I promised more about the #NYUMediaTalk, but this turned out to be more about me than the talk. Last night, I attended a panel about books to film or the big stage. There were three NYT best selling authors each of whom has written novels that became films or stage productions. While the panel was supposed to be about the differences in writing for each platform, what struck me was a stark contrast in each writer’s journey and how they all wrote for the same reason–to connect with an audience–to connect with people.
On the train ride home, I mulled over their stories and their parallels with my life. Like each of the panelist, books and libraries played a considerable role in my youth. I have vivid memories of my mother paying late book fees because of the quantity of book’s we’d check out and return late. For me, books were an escape from my life.
It’s not that I had an unhappy childhood. I didn’t. It’s that I grew up in a predominately white, Mormon neighborhood, and I was neither. Being neither had its advantages. I was free from having to conform to the conservative cultural norm. But it also had its disadvantages. Mainly exclusion. No invites to birthday parties and being unwelcomed at my classmates homes’ took a psychological toll. I had two friends in my neighborhood whose parents were always welcoming. Most were not. There’s one memory in particular that I’ve never been able to forget. A classmate invited over to her place after school. I must’ve been nine or ten years old. We were in her backyard playing on the monkey bars when her mother came out and asked me to leave. My classmate was visibly upset. As I was walking out the front door, I heard her mother say, “I don’t want you playing with people like her. She’s not like us. She doesn’t go to our church” I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. I didn’t like what I heard, and I was too young to fully process what had happened. What I knew is that I felt bad. My cure was losing myself in Nancy Drew’s love triangle with Ned and Frank.
Growing up, reading and writing were my modes of therapy. If I couldn’t find the words to write how I felt, I’d get lost in book’s where outcasts and loners were heroines. When I did write, I wrote for myself. I was drowning in emotions that needed an outlet, but it was just an outlet. Until about four years ago.
Four years ago, I reconnected with an acquaintance who quickly turned into a friend–arguably my best friend. For about two and a half years. We spoke just about every day from dawn-up to . . . er . . . well midnight. And through our conversations, I found inspiration to write about everything. I would sometimes write him stories for his morning commute. I revamped my blog and began writing weekly. I couldn’t keep up with the flurry of plots and storylines forming in my mind. I rewrote folklore, sent short stories and poetry to friends in mourning, to friends faced with unimaginable challenges, and to those that just needed a good laugh. Then we stopped talking, and the ideas stalled. The desire to write ceased. The friendship replaced by an unfillible void.
I bring this up because yesterday one of the panelists mentioned that he wrote out of a need to fill a void, and possibly, from a desire to please his father. Another writer said he wrote out of desperation, and the third said she wrote to connect. That she was a dramatist (a result of being a middle child), and it was her way of being heard. I found myself relating to each panelist.
Last night, I wondered if I write because I have an emptiness inside me that I’m desperate to fill. Sometimes, I think that’s true. But it’s not. Thinking back to that friendship and the flurry of writing that came from it, I realized that I’m the opposite of panelist number 1. Where he writes from an empty place, I feel compelled to put words on paper when I’m most connected to someone.
Maybe that’s because it’s the only time I want to be heard. The two and a half years that we spoke were the happiest years of my life. A friendship forged with a distance of three-hundred miles and based on digital communication filled a void I’d lived with my entire life. With the taxing feelings of anger, remorse, loneliness, and insecurity replaced by laughter, and encouragement,I finally felt free to be me in all my forms. And I liked the “me” that came out at that time. I was no longer chained down by my own dark thoughts. It was a nice time to be me. It was nicer to like me.
There was a time, near the end of our friendship that I was struggling with my finances, health, and a traumatic event. Coping with all three at once was toxic. One day, in particular, when I called him, needing a friend to confide in, he brushed me off with “You’re being a drama queen,” before I could get out what was eating me up inside. The comment immediately caused me to shut down. It has stayed with me for years. I felt hurt, shut down, unheard, but worst of all, I doubted whether or not my traumatic experience was traumatic at all. It was. But because I let that comment get to me, it took me almost a year to talk about it. It was a lesson in how words and how they are used matter. It was a horrible time to be me.
Listening to middle-child panelist yesterday, took me back to that moment, and caused me to reflect on the the term “drama-queen.” We use that term as a negative, without giving value to its meaning. Drama. Life would be boring without drama. Movies, plays, films, books none if it would sell as entertainment without drama. It takes talent to string words in a way that elicits emotions from an audience.
It was in that moment that I realized that the Universe had been yelling at me for years, but I had drowned it out. Refusing to listen. You see, drama queens are storytellers. They string words and emotions together with feelings so intense that it’s exhausting to listen to them. (Try being one of them). But they color our lives. Hearing that writer call herself a dramatist changed my perspective about myself. Not a drama queen, a dramatist. Someone who can draw people in with a story. That’s the me I liked to be.
The muse made a cameo appearance this fall. Like the final panelist, desperation equated to motivation. Having him back in my life, albeit briefly, opened the floodgates of ideas. I felt like in the middle of all this sadness and chaos; the universe negotiated. It said “I’ll grant you this friendship, briefly, but you pay it forward by connecting.”
I didn’t know what to write about at first. How do you connect with people on paper when you don’t know how to connect with them in person?
I decided to start with grief. I couldn’t let Felipe’s death be in vain. I couldn’t bare the thought of my grandpa looking down at me, side by side with my other grandparents, cousins, uncle, and friends. I couldn’t stand the thought of all of them meeting, looking through the window in the sky at my life and thinking, “It’s a shame that she’s not living up to her potential.” I needed to take baby steps. Which is where we are not.
Connecting with people is essential to survival. Some of us are social gifted, the rest of us connect through art. Some of us have a natural talent, the rest of us have to work a little harder at it. But what I learned yesterday is that with grit, practice, and a willingness to learn from failure, you can become the artist . . . or in my case, writer . . . that you want to be.
#LateNightWriter
I have a hat
My Not So Dirty Thirties 