Breaking the Silence

“Hi Litty. I'm going to walk around the table now. Here I go. I’m coming toward you.”
“Hey there Litty. Nice to see you. I’ll just be over here if you need me.”
“Hi Litty. Are you hungry? Here’s my hand. Don’t worry, I won’t come any closer.”

Litty is one of four cats I’m petsitting for the week. I was warned that it would take her awhile to warm up to me. Litty – Little One – was a rescue cat – rescued from two kids that were torturing her.

Litty came halfway down the stairs to stare at me while I was working at the dining room table. She was skittish and skeptical, and at first any movement I made was enough to make her bolt up back upstairs. Slowly she grew accustomed to me, moving out of the way when I came near, but only far enough that I couldn’t grab her if I tried. That was ok with me -- I've known enough cats to know not to try. The more I talked to her, though – the more I told her I was coming out of a room so I wouldn’t startle her, the more I started talking before I started moving – the more she relaxed.


 

I’m a lot like Litty, I think: I need someone to tell me they’re about to try to get close before they do, or I’m likely to bolt, expecting the worst.

Since I don’t need a babysitter, the real world version of this is a little different. I have learned through much trial and error that I stoke silence into a growing wildfire of dark thoughts, fears and rejections, and the easiest and best way out is to break the silence myself or ask someone to break it for me.

I have a friend who shows me in countless ways that he cares about me. I also know that he only checks his email once or twice a week. Remembering the ways he’s shown me I’m important to him feels about as easy as trying to grow a third arm when I’m waiting for a reply to an email whose contents make me feel vulnerable. Even when I’ve just forwarded him some benign piece of information, my mind is much more likely to leap to the most terrible option available instead of to what is most likely the truth: he hasn’t read the email yet.

The same woman I wrote about last week, Jeanne, pointed out to me that I need to hear it: I need people to tell me how they feel, because, well, because the words are important to me. I’m a writer, after all. Although I can say I write for a living, I actually call myself a writer because writing is where I turn for understanding and legitimizing my feelings: I write when I am happy, sad, afraid, vulnerable. Writing is where I go to feel more alive, and the words are what bring it about. Yes, recently I’ve found many holes in the language and I have been searching for a way to describe what does not exist in the words I have been taught, but I’d rather you bumbled the words and tried to say it loud than simply show me.

This is a new discovery for me, invisible audience, but an important one. Now I know that I need the words to feel safe, and that’s changed something: it means I can’t be silent anymore. Now, when I’m starting to feel skittish and like I want to bolt for the door, I gather my courage and say, “What do you think about this?” OUT LOUD to the other person. And where before I always feared the rejection in their answer, now I am finding sweet relief in hearing the silence be broken, regardless of what words they use to break it. By breaking my own silence, I have managed to ask others to break theirs around me, and I’m finding that the sound of their voices, regardless of message, was all I needed.

Love and broken silence kisses
Morgan

The Metamorphosis of the Rock Hard Bitch

In college, one of my roommates watched me blink back tears as I struggled to figure out why I hadn’t heard from the man I was dating – now I know it was my own fault, and in trying to get his attention I had inadvertently ended our relationship – and said in wonder, “Could it be, Morgan, that you’re not near as tough as you always make out yourself to be?"

Fast forward eight months or so, and my nickname had become Rock Hard Bitch amongst my fellow American exchange students in Spain, not because I was a rock hard bitch, but because all of them were surprised to learn how caring and sensitive I was underneath the rock hard exterior I showed when I first met someone – the rock hard bitch they had all originally thought me to be.

Anyone who knows me well knows what bullshit this first impression is; anyone who’s known me since childhood has likely exclaimed, perhaps more than once, “Geez, Morgan, you’re so sensitive.”

At some point, I started to make up for my sensitivity by presenting a less sensitive front: one that was rock hard, unreachable, impenetrable, invulnerable. As was the case in Spain especially, when I was as out of my element as I had ever been, I threw up those walls to protect myself and to get through the daily motions of trying to be understood and understand in an accent I was unfamiliar with, in a language I was not all that comfortable with yet, in a foreign country that was far away from the one where I had grown up – the one whose psyche had just been rocked by a terrorist attack. I was terrified, and I didn’t know anyone, so I did the only thing I knew how to do: I hid within myself and faked a confidence I didn’t feel. 

