Writer's Evolution
I have been wearing my hair in a ponytail for about 13 years. Well, give or take 1-2 days a year when it’s down for a special occasion. The few occasions that called for such drastic measures included Christmas Eve, Easter Sunday, and my Confirmation in 9th grade into the Catholic church. I did not wear it down for birthdays, when the thought of all eyes on me was itself enough to make me want to hide away. I did not wear it down for my grandmother’s funeral, where I knew family members would approach me with their condolences and where I knew I would cry during the church service. If asked why I did not wear my hair down more often, I would reply that I just did not like the way it looked, or I’d say it got in the way, or I’d joke that I was just lazy. All of these things, while true, were not the real reason why my hair stayed up, tied behind me, neglected. The truth was, when I wore it down, I sported an elastic band on my wrist in case it got in the way too much. No matter who spent hours cutting or styling or primping my hair with enthusiasm and reassurance, I knew I still would not like it in the end.
Somewhere between 8 and 10 years old, I was in the living room with my parents. Shoulder-length brown hair, probably windblown and curled at the ends from a long day in the backyard, sitting around on top of the monkey bars with the pink and orange and white striped notebook.
Your hair looks like Jesus', someone remarked with a laugh.
13 years later, I don’t remember who said what or how I reacted. Yet I recall so often that this moment happened, so often in fact that I’m not entirely sure anymore that it did. But I treat it as a fact of my past because I have been wearing my hair in a ponytail for 13 years, starting from the moment someone smirked, “Jesus.”
I take myself too seriously, I know. I am just afraid – of looking bad, of feeling like I look bad, and of the smiting judgement that I imagine will come from some external source should others feel that I look bad. I don’t like when my hair falls in my face as I’m trying to work, or when the wind sabotages it, or when it rains and any effort I’d made was all for nothing. Is it a crime to want to have that control?
I make light of it when I can. My hairdresser, who knows my Jesus story, tells me to have a blessed day as she unpins the smock from around my neck with a flourish and a wide grin. Jaime is late twenties, blonde with small streaks of shiny brown, chopped above the shoulders and styled just enough to make it look effortless. She has a nose ring. Go in peace, I tell her, and we laugh. I leave, keep the windows rolled up, pick at my hair the whole way home, softer than usual, doesn’t smell like me – good.
I was out in the backyard on the monkey bars before the Jesus moment. That was the place where I made up some of my favorite daydreams. It wasn’t even the perfect spot – it was a pain to climb up to and get situated in a sturdy position, I was easily made chilly by the wind, and there was always the occasional spider that just ruined the whole experience. But somehow, that’s where I managed to dream up a story.
I wrote fictional stories with chapters and dialogue, things that let me imagine how my life could be. Not fantasy, exactly. More real. I would bring my notebook to the backyard, position myself on top of the monkey bars, 12 feet above the ground, untouchable. A strategically defensive position. I wanted to work on a horse ranch and take care of all the horses. I wanted to leave home in the middle of the night, survive in the woods alone. I wanted to take off from the planet entirely, blast off into outer space. So I wrote.
I found it. The key to my plan. It was a sign up sheet for the 1st kid to experience the so called glories of space. I read:
ONE LUCKY CHILD WILL BE ABLE TO EXPERIENCE THE
THRILL OF A LIFETIME. LED BY HIGHLY TRAINED AND
EXPERIENCED ASTRONAUGHTS.
THE WINNER WILL BE ANNOUNCED TODAY AT 9:30 ON
THE RADIO (99.5)
[BLAST OFF IN 5 MONTHS]
I look at this now, about 13 years later, and am overcome with the sense of nostalgia that is always both happy and sad at the same time. It’s embarrassing, but cute. I am highly critical even of my second grade self for thinking up such a silly story and somehow finding it worthy enough to write down. But the eraser marks on the lined notebook sheet make me laugh – because clearly I thought 4 months was too little time to prepare kids to travel into space, so I generously changed it to 5. Because the winner of the contest was to be announced on the radio channel 99.5 – the country music station where I’m from. And because, while my actual place of escape was freezing my ass off on top of the monkey bars, just me and the spiders 12 feet above the ground, I wrote about a universe where not only one, but four parents willingly consented to their kids entering a contest to be blasted into space 5 months later.
At some point within the years of writing stories, something changed. Maybe not all at once, but it did. Maybe it was a consequence of growing up, more of my time dominated by classes and homework, being told to write essays instead of stories, and being told about what was right and what was very wrong. A Jesus moment. I don’t at all remember what happened, or when, but I have to believe it – whatever it is – is the reason why today I am so desperately afraid of writing. Usually it’s in the evening after a particularly trying attempt at writing that I remember the spot on the top of the monkey bars back home, the swing set that my dad built by hand in our back yard. He tore it down 2 years ago.
