One

Recently someone clicked a link to this blog and became my 2,000^th reader this year.  For some reason the difference between 1,999 and 2,000 seems significant.  Everything adds up but sometimes one person makes a big difference – that is the point I want to try to make here.

When I was eighteen years old, in my second semester at Loyola University, where I was diligently trying to be an international studies major, I would write short personal essays and post them on Facebook.  I knew several of my friends read them and I figured that a couple other Facebook acquaintances might be reading them as well.  Writing these little essays was almost always the most fulfilling part of my week and almost always occurred when I was supposed to be doing something that was practical and that I found miserable – like studying the philosophy of logic.  

In January of that school year I wrote and posted an essay about how I felt like most of life was about waiting – waiting for class to end, waiting for the work day to be over, waiting for the right time to say the right thing, waiting to be free to truly live.  At that point I was daily looking ahead at the direction my life seemed to be headed in and seeing nothing but days and years through which I would have to patiently wait until I arrived at some vague and distant point in the future when I could start being happy.  And what I mean is that I wanted to write but it didn’t seem like a practical thing to do with my life so I was waiting to do what made me happy and was instead doing what made socially acceptable sense.

It turned out that one of my professors was one the Facebook acquaintances reading my essays.  I found this out when I received a message from him in response to the essay I had written about waiting.  He advised me to live for myself, not for society.  And while that was good advice that I think most people learn to be true on their own in time, it was an offhanded closing remark he made that changed everything.  He wrote, “If you ever stop writing, you’ll be doing yourself and all who read you a disservice.  Really.”

That was the first time that someone made me feel like my writing mattered.  And that is important because if I believe that something matters I will pursue it with all my heart.  And so I did.  I left Loyola and started studying writing.  And for the first time in my life I was no longer waiting for happiness to begin; I was living it every day.  Three years later I am in New York City getting my MFA in Creative Writing.  And while it may have taken a lot of work and the support of various people along the way, I can tell you that that one Facebook message from my professor made a difference.  One person can change everything.

There is a writing exercise that I often do which involves making a list entitled “Things I’ve Been Told.”  The things that appear on this list are an example of how everything adds up but one person can make all the difference – one person can change everything.   

A high school classmate once told me, “Molly, you’re too smart for a boyfriend.”

My first boyfriend once told me, “Sex with you didn’t mean anything.  It could have been anyone.”

My most recent ex-boyfriend told me he broke up with me because sex with me was “too emotionally loaded” because he felt “too much pressure, considering [my] history.”  The history he was referring to was that I had been raped.

These things add up in the worst way.  Such people take a toll. 

Then one night I found myself in bed with someone new.  He was kissing my shoulder and then he was kissing my lips and then when I opened my eyes and saw him looking back into mine, smiling, I had to fight back tears.  Suddenly, as his gaze held mine, I was realizing that this was the first time I’d ever seen someone look me in the eyes during sex. 

Things add up and I wish now that I could take back the choices I made to have sex with the men that I did.  I wish I didn’t remember the way they told me to keep my eyes closed or the way I would open my eyes and see them looking at anything but my face.  And it is not even that I thought I didn’t deserve any better.  It’s just that I didn’t think anyone better existed.  Now I know better. 

I have a habit of telling people about a line from an essay I was assigned to read in my very first nonfiction writing workshop I took three years ago.  I can’t now remember what the essay was called or who wrote it but I can never forget that the line made the claim that people fall in love at the moment when their life is terrorized with possibilities.  The idea was that people don’t like choices and falling in love enables them to believe that love and the life they lead when they’re in it is not a choice but is simply inevitable.  People don’t want to believe in “the many;” they want to believe in “the one.”

I don’t know why I always make a point of telling people about this essay.  I don’t even particularly agree with what it says.  The most recent time I told someone about this essay was this past Monday.  The discussion of the essay led to a discussion on whether or not either of us believed in “the one.”  Neither of us did.  I said that I think that each person in the world probably has five or ten people who could be equally right for them, that in the end it is just a matter of timing.  He replied that he thought there was probably 500,000 people in the world who could be right for any one person, that it’s just a matter of how many of them one can meet and when. 

