Contemplating Catharsis in Cannes

Three months ago I sat in a conference with my nonfiction writing professor. She said that there seemed to be a lot that I was not saying in my writing. I told her that I didn’t feel like there was much I could say because there was no longer very much I knew to be true. Good writers write with authority which was something that I was, at that moment, unable to do because I simply felt that I had none. I told her that while I had heard of people going through periods in their life in which they had trouble trusting others, I was having trouble trusting myself. And if I couldn’t trust myself, how could I write as if a reader should believe what I was saying?

I had lost the admittedly youthful conviction that I understood how the world works. I had lost all conviction whatsoever in my favorite part of the world and my favorite thing to write about: love. And, moreover, I had been stripped of the very writerly delusion that because I could put a feeling into words, the words alone would make it permanent. Just because I could write a scene and then write what it meant, didn’t mean that the meaning itself wasn’t – in fact and in real life – up for interpretation.

As much as I had enjoyed studying literature that used multiple points of view to tell a story and in which the conflict of the plot often lay not in the actions but in the misunderstanding that one character would have of another, I had never enjoyed – or even been able – to view life that way. Because I could write about my life, I seemed to think that that made my interpretation of it right. Thus, my trust in myself and my authority as a writer relied mainly on the fact that I believed myself to be right. However, the truth of the matter is that trusting oneself, or even writing with authority, is better done by admitting that one can’t possibly know for sure.

It’s like religion. Blind faith that relies solely on the naïve insistence that god is absolutely, without a doubt, there isn’t very good faith at all. A better faith to have is the kind that is resilient in the face of doubt, the kind that acknowledges room for error - or even the possibility of being all together wrong - but chooses to believe anyways.

However, I didn’t realize this then, when I sat in the conference with my professor. What I told her was, in short, that because I had believed in love and in a person, only to have been proven wrong, I didn’t feel that I could write about the subject with any bit of authority. And because I had trusted my own interpretation of almost four years worth of events in my life only to have had my interpretation proven inaccurate, I no longer viewed myself as trustworthy.

I couldn’t write well because I couldn’t live well. In my daily life I couldn’t trust myself to know what I wanted, what I thought, or who I was. So I tried out what I could tell others around me wanted, I listened to what my friends thought, and I acted like who everyone around me thought I might be. I made mindless small talk with strangers in bars and I did shots and I dated a man who my friends thought would be perfect for me. I thought I might like someone else – that I might even love that someone – but I left it alone for fear of being wrong. I smiled pretty and kissed men simply because I could tell they wanted to kiss me. And while I didn’t think I liked them, I didn’t trust myself enough to know for sure, so I assumed I might be wrong and that they might be right and I gave them a try.

Both myself and my writing suffered because of this. I tired of hearing my own voice coming up off the page, just as I tired of being around myself.

In the end, it was my writing that improved first.

I was in a bar being someone my friends liked me to be when I ran into a girl from my writing class. She was in the process of writing a bravely intimate true story about her life and I asked her how she did it. She told me that in her daily life she lied to most people but that because she respected the people in our writing class (myself included) she was forcing herself to write the truth. She said that she felt she owed it to us – her classmates and fellow writers – because we sat there every week, sharing our deepest truths, our realest selves. She told me that on the top of every page she wrote, “YOU RESPECT THESE PEOPLE; YOU OWE THEM THE TRUTH.”

I respected her for that. And, just like her, I respected our classmates. I too owed them the truth. So that night I went home and I wrote on the top of my notebook page, “YOU RESPECT THESE PEOPLE; YOU OWE THEM THE TRUTH.” And with that I wrote a story. The story was my way of telling them the only truth I knew: who I had been. I told them what had hurt me, what I had lived through, how I had broken and I how I had survived. I told them the moments of my life I was most ashamed of and I told them about the person I would be proud to be. I never told them what it all meant. I didn’t need to. I trusted them to understand. And they did.

They understood what it meant because they trusted me even when I was unable to trust myself. They trusted the person that came up off the pages, out from between the lines of typed black ink. They trusted what I had written, what I had said had happened to me, and what reading the story had made them feel.

They didn’t just trust me, they respected me.

And that’s how I began to learn to trust myself again.

In time I changed the phrase. “You respect these people; you owe them the truth” became “You respect yourself; you owe yourself the truth.” And in order to be able to tell myself the truth I had to be able to trust myself to know what it was.

I came to learn that being able to trust myself isn’t a matter of being able to correctly interpret a person, a moment, or a feeling. It’s a matter of respecting myself enough to have faith in what I believe to be right, even though I acknowledge it could be wrong.

I learned how to say “No” to men I didn’t like, even when they professed their love to me. I learned how to choose to spend a Saturday night with my pen and paper, even if my friends think that pretty girls like me should be out doing shots. I learned to ask for what I want, not because I can guarantee being given it but because I owe it to myself to try. I learned how to tell someone I could love them, not because I knew they’d say it back, but because I owed it to myself to say how I felt.

