fresh out of law school, especially Columbia Law School, which was one of the finest law schools in the country.

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That's as far as I got today.  I'm finding that fictionalizing the members of my family is liberating, even though I'm still doing a lot of telling and not showing.  It doesn't matter at this stage.  The most important thing is to get the words down on the page.  But I do want to learn how to write a small, self-contained story and this example is not of that.  This example is the very early stages of an autobiographical novel.  Lately I've been reading a few short stories by women, two by Grace Paley, one by Amy Hempel and one by Sallie Bingham.  All of them were weird and disturbing and they worked.  The writing I've done here is much plainer and linear going from A to B to C, and that is because I am a novice.  And as a novice I have a lot of reading to do and luckily I have tons of short stories to read by both sexes.  So I am hopeful that by reading a lot and practicing myself that I will begin to get the hang of writing a story, beginning, middle and end.  As I go along I will write about what I've been reading, especially about what writers have to say about the writing process.  Maybe you can comment on the conclusions I come to or share some of your own insights.  

Cold Doldrums

I said I was going to write more regularly, but almost 5 days have gone by without a word from me.  Bottom line:  I have a cold that has been hanging on for over 2 weeks and it's been sapping me of my energy; while I wait it out, I've been feeling sorry for myself, that and sleeping a lot.  I have been thinking about posting either a poem or a fiction fragment of a story, but I haven't had the courage.  Being sick has made me more vulnerable.  I think negative thoughts and remain passive.  I'm used to being mentally sick with voices, depression and anxiety, but not physically sick on top of that.  I haven't had a cold in a very long time.  It will run its course and I will start feeling better, but I miss writing/playing/singing songs.  It's an emotional release to sing out, even if my singing and playing aren't particularly good.  That doesn't matter so much as that I keep trying to put my heart and soul into the practice of it.  It's more therapy for me.  So I'm emotionally shut down without it.

There's something I do to myself that I don't understand --  I say "No" to myself, no to reading, no to writing, no to listening to music, no to watching a DVD.  The core behind that "No" is fear, fear of making a wrong choice, fear of more suffering.  I have so many good books, CDs and DVDs, but they remain in piles all around me, mostly unused.  I do read and write but haltingly, not with the abandon I once had before I got involved in an abusive relationship.  That appears to be where this monolithic "NO" stems from, a reaction to having been abused.  Becoming ill with schizophrenia was like having an abuser stuck within my mind.  During the acute stages of the abusive relationship and the acute stage of my schizophrenia, I stopped doing the things I used to love to do.  Either I was obsessed with trying to figure out my abuser or I was so caught in my delusions that the focus was not on me but on them.  Now, though I'm in recovery,  there is still this residual negative reaction that I have to contend with on a daily basis.  Perhaps before my reaction served as a temporary protective balm, but now it serves no good purpose; it just keeps me from being a happier individual.

In part, it is my illness that makes it difficult for me to choose what to do with myself, but it is also myself, something about my personality and this is what makes all this so frustrating.  I've internalized my abuser even though the abuse has long since stopped.  I have become my own puzzle and problem.
Living alone intensifies the problem because I am responsible for all the choices I make, I can't defer to another's choice.  But why am I so afraid of making a wrong choice?  Life is filled with wrong choices, but from the wrong choice you learn to find the right choice.  Nothing is fixed in stone; life is fluid, ongoing.  But I act as if making a wrong choice brands me for life as some kind of failure.  I'm also still afraid of the dark side of life that gets expressed in books, CDs and films.  It's as if I were a little child clinging to the fantasy of happily ever after stories.  When I was acutely ill for a while all I could watch were Disney animated movies.  I was hungry for the fantasy, just as most children are.

I've decided that I want to write stories, but for a story to be interesting there must be conflict.  While I think it is bizarre that we as human animals gravitate towards telling and experiencing stories of conflict, I also realize that it is not just conflict that draws us in; it is resolution of that conflict that we're  interested in.  Life is a big problem, there's a lot of conflict and then you die and this is true for all your loved ones and for the whole human race.  So what we want to know is how do we resolve this problem of life and death?  A lot of people place their faith in heroes and heroines who go on a complex journey, but ultimately triumph over seemingly unsurmountable odds.  We listen to/watch the stories because secretly we want to identify with the heroes and heroines.  So is it back to the fantasy that everyone (except the bad guys) lives happily ever after?  Not in the really good stories, the ones where the hero or heroine has human flaws and where the ending leaves open ended questions and isn't just a pat black and white response.  Grown up stories that acknowledge that life is tough and we don't know what happens after death.

