I GREW UP in the humid heat of Alabama’s Gulf Coast. My family would run the air conditioner on Christmas Day so we could use the fireplace. In a landscape devoid of snow, where all you needed to get through the coldest months of the year was a windbreaker, winter took on a magical mythology. I dreamed of sleds and bright woolen mittens, a fat snowman guarding the lawn.
When I was 7, on a family trip to Gatlinburg, Tenn., I saw snow for the first time. What startled me most was the clean, bright smell and the crunching sound beneath my sneakers when I plunged my feet into a snow bank. The cold felt like a great adventure.
In 1997, I moved to New York City. The first snow of the winter filled me with awe. I loved the hush it brought to the noisy city, the way it made everything look sparkling and pristine. But when the snow turned black and piled up along the curbs and the wind bit my face, the romance soured. While I enjoy the cold, I decided I like it best in small doses. So I moved to San Francisco, where the summers are notoriously cold and winter brings occasional sun and frequent rain, never snow.
A Few Things I’d Tell Myself, If I Could Go Back in Time
[aesop_image imgwidth=”70%” img=”https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*XLmcXfNNFlaZwp9-D3_Y_Q.jpeg” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Somewhere in Vermont, sometime in the 90s, a few years past the age of 22″ captionposition=”center”]
If I were 22, I’d tell myself that all of those journals I painstakingly kept, scribbling away with colored pens while Enya’s voice spilled out of the boom box, would just end up gathering dust. I’d advise myself to get on with the business of writing fiction instead. I’d tell myself to study some really good stories, like the works of Grace Paley, instead of wallowing in Anais Nin, who always made me feel as though I was not having quite enough sex (although, in retrospect, I was probably having plenty).
A record of one’s days is relentlessly and uselessly Jungian, while a pile of unpublished stories is an education, an apprenticeship, a step in the right direction. I’d tell myself that the sentences I thought were so pretty, with all the linguistic flourishes, were actually just really long. I’d tell myself that there would come a time when I would prefer Steve Forbert to Enya, In n’ Out to Wendy’s, Ismail Kadare to Anais Nin. I’d tell myself that the only passions of my youth that I would still be passionate about in middle age would be solitude, books, and writing.
I’d tell myself that the apartment that came with my internship with Whittle Communications in Knoxville, Tennessee, would be the last free apartment I’d ever have, so I ought to enjoy the two bedrooms, large kitchen, and brand new furniture, none of which I had to share. I’d tell myself that when I did start sharing an apartment, with a fellow former intern at a subsidized housing complex across the street from a police station, I should keep it cleaner. I should make greater effort to spend time with my roommate, a nice girl from Ohio, who was a lot of fun.
[aesop_quote type=”pull” background=”#848484″ text=”#848484″ width=”content” align=”center” size=”2″ quote=”I would tell myself that I would never outgrow my intense need for solitude.” parallax=”off” direction=”left”]
My desire to be quiet and alone, punctuated by brief bouts of longing for conversations with strangers, would never waver. I’d say, “When you were 11 years old, you preferred to be alone. Now, at 22, you prefer to be alone. When you are twice as old as you are now, you will still prefer to be alone. Not existentially alone, not alone in life, but alone in the moment. It is your nature; embrace it. Don’t feel the need to go out just because young people ‘go out.’ If you want to stay home and write, stay home and write. There is nothing wrong with that.”
[aesop_quote type=”pull” background=”#282828″ text=”#848484″ align=”center” size=”2″ quote=”I might say, “Less makeup. More sunscreen.” And “Cable-access news is on its way out, faster than you can say pleated jeans.”” parallax=”on” direction=”left”]
I’d tell myself not to worry, that I would not always be poor and uninsured, that I would not always have to pay for necessary surgical procedures on my Visa card or agonize over the purchase of a pair of shoes from Payless. I’d tell myself that the cheap shoes, like the credit card surgery and the tanning salon job that paid $5 an hour and the cable-access news job that paid nothing, were minor bumps on the way to a more comfortable existence.
Oh, I’d tell myself to stop after the third beer and the second shot. Definitely, I’d probably tell myself that.
When the elderly gynecologist patted me on the knee suggestively and whispered that I had a pretty cervix, I would assert that I had every right to slap him. There were a lot of people I should have slapped in those days, but, having been raised in a Southern Baptist church where teenaged girls were referred to as “righteous foxes,” I was conditioned to graciously accept shady compliments from men in positions of authority.
I’d tell myself to end the engagement to the sociopath sooner, and to be kinder to the next fellow, who was and is a very good man. I’d tell myself that the sociopath and the very good man would both soon be a matter of history, anyway, because in a couple of years I would walk into a stuffy classroom in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on the first day of my MFA program, and meet my life head on. I’d tell myself that this would be a good time to forgo the small talk and quote Grace Paley instead: “Hello, My Life.”
I’d tell myself to keep the shoes and the dress I wore on that irreversibly significant day, and to throw away a lot of other stuff, instead of carrying it with me from apartment to apartment, house to house, for many years, watching it expand, sponge-like, to fit whatever space I lived in.
