in real life

Ah late January when it feels like it will be 45 degrees and raining for all the rest of our lives. When our early enthusiasm for shiny New Year's resolutions has given way to feelings of 'I want to stay in and eat/ drink the contents of the cabinets including the baking chocolate and the vermouth that's leftover from the time we decided to get into martinis even though we don't like them.'

Readers, I don't want to get up in the mornings to work on my novel. Any more than I want to do any of the long list of ambitious and worthy things I laid out for myself as goals when I was on vacation in the desert right before new year's. It was warm there guys! And sun-shiny! And planning to do things whilst drinking a mojito by the pool is way easier than you know, doing them. 

But something other than this mid-winter inertia inhibits me too, I realize as I roll over to smack my snooze button to high heaven every other morning. Fear.  

My new project is set to be a bit more ambitious than my last few novels because it's going to be good deal more personal. The relationships and experiences that inspired and fueled my past novels were fascinating ones in my life but ultimately fleeting. Now I mean to write about something that cuts much deeper. I can only imagine all the nerve endings I will hit along the way and I must admit, I'm a little scared to go to that place. Even though I know I'm ready, even though I know it will be cathartic, even though it's only fiction and I'm not naming names. 

I want to know from those of you who've done it: how, how do you survive the experience of writing a memoir?

fear

I wrote for the Gloss today about trying to conquer my fears. I had an epiphany while brushing my teeth on Monday morning and then just as quickly started trying to talk myself out it. More to come on what that epiphany entailed but it seemed like either the thing I'd been waiting for or a totally harebrained idea. I told two friends about it right away before my fear could chase it away and they agreed it was the former.

What have you talked yourself out of doing lately?

better late than never

Here are some things I need to do next week: make a dentist appointment, file my tax return, learn how to use my new publicity software program and resume searching for an agent.

These are going to involve respectively: pain, humiliation, frustration, the forking over of hard-earned cash (welcome to freelancing!) and good old-fashioned existential angst. These things all become bigger and more frightening the longer I put them off. I am a slave to deadlines, I won't miss them but I will absolutely put things off if there is enough time to do so.

I took a break from agent hunting after a slew of dispiriting rejections that culminated with one in which a big agent told me I had a good voice and was talented but that it was just too hard to sell anything in women's fiction right now if it didn't have a magical or supernatural element. After I briefly considered turning one of the main characters into a warlock, I knew it was time to take a little breather. As for taxes and the dentist, no explanation of why I fear these is probably necessary but it's occurred to me that H & R Block employees and dental hygienists have both perfected that look and tone of voice that conveys in a mere instant 'of all the people who come in here, you are by far the most disappointing. You are hardly even worthy of teeth/ 10-99s'. As for the publicity software, I consider it a great irony that one of my new gigs is technical writing as I would rather read the Koran backwards than read an instruction manual. I have a deep fear both the boredom and frustration contained in that tiny type.

What do you put off until the last minute?

the tao of bungee jumping

 

                                                                     actual bridge pictured

When I think about what has keeps me from really pursuing what I want—whether it be a job or a writing gig or a romance or whatever—it nearly always come down to one of two things: fear and inertia. Since I’ve been home from Argentina and settling back into my normal routine, the high of the travel adventure wearing off, I’ve found myself confronting these two old enemies again. Being a writer involves pushing your way through a lot of rejection and dead ends: I know by now that this is my lot but I struggle with fighting the feeling of ‘what am I doing this for?’ when sitting down at my laptop. Some days the fear that I’ll never make it feels stronger than the desire to push through it.

Inertia and fear work that way, compounding and feeding off each other until you realize you have stewed and worried away your day, your week, your life; and nothing has come of it. Being scared can make you stuck, and being stuck is scary so it’s a vicious cycle.

So how do you break it? Simple: jump off a bridge.

Some moments in life serve as perfect metaphors. Being a writer I’m perhaps more attuned to this than others but I think we all have moments where something just seems symbolic on a cinematic level. I had a big one of these the first time I went bungee jumping.

I’m not really so into extreme sports but I when I was living in Canada the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college, one of my friends suggested that a big group of us go bungee jumping with the new company that was starting up (that’s right friends, we were the test group for a new bungee company). I wanted to go but I was terrified. I could barely sleep the night before the trip. The only thing that scared me more than the idea of jumping off of a bridge into a ravine with a giant rubber band attached to my ankles was the idea of not doing it and then regretting it when I had to listen to my friends go on about how awesome it was the next day.

I woke up terrified the morning of. I was terrified on the car ride up. I was terrified walking across the bridge to the jumping off point. None of this fear was abetted by the ‘it’s not our fault if you are killed or maimed’ release we had to sign or the fact that when I asked the guy who was running the show (a bungee veteran of thirty years) to give me a pep talk about how no one ever dies doing this he said ‘well, we do everything we can to ensure your safety but people do die’. Thanks bungee guy!

But once I was on the bridge, strapped into the harness and looking down into a rushing river some eighteen stories below I felt moment of not calm exactly, but clarity; I was going to this, there was no turning back. Thinking about doing it turned out to be way scarier than actually doing it. I knew that hesitating would only make me more afraid, so I just jumped. It was so much fun I went back and did it again the next day.

Most of the time what we’re afraid is not actually you know, death as it was in this situation but well, what exactly? Failure? Humiliation? Rejection? Psssh. Weak sauce. These things aren’t even deserving of fear when you look at it.

But of course amorphous fears can be paralyzing; they can outright own you if you stand still for too long. So don’t. Do something, anything.

Just jump.