Now that I’ve written this blog entry I realize that I no longer agree with I said just this past Monday – and maybe I didn’t even really agree with it then.  Mark Twain wrote that “Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is obliged to stick to the possibilities.”  Maybe the strange truth is that there is one right person out of all the possibilities. 

Each of our lives is an ever-expanding collection of people and experiences, all adding up to make us who we are, but sometimes it only takes one person to change everything – or even just change one very important thing.  One person to tell us we matter.  One person to look at us and see us for us for who we really are and not look away.  Out of all the possible people one can meet in the world, I think I am lucky to have met a couple good ones.  And as one person out of all the many people in world, I feel lucky to have people read the writing I post on this blog more than 2,000 times this year.  And even if there really are 500,000 right people for me in the world, I think the point is that I would be wonderfully lucky to meet just one. 

How many loved your moments of glad grace

We become each other’s stories.  Family is the story we inherit, but everyone else…  They are the stories told to us, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we retell until they are no longer a person at all but an anecdote demonstrating who we were and who we’ve become.

And now here’s a story:

When I drink a martini it’s because I like the way the glass feels against my lips.  When the martini glass sits on the bar in front of me I like to run my finger up and down its slender stem because this single movement makes my boredom feel beautiful.  And when I pull my small notebook out of my purse and start making notes in it while my friends maintain a light but steady flow of conversation between each other, it is because I am dramatically discontented in the present moment and concerned that most of life will be like this from here on out – mostly mundane. 

It was my fifth night of my new life in New York City.  My lips kissed the rim of my second French martini as I watched the bartender.  He was short and dark and not very good at his job.  He seemed happily average at all things and oddly confident that either one of my friends or myself would join him for some late night Mexican food once he finished his shift.  I would join him, but not because he interested me – only because anyone who had ever interested me was long gone and I felt that I was getting too old to keep passing up the chance to go out and see if someone I deemed boring upon first impression could pleasantly surprise me.

I was in what my friends had told me was a “trendy” jazz bar in the West Village and I was dressed in a little black dress and new patent leather heels and cascading vintage jewelry, all of which I had had no use for all summer.  Nevertheless, the night felt worse than a night of eight dollar wine bottles and iTunes dancing on kitchen floors in Chicago and small-town Wisconsin.  It was worse because no one else seemed to understand that it could be anything less than wonderful.  Somehow the sheer fact that it was a jazz bar in the West Village was supposed to be enough to ensure happiness.  At least with my family and with my best of friends, when I said that I was worried that this was as good as it gets, they would all nod in agreement because our hearts all beat upon the same artistically, temperamental, terror drum. 

Between saying “goodnight” to my friends and meeting up with the bartender I wandered the streets of the West Village.  It was late and they were empty but brightened by the glow that spilled forth from the windows of big brownstone houses and white brick apartments.  On a street corner, between a large pile of garbage and a sleeping homeless man, I texted my brother and one of the most interesting people I know.  I asked them each if they thought that most people were secretly as lonely and discontent as I was.  They each replied that they did.  And we all agreed that most people are just better at faking it than I am.

So I put on a smile and spent the early morning hours listening to the bartender tell me about himself.  He also told me what food to order and what beer to drink.  And I told myself that he would, at least, make a good story about my first week in New York. 

As it turns out, he doesn’t make a very good story.  The only good story here is that when I walked alone into my apartment that morning I was pleased to prove yet again that I am no longer the person I was ten months ago, fingering my martini glass and going home with a boyfriend I hated just to pass the time.  Now when I feel bored with life and everyone around me, I have the small comfort that I am not alone in this feeling.  And I have the even greater comfort of knowing that I did once find a place filled with people with whom I never felt bored or discontented -- with whom time was not a tedious thing but a delightfully graceless dance that we wove together through songs and smiles and stolen kisses upon a kitchen floor.

And so sometimes I am the kind of woman who orders a martini because she likes the way the glass feels as it receives her lips’ cool kiss.  But always, in my heart of hearts, I am the woman – the girl, the happiest – dancing on that kitchen floor. 