Writing this out makes me feel better, gives me hope that I can start to say "Yes" to things instead of "No", but it's not so easy when I'm lying down on the couch staring at the ceiling.  During those moments I feel stuck inside a self-made prison and too often I give in to that belief and do nothing.  Having this cold just accentuates that tendency.  If all goes well, this cold will end and I will be liberated.  May I make the best use of that liberation and start making more choices, even poor ones.  It's not about getting it right.  There is no such thing as perfection.  It's about doing the best you can with what you've got, and I know I've got a lot.  

An Old Friend's Birthday

Thank you so much Jen and Karen, as always, for your intelligent, thoughtful and kind comments.  You are part of the reason why I'm going to continue with this blog.  You inspire me with your  blogs.  I think you are exceptional woman and I'm not just saying that to be nice.  I'm honored that you continue to follow my blog and that you stay in touch with me as a few of my best online friends.  Together I think we set a fine example of what individuals with our disability can accomplish.

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I'm writing this morning because today is an old friend's 49th birthday and I've been thinking about her a lot lately.  She was my best friend from high school and I thought I'd like to pay tribute to her in this blog. In real life she has a French name, so I've decided to call her Colette after one of her favorite writers when we were in school.  I haven't seen her for over 30 years.  In the last few years I've looked for her on Facebook but couldn't find her, then I looked for her on Twitter and I did find her.  I knew for sure that it was her because there was this great photograph of her looking away from the camera but smiling broadly.  I snooped around a bit and followed some links and got some information about her.  I discovered that she's bilingual (French, of course) and a college teacher now working on her Phd.  She is the "Deputy Director" of a reputable New York City college and I have no doubt that one day she will become the Director itself.  From her language I can see that she is highly intelligent and sophisticated, a real success story.  On top of all that she's also the mother of at least one child who is probably around 10 years old now.  I found her work email address and in the last two years I've written a couple of emails to her that I never sent.  I felt too ashamed of my circumstances to contact her, especially since we didn't separate on the best of terms.

Colette and I had been so close during high school that we nearly became lovers.  But then in our senior year a boy I'll name Daniel from the grade below entered the picture.  At first he hung out with both of us.  He was very bright and funny, Jewish on his father's side only, quite similar to Colette.  He was a writer and a film buff, spent hours after school watching foreign films at revival houses sprinkled throughout Manhattan.  Sometimes we would all go together.  But gradually, he began to single me out; he made romantic advances.  I realized that he didn't have a happy home life.  His mother was morbidly obese, a smoker and an alcoholic.  They lived in a one bedroom apartment.  He got the bedroom while his mother camped out in the living room.  His mother and father had divorced when he was just a child.  It turned out that his father was mentally ill with schizophrenia and didn't see his son very often.  I got pulled into Dan's world.  He was a little too close to being mentally unbalanced himself and I became protective of him.  I started sneaking him into my house at night trying to save him from having to go back to his cramped apartment and his increasingly drunk mother.  Sometimes we would skip school together.  He became my first boyfriend.  Eventually Colette got fed up and rejected me.  But before that, for a couple of years, she had been my faithful friend, really, my only friend in school.

During high school Colette had been an uneven student and a bit of a pot head.  She was also a good actress (like her father, who was a professional) and a talented modern dancer.  Quick and lively, with a flair for the dramatic, she had thick dirty blonde hair, candid blue eyes, a distinctive Jewish/French nose and a small cupid mouth which easily turned into a wide and pleasing grin when she was happy.  Our high school was located on the edge of SoHo in Manhattan.  Colette lived in a two bedroom apartment with her divorced mother and sometimes her older brother in the East Village.  Her father, too, lived in the Village, though in a somewhat more fashionable part of it.  Colette would take me on walking tours occasionally stopping by her father's apartment when he wasn't home.  She doted on her father.  He was a character actor and a good one, but he was not always available.  She wanted badly to please him with her acting and dancing.  He was the favored parent unlike her mother who invariably got on Colette's nerves.

I entered ninth grade in this strange, private school complete with a Brooklyn accent, nice clothes and a work ethic garnered from having gone to "advanced enrichment" or AE classes in my public junior high school.  No matter how hard I tried to recede into the background, whenever I opened my mouth and spoke, I stood out as different from the more slovenly, generally white, often wealthy, not particularly hard working Manhattanite private school kids.  The first time I became aware of Colette was in French class.  She might have even been one of the kids to try and cheat off my paper while we took a test.  That first year I kept mostly to myself.  I was neurotic enough to avoid the cafeteria because I was afraid of interacting with the other kids.  I wound up eating my bag lunch on the no longer used back staircase, furtively listening to the sounds of the students below me.  During free periods I would either go to the small library on the third floor or outside to wander in the streets of SoHo and Greenwich Village.  I didn't fit in this school and, with typical stubbornness, I didn't try to fit.  I was even proud of being different.  But I was depressed and lonely, too.

