emotion

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8
Aug 10

Daddy

This was the last time I spoke to my father.

For the longest time, I called him Daddy — like a Southerner, like a child. Not consciously.

I didn’t speak to him for almost a year — until two weeks ago –

I was at home rehearsing my essay for the NPR show State of the Reunion. The producers were coming over to record the piece. I’ve never done radio before, so I was nervous. I’ve been busy, so I didn’t have a lot of time to write it — between anxiety over how to perform it and anxiety over what I had written (are these jokes as sharp as they could be, do they make me seem like a bitch, is it too revealing, could the whole thing be tighter, funnier, more cohesive ….) I was feeling nervous. But also excited — NPR! That’s pretty fucking cool.

Then I got a text from my real dad (I call him my real dad to distinguish him from my stepdad, who was there for me growing up and whom I adore) — whining about how he didn’t know what he did but didn’t I think I had made my point –

Then the NPR producers arrived.

I had to record my essay — which I was already nervous about — with this aching, anxious knot in my stomach in the shape of my father.

The recording went ok — not perfect, but it was fine. I spent the rest of the day dreading the confrontation I knew had to happen. I couldn’t let him just keep interrupting my life like that — it’s like he has a radar for when I’m starting to break free of him, so he can swoop in and suck me back into the tar that is his emotional mess.

I called him. Everything in me didn’t want to. Everything in me has resisted writing this post since this happened almost two weeks ago — but I don’t feel like it would be fair to this blog to write about deciding not to speak to him last year and then not write about speaking to him again. It would feel dishonest.

He was at a restaurant. I told him if this was a bad time, we could talk later. He said no, now that he’s gotten me he wanted to do it then. He stepped outside.

He started — he went off on how he didn’t know what he did but didn’t I think it was wrong to go so long without speaking to your own father, hadn’t I made my point, what point was I trying to make anyway? Hadn’t he been punished enough? That kind of thing. I let him talk.

Then I talked:

Your not loving me — your abandoning me over and over and over again — your compulsive selfishness — has left me unable to connect with anyone.

I said this between sobs — I was crying so hard I almost vomited –

I struggle — hard — with depression — because of you, because of what you did —

I can’t have relationships. I try and fail — I can barely even have friendships — this started with you –

I can’t afford to have you in my life. The last time we talked, I was calling to tell you I was going to withdraw my 401k, which was my only security in the world — and I really didn’t want to do that. And it was only $9,000 — $6,000 after taxes. I was hoping you would say “don’t do that. I’ll give you the money” which you could have easily done. Instead you gave me this awful speech about you didn’t know why I thought I would ever succeed as a writer — how long would it take before I gave up — how long have I been out here and when would I wake up and realize it wasn’t going to happen and come home — what was it going to take to make me wake up to the wrongness of my choices —

That was already a low, terrible moment for me — and you took it as the chance to kick me while I was down — and while you’ve done that before, in other areas of my life, it was the fact that it was about my career, the most important thing to me, that finally made me realize that I couldn’t afford to let you do that to me anymore. The biggest part of what I do is maintaining the emotional energy and momentum and courage to keep moving forward no matter what, and I cannot afford to have my own father planting doubt in my head —

But the worst part is — you already succeeded. You planted the doubt about who I am, as a person. When I was a child. You changed who I am, as a human being. I can’t separate who I am out from what you did. You warped what I became. I’ve tried, hard — and I continue trying, because I have a lot of hope and faith — but I keep running into the road block that is you.

I went on. But that was the gist of what I said.

He responded — you are 100% right and I am 100% wrong. I was very bitter and very selfish, and you suffered for it. I regret what I did. It’s not that I didn’t love you — I didn’t love you the right way.

He said more, but that was the gist of what he said. You might think that sounds like progress. But my father is a person who says whatever he thinks the other person wants to hear, and he never means any of it. He loves drama, which is why I think he loved to hear me violently sobbing and having this huge confrontation — it satisfied that craving in him. Unable to feel real emotions, he thinks these dramatic upsets means he’s interacting emotionally. He mirrors the people he’s with — so he basically just mirrored back to me what I was saying, in a very dramatic and insincere way. I have enough experience dealing with this man to know not to believe any of it.