Remember how I wrote before that we become each other’s stories?  The bartender became just one more story that brings me back to my favorite one to tell.

*The title of this post is taken from a line in the W.B. Yeats poem, "When You Are Old."

Hello to All That

New York began for me on Sunday, the nineteenth of August.  As my plane began its descent into LaGuardia airport I looked out my window for views of a glittering skyline or the Statue of Liberty.  Instead I saw muddy brown waters and brown buildings, gray roads and a sad, gray sky.  When my plane had left Chicago that morning I had watched the skyline tower and shine in the hazy silver morning mist, keeping my eyes on the city until the very last skyscraper was out of sight, as if I was taking a last look at a one-time love – and I was.

I spent the duration of the flight writing about Chicago, crying quietly behind my dark sunglasses, and rereading my favorite Joan Didion essay, “Goodbye to All That.”  I had read “Goodbye to All That” almost every night this summer and on almost every flight I had taken during my travels around Europe this past spring.  The first time I read “Goodbye to All That” was a year and a half ago on an April afternoon in Chicago, as I sat at my favorite spot at the Diversey harbor and stared south at the downtown skyline while wind blew from the lake to my hair, tangling it more terribly than sex or swimming. 

That was the year – my twenty first, like Joan Didion’s twenty eighth – in which, like Joan Didion had done before me, “I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”  Joan Didion learned that lesson in New York.  I learned it in Chicago.  Ever since that April day I had clung to that essay and to the idea of Joan Didion as proof that my experience of coming to a city – in my case, Chicago – and falling in love with it as deeply as I had ever been in love with a person was not entirely unusual and the tears I had cried when sitting at the harbor were not the only tears in the world to be shed over the betrayals of the hopeful-hearted promises of first love.  I grew to quote Joan Didion – all of her writing, not just “Goodbye to All That” – the way some people quote the Bible.  Slouching Towards Bethlehem, my favorite of her essay collections, even came with me to every country I traveled to. 

So when my taxi driver took me over a bridge on my way from LaGuardia to my New York City residence, I asked him the name of the bridge.  And when he said it was the Triborough I smiled and made a note to write about how I had rode over the same bridge that Joan Didion had rode over when she first came to New York.  And then, five days later, I had stood atop a subway grating on Lexington Avenue, feeling the hot, wet air climb up my bare legs from the cracks in the grate and noting the comingling scents of rotting garbage and Chanel perfume.  And I had been surprised to see that even in 2012 it was still possible to buy a peach from a street vendor as Didion had done in the sixties.  And I had thought of how she had written that it was during just such a moment that she knew she had “reached the mirage” – that she had made it.  And then I thought about how I did not feel that way.  I had felt that way in Chicago – and, to some extent, in London and Paris too – but New York was just another place to me. 

In particular, that first Sunday I arrived New York was not even a place but a sad, gray, misremembered embodiment of all other places I had been before.  I had wandered from my residence to a street lined with open-air shops and vendors.  Somehow, something I had read before informed me that this was the Fulton Street Market and I had looked at it as if from a distance even as excited tourists bumped up against me, for I was not seeing this market so much as I was seeing London’s Portobello and Camden markets. 

I walked on Fulton until I came to the South Street Sea Port, a place of cobblestones and life-size pirate ships, acrobats and storefronts that looked like London.  And as crowds merged and swirled around me I felt lost and alone even though I knew exactly where I was and even though I knew that while I missed many of the places I had been, I had yet to find a place or a person in any of those places who truly fit me.

From there I did the only thing I could think to do – I put on the big, dark sunglasses that I had purchased the previous summer so that I could look like the picture of Joan Didon from the cover of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and I walked to the Tiffany’s I had passed on my taxi ride earlier that day.  That was the other thing about being in New York – it didn’t feel like mine, nor did it initially feel like a place that I could be.  It felt like it belonged to the tourists of the world and to all of the writers and singers and movie characters who had existed there before me.  Joan Didion, Woody Allen, Truman Capote, and all the rest had lived and articulated New York so well that it seemed to me that my presence in it and my words on the subject were utterly unnecessary.  So I stood outside of Tiffany’s experiencing what Holly Golightly had called “the mean reds” because I was afraid of something so big that I didn’t even have the words with which to say what it was.