That’s what they don’t tell you about anxiety: it’s about control. Whether it’s the everyday stresses – the type of anxiety that people most often refer to – or the more serious stuff, every permutation of the disease stems from a need for control. Earlier in my life, it was most often the things that were beyond my control that I worried the most about – like whether my job application would be accepted, or if the audience would be unforgiving when I made the high school graduation speech. And while I made that speech with shaking legs and a dry mouth, I realized that my onstage afraid-ness was the very thing I had been afraid of.
I felt (and feel) this anxiety even while writing about anxiety. What if I don’t explain it right, and someone gets it all wrong? That means they would get me wrong. And if thirty years from now I read that essay about anxiety and shake my head at my own terrible misrepresentation, I will be afraid that I missed the chance to say something true and important. I will know that I betrayed myself.
Once my thoughts enter a space where others can read and interpret them, I am completely vulnerable. I have no control over how readers interpret my writing. Even when I write something just for myself, never to be seen by outside eyes, a certain intense paranoia builds up – like a weird feeling of never really being alone, like someone will come across a journal shoved in the back of my bookshelf and, uninvited, bring on the judgement and smiting.
And then there’s the teacher, whose red pen can’t wait to quantify his judgement of my work, who will inevitably take my thoughts, feelings, and very self from the page and reduce it all to one number, and me along with it. Or the audience who is reading, poised with a scale from one to ten. Three stars? Four stars? God forbid five. That person has no stake at all in my success or failure. I have given a part of my life and of myself to this essay. Who can tell if she will even read it, or understand it, or just finish it and shrug? Who can tell if he will think it – me – intelligent, talented, and original?
I feel this anxiety as I write, and I wonder about the outcome before I’ve finished. The experience of writing about anxiety was paradoxically painful and comforting. Without writing, my brain would twist me in circles until I made myself a nice, miserable hole to live in, alone with my thoughts, going slowly insane. With writing, I’m a little less insane; I have therapy and release, so my brain doesn’t get too wound up, and the feeling of being afraid is less than the empowerment of allowing myself to exist in fear and to survive in spite of it.
Still, this fear means I often don’t give my words a chance to exist before I begin to self-edit. At the same time my mind attempts to translate thoughts into type, it begins translating the type into something presentable. My brain undertakes the impossible chore of editing something that hasn’t been written. I primp the life out of my sentences and inflate the text with attempted perfectionism or, at the very least, pretentiousness.
In answer to your question, it is my opinion that phenomenological theory emphasizes the effect of literature on a particular reader, and it is this effect that helps us recognize how literature itself is unique and deserving of our attention. In other words, our reasons for studying books and their history lie with the undisputed fact that books have been important to people in many different ways throughout history.
The words can become over-complicated to such a degree that I feel the need to say the same idea in two different sentences. They rely heavily upon impression and say so little in so very many words. If I had been reading this – well, I wouldn’t want to. What was meant to be meaningful and intelligent has become annoying and long-winded. My self-consciousness has won.
The process of self-editing while writing is like imagining an out-of-body experience. At the same time as I undergo the process of writing, part of my mind wanders elsewhere – specifically, to someplace in the future. My mind visualizes the potential negative effects or responses to what I am doing. This dual state of mind is where I do all my writing. I have no control over how a reader will react to my work. I have control over the various authorial decisions that will effect his reaction, but I cannot control the reaction itself. I have no control over how worthy my teacher will find my paper, but I can monitor how much time and effort I put into it, which means that I will be anxiously typing away until the due date, just trying to control.
When it comes to others' writing, I have no problem. I have complete control over the words, grammar, and sentences. I can form my readerly opinion without a problem, and I am comfortable offering suggestions for improvement. I have no problem cutting my boyfriend's hair for him.
So it is not in revision that I have control problems - well, it is, but not to such a debilitating degree. The revision process presents me with a finite, concrete collection of words. Like doing a puzzle, I can move those words around, change sentences and add more ideas to one that's already there. I can be an objective reader, because this is the stage in writing where those voices in my head can actually become useful.
I cannot find a way to put those voices in a jar, as Anne Lamott would have me do. Or, maybe it isn’t that I cannot, but that I refuse to. The paradoxical comfort of fear and anxiety, and of those voices who bare harsh criticism and demand a perfection that I know does not exist but that I drag myself toward anyways, keep me writing. I can’t tell if wearing my hair up all the time means I’m prone to fewer bad hair days, or if, because it is up all the time, every day is a bad hair day. As much as I know writing produces anxiety, it also helps me exorcise it from my body. Without the anxiety, I don’t know that I would write at all. I don’t bottle up the fear and anxiety because part of me thinks they are useful, like a safety net. Or a hair tie.