I told him I wasn’t sure I could let him back into my life. But that one thing I was sure of — he was absolutely not allowed to criticize me ever again.

He asked if I was prepared to make the same promise — if I was prepared not to criticize him anymore. Caught off guard, I agreed –

Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I realize how absurd this is. Routinely in our interactions, he’s pointed out that he has forgiven me, so I should forgive him. I have done nothing to injure him — he has nothing to forgive me for. He injured me, greatly. For someone to commit evil and then to say that you can’t criticize him for it is just so twisted. I’m not going to hold that promise.

Eventually he said he needed to go back to his dinner but he felt a lot better about having talked to me — he just wanted to hear my voice. I hung up leaving things ambiguous about whether we would talk again.

Then I cried, a lot.

I had plans to see Inception with my friend S that night. I cried during Inception, during the father moments.

At the bar at the Arclight, I told S what had happened. I told her “he said ‘it’s not that I didn’t love you — I didn’t love you the right way.’” And I started sobbing — surrounded by strangers at the Arclight bar. S asked the bartender for napkins, and the woman looked embarrassed for me and said she didn’t have any.

S was kind and supported me. I went home and cried more, cried these last two weeks. Cried every time I’ve tried to write this post.

A few days ago I got a letter from my dad saying that he would stay out of my life and that I could solve all my problems if I accepted Jesus as my savior. He never used to be a religious man — until he took up with his 29-year-old Brazilian evangelist maid, who’s now his fiancee. My dad is impressionable, influenced by the people he’s surrounded by, whether they be crooks or evangelists.

Even if my dad does stay out of my life, which is doubtful, he’s in it at the cellular level. I’m having a very difficult time separating who I am from him and how I feel about myself because of him. I don’t know that I’ll ever be free of him. But I’m trying. Hard.

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3
Jul 10

Men

On the bottom of my Writers Guild application, it said “Other Interests or Specialized Knowledge.” I put — “Men.”

This is gonna be one of those posts that I feel like I shouldn’t write. Which is what tells me I should. I’m a novelist. I push myself further, always. I go — there. I search the edges of my peripheral vision — what am I ignoring? What don’t I want to see? What am I blind to? This is my subject.

Men are my subject.

The subject of my life.

As much as I go on about women, about feminism, what’s important to us — I talk about women. I think about men.

What allows me to think this much about men is the disconnect I feel with most people. If I were connected to them, I wouldn’t have the mental energy to think about them so much.

I try stuff out — this is what keeps me flexible. I give myself permission to try stuff. To embarrass myself, to be wrong. To feel shame.

I started this post weeks ago.

I think about sex all day long.

But I’ve been burned, like a child on a hot stove. I think about it obsessively because I’m afraid of having it.

I live on an island. Men live on another island, where I can see them and long for them and never ever reach them.

I think of the relationships I’ve had. What they all had in common — distance. Even when I was with them, I could never reach them. They were estranged from me in every way –

These men spoke to me because they had what I craved — distance. The illusion of a relationship without the terror of closeness.

The only way I know how to be with a man is when he’s abandoning me. If he’s already leaving me, before I’ve even met him, that’s when I know I’m home.

I make eyes all day long. With men. I make eyes and think about sucking their dicks, think about the worst things — and then

I’m not interested in married guys or guys in relationships — they have to be near yet far. They have to seem like I can have them, like there is no impossible gulf between us. Attraction isn’t something you think about — it’s something you feel. I learned this game early.

Do they know, when we’re trading eyefucks, how little this has to do with them and how much it has to do with my life? Do they know this is my life — that I was robbed, and now I spend my days making eyes at strangers instead of being loved?

I want to be loved, and I don’t know how.