It was not the first time I’d been called something similar to a rock hard bitch, and it would not be the last. I always found the label amusing, because it was so obviously NOT me that I found no reason to be offended. I was even proud, because it meant that it was working: that I was presenting the strong person I had always wanted to be instead of the terrified unlovable child that I always felt like inside.

It’s been years since I’ve been called Rock Hard Bitch. In the past four years or so, I’ve been working hard on being able to show a more vulnerable side of myself; instead of needing to find reasons to bring others down or pick them apart to justify my own actions, I’ve been working on accepting my own humanity and the humanity of others. I have been trying to remember that perfectionism is the opposite of being human, and that perfectionism is a goal I should not strive for because it will mean striving away from the amazing subjective and varied existence of actually being a human. I have been working on this, and yet it seems that I still have a long way to go.

I gave my unfinished manuscript to a friend to read. This is a person I have shared many things with, whom I feel I have opened up to and often shown a vulnerable side to; this person is also a regular reader of my blog. When he gave me his feedback, he told me that – among many other wonderful things he had to say about my writing, things that gave me the strength to continue on when I had been vacillating on whether I should finish the damn thing at all – my book showed a vulnerable side of myself that he had never seen: the cracks, he said, in my otherwise well-put-together exterior.

Oh God, invisible audience. What have I done? What have I done by channeling that Rock Hard Bitch persona for so long that she still stands between me and my friends; my life; the person I am striving to be? 

Every day life feels very personal, very too close for comfort, very raw and terrifying to some extent. I do not walk around fearing a physical attack, but I do find that I walk around with earphones in so I can’t hear the whistles of the construction workers, I separate myself from many people whose needs feel like much more than I can bear, and I find myself spending time alone because it feels better than spending time with others that leave me feeling depleted. All this, and yet it is no longer a case of needing to be angry at those people; I do not blame them anymore for what they need from me, I have simply realized that I don’t have to give to those people and that it’s best to be away from that need. At the same time, I’ve been working on being more honest with those that I do value: showing that vulnerable side that causes me to burst into tears at the drop of a hat, because sometimes that’s just what I need to do. It’s presenting the gooey sensitive side of me and hoping to be understood, but not being attached to that actually being the case; instead, just knowing that the act of showing myself is important, not necessarily to others, but to me. 

It seems, however, that I am still a work in progress; that often I am terrified enough to throw up a wall and stand behind it without even realizing it’s there. It seems that even here on my blog I am not showing myself in all my full humanity, and you know what? It’s true. It’s true because my book IS much more vulnerable, otherwise I wouldn’t have struggled as much as I have in whether or not I should publish it. I say this before it is even done, and yet I find that NOT writing is worse: trying to hide that vulnerable part of me ultimately feels like a personal betrayal. And I can’t do it anymore, invisible audience. I can’t deny me any longer. The Rock Hard Bitch is tired of doing her job: tired of standing between me and the rest of the world. Although there is definitely still a use for her – not everyone or every situation is safe to be vulnerable with or in, after all – she is tired of working so hard with no time off. And I’m tired of letting her. So here’s to progress, and baby steps. Here’s to humanity, in all its imperfect and vulnerable glory.

Love and not-so-rock-hard kisses

Morgan

Baby Steps Still Propel You Forward

I can be an impatient person. I see an end goal, a final project, and all I want is to have it DONE. Although I have the ability to also foresee the many, many steps involved in getting to the end of something, it is often hard for me to calmly take each step, knowing that eventually what I want will materialize before me, not with a *POOF* as if out of nowhere, but instead out of the many small steps I have taken in the right direction.

This has been especially hard for me lately. I am planning a move, and the move requires many small steps that will eventually leave me in the new place where I desire to be. In turn, moving will give me some time and space to focus, which will then lead to more time to write, something I want so badly it leaves a lump in my throat.

I have been craving time to write for years. This craving is what led me to quit my job in Bellevue – it led me to make a decision to divert part of each paycheck into a savings account that I never touched; to stay at the job in Bellevue for a year, wanting to tear my hair out, as my baby steps eventually led to the day that I turned in my resignation and walked out with the money to start again.