For the first couple days I moved about New York not in youthful or touristy awe but in the practiced irritation of someone who has lived and worked and loved in a city, someone who has run to catch a train and missed it and showed up late for drinks with a friend and been overly bothered by the inconvenience of the whole thing because it had been raining all day and the wind had blown their umbrella inside out.

But New York did begin to endear itself to me, though not in the way Chicago had.  With Chicago I had fallen head over heels in love at first sight.  I have loved the hot pavement of State Street in the summer and the lights of Michigan Avenue in the winter, and the route that the 146 express bus took down Lake Shore Drive.  I had loved Chicago the way I had loved a boy for the first time – not because this particular place was the right one for me, but because it was the first place to ever even come close.

With New York I sense myself slowing slipping into the kind of love that is real and grounded in common interests and understanding and that can thus withstand the tests of time.  This began on a Tuesday night in Brooklyn.  I had taken myself to see the latest Woody Allen film, To Rome With Love, and I had then wandered into a small bookstore.  The movie was everything I loved about a Woody Allen film and I had been glad to be able to enjoy it without the extraneous company of a lackluster date or a shallow but well-meaning friend.  And then, inside the bookstore, I found on the shelves every title and author that had carried me from my childhood home in Platteville, Wisconsin to that very moment.  And I stood talking with the man behind the register about his travels in Turkey and my travels in Turkey, his travels in Scotland and my travels in Scotland, and about why Reality Hunger by David Shields is a wonderful piece of literary criticism and why How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One by Stanley Fish is not.  And I had left the store feeling happy and at ease with who I was and – for the first time ever – where I was in the world. 

The following day was even better.  That evening I attended a reading at the McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo and then I met up with a friend I had first met in France.  Together we found ourselves on a rooftop in Spanish Harlem drinking Coronas with men we had met outside a bar on the Upper East Side and to whom I was reciting Woody Allen’s opening monologue from my favorite movie, Annie Hall – a thing I have done on various occasions over the years to no particular effect on the people to whom I have recited it.  However, this time when I had finished quoting Woody Allen paraphrasing Groucho Marx saying, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member,” one of the men in front of me smiled, stepped a little closer, and said, “That was good but here’s how it really goes.”

And so it goes that a week later I sat at a small candlelit table at a tequila bar and tequeria on the Lower East Side with the man who could quote Annie Hall even better than I could.  And now I was quoting Joan Didion to him, saying, “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” 

Four days later, in bed on a Sunday afternoon, I asked him what he had first noticed about me.  He replied that he had first noticed the passion in my eyes when I had quoted Annie Hall and then again when I had quoted Didion.  That is where my New York began: in a bookstore in Brooklyn and on a rooftop in Spanish Harlem and in bed on a Sunday.  In my New York I found not the possibility of being able to become somebody but a hope of being able to be precisely who I have always been.  

A Canterbury Tale: The Troubadour

I can’t tell you when I first saw the man I came to call The Troubadour but I can tell now you that I loved him.  I did not love him in the way that one loves a brother or a partner or even a friend, but in the way that one loves love and life itself – the kind of appreciative love that wants to reach out to touch rose petals because they’re soft and to stand in the rain because it’s cathartic and to hold hands with a loved one while walking down the street because it means you’re not alone.  I remember watching The Troubadour’s weather-worn face and England-gray eyes and sensing a kind of sadness that ran soul-deep, as it does in so many of us who make art.  And I remember having some instinct that of all the people I had come across in the world, The Troubadour would understand what I meant if I were ever to tell him that sometimes listening to the Cloud Cult cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man” was all that got me through the day.  And I loved him for that. 

The only thing I ever told The Troubadour was “Thank you,” but during the months I lived in Canterbury he was a fixture in my daily life.  When I went to the city centre for lunch or coffee he would be there, sitting on a bench beneath a tree, strumming his guitar and singing folk songs.  When darkness was cloaking the rooftops and medieval ramparts he would be leaning against the old Roman wall, playing his guitar, singing rock’n’roll songs and giving the money that passersby had placed in his case to the homeless man that sat beside him.  And whenever I saw him my soul would smile. 