I'm not sure why Colette took an interest in me.  She was not particularly popular, but she did fit into the school much more than I did.  By the time tenth grade rolled around, she had taken me under her wing.  She began inviting me over to her apartment after school.  She told me many stories about her old school (another private grade school) and her old friends and stories about her family.  She took me to her favorite places in the Village.  She shared her active imagination and dreamed up fantasies of how we would grow up to be successful, artistic types.  She was warm, engaging and vibrant.  Neither of us were particularly thrilled with our school or with the students in the school.  We went because we had to; we stuck it out together.  Pretty quickly, I lost my Brooklyn accent and my nice clothes.  I cut my hair short one day while listening to Elvis Costello's song "Pump It Up".  I started dressing more androgynously in sneakers, pants, t-shirts and a black oversized man's jacket.  Colette dressed more stylishly and more femininely.  She fell in love with a pair of cream colored cowboy boots and would wear them with long dresses.  Our school was very small, only around 200 students, so there wasn't a lot of choice when it came to boys and so Colette and I stuck close together.  I was a little in love with her and sometimes I felt as if she felt likewise.  She really saved me from being quite miserable.

But then I went astray and got involved with Daniel.  I neglected Colette.  I hate to say it but maybe I even betrayed Colette.  She began to become friends with other kids from school and became progressively colder towards me.  I really hurt her and so she, in turn, really hurt me.  That last semester of senior year was horrible.  Daniel was pressuring me to be sexual with him, but I was such a virgin and I was scared.  I was seventeen years old and I had never been tongue kissed.  When he finally got me to try, I was utterly revolted.  I wasn't all that sure that I wanted to be with him, but I was so insecure I thought I may not ever have the chance to be with a boy again.  And so, I stayed with Daniel...and lost Colette.

I stayed with Daniel all through college, but never made any new friends.  After college we broke up amicably.  A couple of years later I began hearing voices.  Colette and one other friend were the last real friends that I ever had.  And that's why I still think of her.

Being Myself, Alone & With Others

 Last night, because I was feeling rather miserable with a cold I picked up last week, I watched a comforting film, "Pride & Prejudice" the latest version with Keira Knightley.  It had a good cast and was lushly filmed and I've watched it maybe three times so far.  Each time I was crying by the end.  I thought this time maybe I wouldn't cry, but I did.  I'm a sucker for old fashioned romance.  Despite all I've been through with romantic delusions, I still want to believe that two people can come together and be "right" for each other.  I did think that perhaps I was getting a bit too old for all of this.  I'll be 50 next spring and I'm way past believing that I will find a romantic partner.  I don't rule it out completely, but, for now, I am content to be single.

There's an interesting freedom in being a middle aged and obese woman.  There was a time in my early 40s when I wouldn't have said that, a time when looking in the mirror meant instant depression and shame.   My feminine vanity had been wounded, not only because of weight gain due to taking the anti-psychotic medications, but because I had reached middle age and was starting to show it.  Only a few years earlier, I had been attractive, but now I was ordinary.  I had to readjust.  Early in my acute psychosis I was the heroine in my delusion.  I thought real people were paying attention to me, following me, interested in what I had to say.  At first, that was exciting, but ultimately, it was a burden.  The trade off in entering recovery when I began to take the medications was that I was no longer the star of my story.  I was deeply humbled.  I got into the habit of calling myself "fat and ugly".  That sounds worse than it was because gradually I came to accept and like myself in my new state.  I was alive, relatively sane, and compared to the years of acute psychosis, comparatively content.  Gratitude played an important part in my continuing recovery from an illness that, not so long ago, was deemed so severe as to be hopeless.  I didn't feel hopeless anymore.  What I valued more than my looks was my creative intelligence and my ability to survive something so horrible.  It wasn't absolutely necessary for me to be with someone in order to have a meaningful life.  I didn't have to be a wife or a mother; I could just be myself.

Living a solitary life is okay by me as long as I continue to have outside connections to my family and a few friends.  A few months back an old friend that I found on Facebook asked if we could start to talk on the phone.  Since I got sick, I've been nervous about using the phone, but I really wanted to get closer to this friend while overcoming my aversion.  And so we've been calling each other once a week for a while now.  It's been great.  My friend, who I'll call Rita, is presently single and never had children and this is a bond between us.  I also remember her when she was a little girl and young teenager.  I feel so comfortable with her that she's like family and I tell her this.  I tell her I love her.  It's easy to love her because she's been nothing but supportive of me right from the start of our renewed friendship.  I find myself looking forward to years more of friendship with her.  Committing to our connection is a responsibility I want to step up to.  She gives me a much needed link to my past  and this makes me feel more whole within myself.  For years, while living with my abusive boyfriend, I denied that I had a past in New York City because my boyfriend was so insecure about it.  Now, years after the abuse and years after the acute psychosis, I can reclaim my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood all through knowing Rita again.  Thank you Rita.  I would tell the story of Rita, but she's a very private person.  Maybe sometime in the future she'll give me permission to write about the successes and challenges in her life.