I learned how to like myself. And now I am what I put my faith in. There may not be much in this world that I can know for sure, but I will enjoy getting to know myself more and more with every passing day.

France Is For Dreamers

I was a haunted child – haunted by the translucent shadows of dreams that darken the corners of the waking world. When the hours of the day had climbed to their highest height and lamplight glowed like ethereal beams I would sit wide awake at my desk writing stories and binding them into books and then making lists of all the places I would someday go and all the languages I would learn.

I am now a haunted woman. I sit awake late night in the dim light of one too few florescent bulbs, plagued by the ghosts of wild hopes and youthful dreams. On the wall above me hangs a poster sized picture of the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower shines golden bright from behind clumps of fog while streetlights line up along the Seine, all balls of orange, all reflecting a rippled picture of light and France upon the water’s surface. I took that picture myself. I kneeled down in the muddy grass between bits of melting snow, rested my shamefully cheap camera upon the cement wall beside the river and took that picture on the third to last night of December.

Then, it was just a picture. Just a pretty sight that, honestly, I didn’t love as much as other pretty sights I’d seen in past weeks in Innsbruck or Istanbul or Edinburgh. I said then that I thought people love France because France is easy to love. France speaks the language of love and boasts a phallic symbol of romance that reaches high up into the sky, above Notre Dame and the Saint Chappell, high enough to be seen and photographed with amazing clarity from Montmartre, even on a day thick with fog. France – like love itself - is timeless, with movie characters and vacationers alike all strolling along the banks of the Seine, whether in black and white or HD. France is outdoor cafes and a glass of wine with lunch, whether in 1812 or 2012. France is art and bonne nourriture. It is as iconic as its reigning queen of tragedy and excess, Marie Antoinette. France lets you eat cake and you like it.

We all know how to love France. We’ve all seen enough movies to know to say “Oui” and “Non,” “Bonjour” and “Au revoir.” It’s easy to swoon for the Eiffel Tower, because we can buy a black, white and red poster of the perfect Eiffel Tower swoon at any Urban Outfitters. We all know that wine is romantic and we can easily love a place that lets us spend a two hour lunch sipping Cabernet Sauvignon in a charming café while we read Madame Bovary.

Yet I didn’t love France. My heart preferred a challenge. It preferred to smooth the rough edges of Turkey or soften the harsh tones of the German shouted in bars in Innsbruck. My heart preferred to love that which is loveable in spite of its dark corners and tough exterior. Not that I’m saying Turkey or Austria are difficult to love or unsavory places. They’re not, but they’re also not France. A place like Turkey is the boy in rock’n’roll band who smokes a joint while undressing you with his eyes; it’s rough around the edges but that’s part of its allure. France, however, knows romance by heart and it effortlessly courts you with flowers and chocolates.

When I was in France it was near the end of a very long journey across countries and months and Easy Jet terminals. I had friends who had gone to Europe and been captivated by an Italian boy or a summer romance in the Alps. They’d described to me the kind moments that busted at the seams with fireworks and trumpeting fanfare, white horses and sunsets. But I had said (not to them, but to others) that the kind of people who find moments like that are the kind of people who need such moments, the kind of people who are not yet happy enough, who are looking for a sign or for themselves. I said that I did not need trumpets or fireworks, white horses or sunsets. I didn’t need France. I wasn’t looking for a sign or for myself. I was finding quiet paradise in lonely cemeteries in the Austrian Alps and in warm pubs along the Cornish coast.

Yet it is not a picture of the Alps or of the Cornish coast that I ordered an oversized print of and hung upon my wall; it is France. When I first hung that picture on the wall beside my bed I thought I was doing so simply because it was a stunningly beautiful image. Now, I realize I was doing it as a reminder to myself of all the beauty the world holds, all the romance, all the dreams that can come true. Years ago, as I sat at my desk listing the languages I wanted to learn, French was at the top of the list. And for all the years that would follow, French remained at the top of the list. And I am proud to say I did it. I learned the language of love. I also learned French.

I donned a black beret and rode a carousel in front of the Eiffel Tower while holding hands and smiling at person I love. I skated figure-eights beneath the silvery shadow of the Eiffel Tower. I waved at the camera while the man I loved waved back at me from behind the lens. I made a reality the dreams that my relentlessly hopeful heart had first wished to come true. And that’s what France is for. France is for dreamers. And later, if you’re lucky and your dreams come true, France is for remembering the dreamer you used to be. And then, even later, when those dreams that came true have come to seem like vague memories of someone else’s life, the picture of the Eiffel Tower is so you never forget to remember the dreamer – to remember how to dream.