As it happened, Canterbury had many street musicians, most of whom played banjos or just played “Wonderwall” over and over.  The first song I remember hearing The Troubadour play was the Tom Petty song, “American Girl.” And while all the other street musicians would disappear along with the last golden-purple streaks of evening light, The Troubadour would remain.  When the streets were empty and the damp chill of an English Autumn was whispering ghost stories of all the Canterbury tales that had come and passed upon those cobbled streets, The Troubadour would still play.  I would see him there with his gray hair and cracked fingers and I would swear that he needed the music the way I needed the music and in my heart I would thank him for helping me to feel a little less alone in the world. 

I was always with my boyfriend whenever I saw The Troubadour and I was always miserable.  I felt stuck in my relationship and stuck in a world that was filled with people who were content to just be happy enough – people who never cared to question the meaning of things, people like my boyfriend. And I was worried that this was as good as it would get -- as good as I would get.

Whenever my boyfriend and I would happen upon The Troubadour I would smile and clasp my hands together and stand utterly transfixed in the happiest moment of my day.  But I would be lucky to hear one full song before my boyfriend was pulling my away.  He didn’t feel the pressing, pulsating need for the music the way I did and he had an outright, inexplicable hatred of street musicians.  Sometimes I would wonder if he could love me the way he said he did if he couldn’t love what I loved or even just love how I loved it.  The thing I loved most about myself was how I could fall in love with a song, how time and time again I could give my heart up to melody and verse and let them make me better and lovelier and brighter and more alive, if only for a few minutes.

One night in late November, when it was just me, my boyfriend, the homeless man, and The Troubadour, I paid The Troubadour for a song.  I put some pound coins in his case and he thanked me.  I was surprised to hear that he had an American accent.  I thanked him in my own.

The song he played for me was “Mrs. Robinson.”  His eyes moved back and forth between mine and his guitar.  A terrorizing thought crept from the song to my heart as I wondered if he had heard me exclaim happily every time I had seen him in the street and if he had seen me stare back at him over my shoulder every time my boyfriend pulled me away.  I wondered if he had noticed the way I walked around like my high heeled boots and pearl earrings and other pretty things could make up for how unhappy I was.  I felt like he knew.  I felt like he could see the art of misery painted in my eyes.  And, in a way, I wanted him to.  But really, it didn’t matter if he was playing the song because he was trying to save me or not; either way he was scaring me and I needed that.

Before the song was through my boyfriend was pulling me away.  But even as we made our way up High Street and through the old city gate, the wind carried the sounds of “Mrs. Robinson” from The Troubadour to me.

It was snowing on my last day in Canterbury.  The Troubadour was playing in the street outside the café that my boyfriend was hurrying me into.  I promised myself that this time would be different – that after we had had our coffee I would go back outside and I would stand in the falling snow and I would listen until my soul had had its fill.  When I came back outside The Troubadour was gone.

A year and a half later I returned to Canterbury.  This time it was early May and the air was warm and tulips were bursting up in patches in the grass.  The Troubadour was nowhere to be found but neither was Mrs. Robinson.  And there was a new work of art hanging in my eyes; this one was called Happiness.

My Secret Narrative

Nine weeks ago it was a warm night in Paris and I was dancing alone in the mist of the crowd that gathers nightly in front of the Eiffel Tower during the summer to drink and talk and kiss and dream while wide awake and to just be there in front of the world’s most romantic icon.  I was dancing because I had to.  It was my last night in Paris.  The following afternoon I would be on a plane to Chicago. I didn’t know how long it would be until I would be able to return to Europe but I worried that by the time I did return, I would be much older and much less hopeful – much less youthful and free.  And so I had to dance because that is what one should do when one is young and in Paris, but mainly because that is the kind of person I like to be – the kind of person who is young and dancing, living and loving, and who is doing it all because life is nothing but several lovely moments dispersed at random in the midst of a static series of quotidian monotony.  So when life gives me a lovely moment I must be as lovely as possible within it - as alive and as lively as possible - so that later when the stasis of daily life is strangling me and I am failing to find any more beauty in the world, I can live off that memory of the time when everything was breathing loveliness and affirming life.