That the shortest decade I would ever experience would be the one between my son’s birth and his tenth birthday. That on a spring day in 2015, the boy who once felt as light in my arms as a loaf of bread would look up at me and say, “I bet I can pick you up.” And then he would pick me up. And I would realize that the next decade would move even faster than the last, and I better hang on and practice “being in the moment,” a skill for which there would one day be many helpful apps.
Braum’s Ice Cream in Fayetteville, 1995; wedding in Yosemite, 2001; San Francisco, 2004; Little League, 2015
“What are apps?” my 22 year old self would surely ask. To which I would reply, “I really can’t explain it.”
[aesop_quote type=”block” background=”#282828″ text=”#848484″ align=”center” size=”2″ quote=”I’d tell myself that the next twenty years would be okay. That all the places I couldn’t imagine going, I’d eventually get to.” parallax=”off” direction=”left”]
I’d tell myself that I would work in Beijing, and I would work in the Empire State Building, and I’d see the Northern Lights in Iceland, and I’d ride a bus through Patagonia to Ushuaia, the town “at the end of the world,” that I’d honeymoon in Budapest and take my kid swimming in Oslo’s public baths during a startlingly warm Norwegian summer, that I’d get lost on a mountain in a thunderstorm in Slovenia and be rescued by a troop of young boys who, many years later, would find me on a thing called Facebook, which was on a thing called the Internet, which predated those things called apps.
I’d tell myself not to lose the photograph my boyfriend took of me with my parents on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty in 1999, the last photo of the three of us together. In a few months my parents would be divorced, my boyfriend would be my betrothed, and we’d be on our way to San Francisco, the city of my dreams. In the photo, my parents, who have not yet told me about their plans to end their thirty-year marriage, stand on either side of me, and in the background, the Twin Towers rise up, so ugly and imposing, and yet, it seemed, so reassuringly permanent.
[aesop_quote type=”pull” background=”#282828″ text=”#848484″ align=”center” size=”2″ quote=”If I were 22, I’d say, “Don’t worry, you’ll keep writing.” ” parallax=”on” direction=”left”]
Because the need to write would never go away, and through every bump in the road that desire would keep me going. It would always be what I came back to, my parachute in case of tragedy, my planned soft landing. Well, if A, B, or C happens, at least I can write about it. Though, deep down, I understood that, in the face of real tragedy, it was quite possible that I would cease to write. Because words can only take you so far. Because there is such a thing as the unspeakable.
More optimistically, I’d remind myself that I was young: at 22, I couldn’t wrap my mind around that fact. At 22, I believed my time was very short, that I must do and experience everything as soon as possible. I’d tell myself that, one day, life would indeed be short, but for now, the road ahead was long and meandering, and scary and sometimes dangerous, and often not very easy, and yet, mostly wonderful. I would tell myself that the next twenty years would bring more happiness than I expected, less turmoil than I feared, and, blessing of blessings, nothing I couldn’t handle. I’d tell myself to stop worrying so much, and just get on with the ride.
This post was inspired by the #IfIWere22 tag on linkedin.
5 Truths About Writing I Wish I’d Known 20 Years Ago
Last week, I visited California College of the Arts to talk to the current crop of MFA candidates about writing and publishing. I taught at CCA for several years, several years ago, but somewhere along the line I quit teaching in order to spend more time writing. I always enjoyed teaching, though, and it was good to be back there, talking to students who are at the stage I was almost twenty years ago, and who have most of the same concerns that I had at that age.
I hadn’t really prepared anything for my talk, because when you’ve been writing for as long as I have, there’s nothing easier to talk about than writing. It’s like asking a chef to talk about food. Somewhere along the line, it comes naturally. More naturally, probably, than even the writing itself, which has its good days and its bad days. Some days, writing is like drinking water; it feels completely natural. Some days, it’s like drinking lighter fluid; it feels not only unnatural, but also painful.
I asked the students what they wanted to hear about. Were they interested in the publishing world? They were. I talked a bit about that—how it was when I was coming up, and how it’s changed, and why it’s still important to have both a trusted agent and a trusted reader. The conversation veered a bit, and I find myself sounding something like an old-timer, giving the “what I wish I’d known back then” talk. It wasn’t a talk I’d given before, but it just sort of started to roll off of my tongue, because what the students really wanted to know about was the writing life: how to do it, and how to sustain it, and if it was possible, and how.
The why, they didn’t really need to know, because if they did, they wouldn’t be pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. The why for any writer comes down to this: if you’re not writing, you’re not happy. Therefore, you write. Of course, that reasoning implies that writing will always make you happy. For many people, that’s not true at all. What I should say is: when you’re not writing, you’re not fulfilled. That’s better. Want to know if you are really and truly a writer? When you go long periods without writing, you feel a bit empty. When you write well, or at least productively, you feel fulfilled, and often, if you’re lucky, even happy.
Thank you for bearing with me. It’s been, I realize, a long and meandering path so far. But that’s what the writing life is like, and that’s why we’re lucky, and that’s the first thing I wish I’d known about writing twenty years ago: (click Read More to continue to WRITING TRUTH NUMBER 1)…
For today’s writers on writing segment, I thought I’d share a video about how I became a writer. Hint: it has something to do with a hound dog hatching from an egg.
