psychology – PSYCH/FLASH

Geoffrey Wolff, Vivian Gornick, and the Art of Calling Out Your Own Bullshit

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“But the genius of this memoir lies in its letting us see how much the narrator becomes his father rather than struggles to separate from his father.”
Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

When I read the quote cited above, I underlined it with my black pen, hard, and drew a big star next to it. Big stars mean business. Big stars make it easy to find what matters to me in a book long after I’ve read it.

When I drew that star, and every time I reread the quote, my heart turns icy. For me, this is terrifying. I can’t bear the idea that I would become my mother, yet I can bear it, otherwise I wouldn’t draw a star next to Gornick’s sentence.

Free the Draft! An Attempt to Liberate my Writing Routine (with Bonus Baby Bunny Interlude)

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I feel as if I’m re-learning how to write. Or maybe finally learning how to write. Or maybe that’s what it is to be a writer–to cycle through the re-learning how to do this art for every project you have, every major life change, every significant emotional shift or growth or loss you experience.

When I began writing my memoir Terrible Daughter, about how I became estranged from my parents, I was married, had two dogs, lived in the heart of Boston, and spent most of the winter at a small apartment in Florida. In the years since then, I got divorced, my dog died, my ex kept the other dog–the loss of which I still feel keenly–had to leave my home in Boston, sold the Florida place, and moved to Maryland. And I earned an MFA.

When the Coffee Grounds Hit the Carpet: A Mini-Essay Examining One Morning of One Writer’s Process Full of Unwanted Drama

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Prologue

For a person who hates drama, I sure had a lot of frickin’ drama this morning.

First you should know that I have polycythemia vera, a chronic blood malignancy. I’ve had it for many years, my whole adult life. It’s well-treated and managed and I’m very familiar with the symptoms and how to deal with them.

But still. Sometimes this never-ending fatigue gets to me. I want to do The Things! I have all this mental drive and often my body cannot meet the demands of my brain. But I have many techniques for doing my work while not feeling well.

A Headache and Perfectionism and Quite a Nice Swim

What is it with me and headaches lately?

Woke up at 3 am with a raging tension headache–radiating from the back of my neck down into my shoulders. Or vice versa. It was brutal. And I still have it. Go away, headache! Don’t you know who I am? I’m Very Important and I have Very Important things to do!

So I took it easy today and worked on being okay with taking it easy today. It’s my first day of this residency. Of course I want to work and make myself feel good about working and workity work write write. I’m a writer and stuff with stuff to get done!

That Time Someone Called Me a Victim

I still feel weird saying it all these years later, but that person did me a favor.

I was in my twenties, living in Los Angeles, and sitting around a table with some friends. We were planning what we would do that weekend. Before I’d arrived, the group had already decided where we would eat that night.

I felt a strong defensive reaction in my gut, a dull pain, a pattern that repeated often in my younger life. They’d made this decision without me! Didn’t they like me? Why didn’t they care what I thought? Didn’t they want to be my friends anymore? Why hadn’t anyone asked me?!?

So I spoke up. “Why didn’t anyone consult me about this?”

Melanie, a friend I really liked and respected, laughed. “Oh, Amy,” she said, smiling. “You’re such a victim.”

It felt as if she’d slapped my face. I could sense the redness spreading across my cheeks. The floor seemed to drop out from under me as if I were on a roller coaster about to speed down a hill. The pain in my gut sharpened and I was ready to speak.

No I’m not! Why would you say that? I don’t act like a victim!

That’s what was on the tip of my tongue when a sudden revelation hit me. I don’t know if I was just old enough for my brain development to consider a more mature response; I don’t know if, in this moment, I’d suddenly understood the difference between a reaction and a response.

What I wanted to say was a reaction. But another option revealed itself to me: maybe she was right.

Oh, man, that was tough to consider. In my world, given the way I was raised, to be acting like a “victim” was to be bad. A bad person. A bad friend. Just generally bad.

I was deeply embarrassed, and I knew I had a chance here to choose my response, to break my pattern of defensiveness. And all of this was churning through my brain during a total of five seconds.

And my next thought is what really got me. Crap. I’m acting like my mother. This is exactly what she’d do.

I was taking a normal conversation between friends, potentially creating drama over a non-event, and making the moment about me. And I knew why: for some reason, making a decision without me made me feel abandoned. Unwanted. Unfriended if you will.

It would be years before I could unpack exactly why I felt this way, but I instinctively realized that it wasn’t true. They were being normal and I was reacting dysfunctionally.

So I chose to respond. I kept my mouth shut and let the conversation proceed. And I don’t mind saying that this is one of the hardest things I ever did in my young life–to sit with that feeling of abandonment and contemplate it, realize it was my problem and not my friends’ problem, and shut down my defensiveness.

It is often tough to speak the truth to someone. It is especially difficult to speak the truth to someone you care about. My friend Melanie told me the truth and somehow it stuck. Maybe it’s because her tone was joking and not accusatory. Or maybe I was just ready to hear it.

Something clicked in my brain. I was determined not to follow in my mother’s emotional path. I began to change that pattern of behavior immediately, now that I could see it, name it, and realize that I had choices in how I responded to the people around me. Especially people who were important to me. Because, to paraphrase Billy Joel, when someone tells me something that’s hard to hear, they may be wrong, but for all I know, they may be right.

This is why I’ve started this blog: to identify those moments that I’ve had sudden breakthroughs in the way I think or see the world or in how I treat people or how I treat myself. Moments that were points of no return. Once the revelation hit me, I was altered forever.