I am telling you this because I told you in a recent blog entry that we become each other’s stories.  I told you that family is the story we inherit, but everyone else…  They are the stories told to us, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we retell until the people in them are no longer people at all but anecdotes demonstrating who we were and who we’ve become.  Having said that, I now want to tell you that I do not think we are merely each other’s stories; we are our own stories as well.  And those stories – the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves – might be some of the most important stories of all.  Though, not because they are necessarily true or good, but because while our interactions with others are the stories of who we are in the world, it is the stories we write solely about ourselves and then read back to ourselves time and time again that let slip the secret narrative, the subtext: who we believe ourselves to be.

As I danced in front of the Eiffel Tower I was telling myself the story about myself as a young woman who is brilliantly and stubbornly alive and happy against any and all odds.  That was a story I had been telling myself quite often during my time in France.  It was a story that I so desperately wanted to be true that I told it to others.  It was a story I was telling in a grassy clearing in a forest on an island in the Mediterranean as I spun around beneath the hot afternoon sun, holding an open bottle of wine in one hand and smiling at my boyfriend.  I had told him that this was the kind of moment that he would remember much later when his life was just a static series of days and what I had meant was that I hoped he would remember me as being as bright and carefree as that day.

The day after I danced in front of the Eiffel Tower I boarded a plane and flew from Paris to Chicago.  In Chicago my mother met me at the airport.  From there we made the drive up through Illinois, past cornfields and pro-life billboards, back to my southwestern Wisconsin hometown – a place I had barely visited at all during the four years I had been in college.  I have now been here, in that town, for nine weeks.  I have been able to find very little to do here but read and write, drink and dream.  Here there is no longer anyone that I might call a friend or even a tolerable acquaintance and so I spend my time with my family and most often by myself.  And when I am by myself I find that I am in the not necessarily welcome company of all the stories I have ever told myself about myself.  And whether I like the stories or not, I am reminded of their importance – a thing I had forgotten over the past couple years – for it was here, in this town, that I first started telling the stories.

This is the story I grew up telling myself, the story I never really grew out of telling, the story that has been told about me by this friend or that boyfriend so many times that I have come to believe it’s true: I am inherently different. 

In grade school different was called weird.  And I was.  I liked books the way most other kids liked videogames and when asked my favorite thing to do I always answered “write.”  While other kids wanted to be veterinarians or teachers or maybe football players, I always said I wanted to be a writer.  Even then I liked the power of good writing.  I liked how a book could take a series of events and find meaning in them.  And I think I was weird because I was always contemplating the meaning of things.

Now that I am back in my hometown, walking the same cracked pavement I walked on my way home from school when I was much younger, I am reminded of the other reason I wanted to be a writer – the other reason I was weird.  I was always telling myself stories.  It wasn’t that I was talking to myself but in my head I was writing stories that were far more lovely and life affirming than anything that ever really happens in a small town.  I was telling myself stories about distressed damsels who saved themselves and who saved their knights in shining armor too.  I was telling myself stories about witches and the magic that some people grow up to find within themselves.  And I was telling myself stories about princesses and pioneers, stories of girls who went out into the world and kept going and going, stories of girls who married adventure and lived happily ever after.  I told myself these stories sometimes because I was bored and sometimes because I wanted something to hope for and sometimes because I didn’t want to be who I was. 

But of all the stories I ever told myself when I was young, the story that said I was different was the most important, the most insistent.  As lonely as it often made me, I believed it would be the thing that would save me.  The story that said I was different would also be the story of how I wouldn’t ever end up in a relationship as awful of that of my mother and father.  I would be different.  It was the story of how I wouldn’t ever find myself stuck like my mother, living a very average life in a very small town when once she had made art out of above average dreams.  I would be different.  It was the story of how I wouldn’t end up alone the way all the women in my family were.  I would be different.  And the story was the reason.  I was different because I had witnessed and been caught in the midst of pain and heartbreak and failure.  And I would be different because it had taught me to just know better, to fight harder, and to believe in nothing but myself. 