I learned about publishing in baby steps: how the industry worked, the advantages of self-publishing, the slowly changing behemoth of traditional publishing, and the joy of learning of other like-minded individuals who want to breathe life into their words and share that life with others.

I wrote my cookbooks in baby steps. Talk to wineries and restaurants; create recipe templates, call, email and cajole contributors, make appointments to take pictures, test recipes one at a time, lay out pages, edit, edit, EDIT, print, sell, one Facebook post, one local retailer, one Amazon sale, one new friend at a time.

I have grown confident of my writing in baby steps. Regardless of how long I have called myself a writer, it has only been recently that I have started sending out essays to publications, no longer afraid of their rejection. Suddenly I realize that I have something important to say and all I need is to find the right place to say it. This is not to say that I will not continue to improve, but only through writing for the past four years have I finally gotten to the point where I can realize that I am actually a writer in a way that feels real and visceral.

I have found my way here through baby steps. I feel a book trying to emerge, and I want it to come out in one fell swoop, leaping out of my brow much like Athena leaped, fully formed and ready to fight, out of Zeus’ forehead. The task seems overwhelming. It seems like I will never finish, because it is so hard to start; because the baby steps seem so infinitely small.

More than a year ago, two writing friends and I decided to do the Artist’s Way. It is a 12-week program to help people rediscover their creativity, in whatever way, shape and form it may take. One of the essential parts of the course is the morning pages: first thing in the morning, you take a pen and a notebook and write. At first, I got up an hour early to do this. At first, I wrote the three pages suggested, but then I realized that I was taking on more than I could handle. I cut it down to a page, got up a half hour early, and found it was the most joyful part of my day. Fifteen months later, I look forward to waking up, making coffee and settling in with a cup in one hand and a pen in the other, a notebook resting on my lap. More often than not, I fill two or three pages before I realize what I’ve done. I have filled more than 500 pages – front and back – with my scrawling handwriting. 

I am impatient, and yet the mountains I have moved the farthest are the ones that I pushed a little at a time. Although the ones ahead seem daunting, all I have to do is look behind me to see how far I’ve already come, one baby step at a time.

Love and baby step kisses

Morgan

Ruining My Coping Strategies

Ruining my coping strategies

I made a resolution awhile ago that I was going to work on facing things instead of coping with them. This may seem like minute point, but basically I decided that for me, facing things meant living with them while coping meant dealing with them.
Still confused? Let me see if I can explain. There are many things in my life that I simply deal with, or better yet, I ignore them and hope they will go away or at least the feelings surrounding them will ease. These aren’t even all necessarily bad things: I have recently discovered that I am as freaked out by incredibly good feelings as I am by bad feelings. The point here, however, is not the feelings themselves or the situations that bring them on, but what I do with them.
I would prefer not to deal with feelings. They make me, well, feel. A feeling is something I can’t control, so it scares me. When something scares me, I don’t face it, I cope with it.
My coping strategies? Gossip. Self-justification. Self-validation. Eating when I’m not hungry. Drinking without regard for the taste. Watching movies or TV I’m not interested in in the hopes of drowning out my thoughts (there’s a reason you burn more calories simply sitting still than you do while watching TV).
It’s not that impressive of a list, but there’s a problem: now that I’ve identified my coping strategies, they aren’t working as well for me anymore. When I open the fridge in search of some self-validating sweet comfort food, I know why I’m doing it, and it ruins the comforting effect. When I sit down to watch a movie to shut off my brain, it insists on chugging along, wanting me to face my fear instead of simply coping with it.
What does facing a fear look like? It looks like calling up someone who has hurt you and talking about it. It looks like sitting with the pain and feeling it instead of putting it in a drawer. It looks like opening the wine bottle because I want something tasty to drink, not to drown my sorrows. It looks like regularly checking in with myself to see if I how I’m feeling and taking care of my physical and emotional state on a regular basis instead of waiting until I’ve made myself sick.
It looks like a lot of work, but work I need to face.

Love and facing kisses
Morgan


NOTE: If you are trying to post a comment and can't, it could be because you don't have third party cookies enabled in your web browser. You can change this by going to "preferences." You can also email me at morganfraser@hotmail.com if you prefer; I welcome your feedback!