I've recently made a new friend who actually lives nearby.  This is another serious breakthrough for me, one that's got me excited.  This new friend, who I'll call Sam, I've been wanting to get close to for several years.  In the beginning of the summer I bit the bullet and asked for her address so that I could start to write to her and she agreed.  She's a good friend of my brothers and he told me that she is a writer, so I thought we could both get to know each other and bond through our mutual love of writing.   That's just what we've done.  On top of that she came to visit me a month ago.  Virtually no one visits me which is why my house gets messy and I feel disconnected from others a lot.  So I cleaned up the house and welcomed her inside.  Sam is close to 60 and quite poor, but she's also a rugged individualist.  She lives in an old trailer with a wood stove and no running water (her water pump broke a while back and she hasn't had the money to fix it).  On her land, which she bought about a decade ago, she has a large pond and has cultivated a substantial garden.  She relies on her garden for a lot of her food most of the year and spends a good chunk of her time taking care of it.  When she's not working in her garden, she's working in town at a local restaurant and bar three nights a week.  When she's not doing that she's either visiting her close circle of friends or writing.  Last winter she wrote a novel.  During our visit she asked me if I'd like to read it.  Right away I said yes.  She said she'd get me a copy the next time we met.

In the interim I wrote to her and asked if I could visit her and a week and a half ago I did.  It was the first snow of the season, but luckily it wasn't sticking to the roads and I found her place with relative ease.  Her driveway is 1/4 mile long, which is good because one, it gives her privacy and two, it keeps her three cats away from the main road.  It's also bad because each winter season she gets snowed in several times.  She has a friend who sometimes plows her out, but I'm hoping she'll let me pay to help her with that this winter, mainly so she can get to work and to the store when she needs it.  She greeted me at the door of her trailer and welcomed me inside.  She had already stoked her 100 year old wood stove, so the trailer was nice a cosy.  She got me a cup of coffee and one for herself and we sat down in front of the wood stove and talked for over an hour.  I felt very comfortable sitting there with her.  She told me about the photographs of family and friends that she had tacked on a nearby wall and she showed me the contents of a small medicine bag where she kept precious items like a nearly perfect arrowhead that she had found in the clay dirt of her garden and a black, petrified shark's tooth that she had picked up on a beach in Florida.  She then showed me her pond and garden and I helped her bring into her trailer some garlic and potatoes that she had grown.  With the fresh fallen snow on the trees and on the grass her property looked lovely and I found myself already looking forward to next spring when the garden would start growing again.  I even imagined myself helping her in the garden.  At the end of the visit Sam placed her novel in a bag along with some garlic, potatoes, onions, a squash and two glass containers, one filled with homemade applesauce and one with chopped up peaches.

I read her novel within 24 hours, waited a day and then read it again.  It was very good!  I felt proud of her for writing it and doing such a good job and soon wrote another letter telling her so.  Her example has inspired me to start an autobiographical novel.  For the last two years I've wanted to write a memoir, but I kept getting stuck.  Memoirs that are "creative" nonfiction are very popular these days.  What makes them creative is that the authors write using the techniques of fiction: narration, scenes, dialogue, character studies, etc....  I found myself resisting some of those techniques, especially scenes with dialogues, because it didn't ring true for me.  I couldn't honestly remember conversations from 30 years ago or more.  Also, I didn't know how to narrow down my subject and began tackling incidents from my whole life, making a mess and not having a focus.  But I'm finding that fictionalizing my family and my past has given me more freedom to explore my personal history while taking some pressure off me about writing "the truth".  In this novel, I can learn the techniques that I was resisting when I was working on a memoir.  Until now, I've made some half hearted attempts to write several short stories, which I would like to continue doing, but I never ever approached the idea of writing a novel.  I needed Sam's example to give me a little push in that direction.

Part of being myself has been writing in a journal.  This blog, though I've been neglecting it of late, has also been important to me by giving me room to practice before a small audience.  I think it's time for a change here.  I need to write more, not less.  I've tried backing away from this blog, but it doesn't feel right and quite frankly, I need the practice not only of writing, but of sharing my writing, putting it outside of myself.  I'd like to include fiction and poetry mainly because I rarely share them and could use some constructive feedback.  I don't know if I'll have the discipline to write here several times a week, but I want to try again.  I need to take the pressure off myself sometimes by writing short entries as well as longer ones.  Let's see if I have the courage to change my approach the way I'm beginning to have the courage to reach out and foster friendships.