The story that I was different became the very thing that sustained and broke me; it was the torch I carried and the void I tried to fill.  It was a story that I believed in so strongly that it got me out of this small town and it kept me going – to Chicago and San Francisco and London and Paris and Istanbul and Prague and on and on.  It made magic out of the sounds of the sea and the feeling that grew and grew within me until I felt like I was floating through heaven in my hot-air-balloon-heart whenever I was in London.  It was also the story that kept me in a bad relationship for three years because it allowed me to believe that I was too smart to ever be in such a thing as an emotionally abusive relationship.

It was the story that I was starting to have trouble telling myself towards the end of that relationship.  A year ago, on a late June afternoon in Chicago, I stood in my apartment before a full length mirror.  In my reflection I saw the damsel I had envisioned in the stories I had told myself when I was very young.  And I was starting to see that it might be time to save myself.  I was skin and bone, with a big green bruise on my right arm that was left over from an IV that I had been given in the emergency room earlier that month.  I was wearing a black silk corset and a pearl necklace.  I was dressed to impress and, more specifically, to prove to my boyfriend that he couldn’t possibly have meant it when he told me that having sex with me didn’t mean anything – when he said it could have been anyone, that I could have been anyone.  I was not just anyone and never in my life had I ever said or done anything that didn’t mean something to me.  He had to be wrong.  I had spent most of our relationship trying to prove him wrong about such things because I didn’t want to have been wrong all the times I had told myself that I knew better than to end up in a relationship the like one my mother had been in with my father.  I was supposed to be different.  But there in the mirror I was just another woman in a bad relationship.

Six months later I was just another one out of every four women in the US to be raped.  Later my mother remarked that she had always thought I was too smart to ever have something like that happen to me.  And though I got angry at her for saying it, I think that was her way of saying that I was supposed to be different. 

It happened on a Friday night in January.  Earlier that day I had gone the French consulate in Chicago to apply for my visa to live abroad.  And then I had stopped at my favorite bookstore to buy a travel guide about living in the south of France.  That evening I had gone with my friends to a nice restaurant and then to a bar in a nice neighborhood.  There I had made polite small talk with the man who sat beside us by telling him about an article I had read in the Economist. 

In the end those little things that I had believed proved that I was somehow a bit different didn’t matter any more than the pepper spray I was carrying in my purse.  The next morning, when I went to buy Plan B, both the pepper spray and the travel guide were still in my purse right where I had put them the night before.  They were the same as they had been before and now I felt the same too – the same as one in every four women.  But I felt different too; I felt like a stranger to myself and a second class citizen in my own body.  And what felt the most different was my sense of being able to control or make sense of anything that happened to me – that was gone.

I am telling you this because this is one of the stories I have sat with this summer, alone in my childhood bedroom, late at night when I could think of no story with which to lull myself to sleep.  And so sometimes I drank until I was too tired to drink anymore because that seemed like a very average thing to do.  And it seemed to me that I had been telling myself a lie my whole life.  I wasn’t different at all.  And as I doubted the story I had told myself, I doubted whether or not I was really even a writer.  But one night, as I sat at my desk with some wine and some gin and my notebook, something occurred to me.  Life happens to everyone.  What makes me different is how I react to it: I write.

It is in words and paragraphs and syntax and punctuation that I can take control of anything that has ever happened to me.  It is in the juxtaposition of one scene and another and a finely articulated thought that I can begin to see the meaning in things.  And it is in the stories that I tell myself that I can be not as the world might see me but I believe myself to be.

Of all the stories I tell myself, I want you to know that I rarely tell the victim’s story.  I prefer to tell the story of a fighter and a survivor.  And that is what I am doing every time I write.  When I sit down to write, no matter what I am writing on the page, the story I am telling myself is the story of a woman who writes what she knows because knowledge is power.  That is my secret narrative. That is my subtext.