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3
Jun 10

I Don’t Remember Who ‘We’ Were

Freshman year at Princeton, we were going to New York a lot because it was just an hour by train, and because the little shuttle train called the Dinky dropped off about a block through the Junior Slums from our dorm room, it was literally an hour and a half door-to-door, Witherspoon Hall to Penn Station.

I don’t remember who ‘we’ were.

Could have been a few different people on that trip — we were there for different reasons. I was probably doing something impossibly glamorous like visiting a real New York artist’s studio. Somehow we wound up catching different trains home.

Was I supposed to meet them under that sign with the spinning destinations? Was I late and that’s why I was alone in Penn Station in the middle of the night?

I think I had my book bag, like an anchor.

I was 18 and new to New York. I was afraid I would be robbed the minute I dropped my guard — maybe I was already being robbed, pickpocketed, or would, and not even know it. That is the bag I packed with me to New York that night.

All Princeton kids carry book-bags around at all times — jammed full to prove we were working or about to work or capable of working or at least thinking about working all the time. Our work was to think. We thought about big, important stuff. That was our jobs. Your book-bag was your guard against recriminations of the world — you’re not working hard enough. Not enough thoughts.

I didn’t want them to take it from me. I guarded it.

The next train to Princeton wasn’t for another hour.

I made my way into the urine-soaked, fluorescent bathroom. Metal ant-theft purse clasps. Signs warning you to watch your belongings. The scattered contents of a woman’s purse on the floor.

I tried the first stall. Blood all over the toilet steal and broken crack vials scattered on the floor. Pushed open the second door on a shrieking transexual clown. Ran for the handicapped stall — chased by the clown. Slammed the door on his hand as he tried to force it open. Locked the door and backed away from it, terrified. But I still had to pee like a racehorse. Dropped my stuff down, pulled down my pants and squatted over the filthy toilet seat –

A crack vial rolled from beneath the other stall and hit my foot –

The clown shrieked and stretched his hand after it, groping — touching my foot –

Then he squeezed his head and shoulders underneath the partition, going after the crack, smiling up at my naked cunt –

I kicked him and screamed –

I yanked up my pants and pressed myself against the wall. The clown stood on the toilet in the next stall and looked down over the partition, screaming at me to give him his medicine back –

I kicked his crack back over to his stall. I couldn’t hear what he was doing in there. I was afraid he was going to attack me the minute I opened my stall door. I didn’t know whether he had left or not. I waited an interminable amount of time, then I busted the door open and ran out of the bathroom all the way across the length of Penn Station to the retail safety of the magazine shop. Shaking, I flipped through magazines without seeing them. I looked over my shoulder — I thought the clown might still be chasing me. Maybe this was one of those movies where the end-game is destroying the clown by blowing up Penn Station. I flipped through magazines without seeing them for the hour till my train to Princeton. I felt guilty and dumb for being in Penn Station alone in the middle of the night. Was I brazen or a hayseed? I was new to New York. I probably didn’t tell my friends.

I shook all the way till I got on the train, maybe till my dorm room bed. I didn’t want to be robbed. I was 18.

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26
May 10

You Know More Than You Know

When I was a teenager, I went with my parents to visit the beautiful new farmhouse of some of their friends. The property was idyllic — on a creek, in a valley, with cleared, fenced horse pastures, horses, a large finished barn a little ways from the Victorian house.  The couple had been together for almost twenty years and had two happy children. Together they showed us around the house.

The house had been decorated in the wife’s style — lots of Victorian stuff everywhere, feminine — it matched the Victorian outside of the farmhouse. They joked about how the house was her domain — and his shit was out in the barn. Sure enough, he had renovated the barn and built a beautiful multi-room office and den adjoining the horse stables. That’s where he kept his stuff and whiled away his time.

They seemed exuberant about all their new stuff. Happy.

As we drove away, I told my parents they were going to break up.

My mom and stepdad thought I was nuts. That I was being negative and imagining stuff. When they asked me why I thought that, I told them –

There was no room for him in that house.

It wasn’t something I thought about consciously. I didn’t arrive at their home intending to analyze their marriage. I just moved through the tour — and listened to what they said — and got this overwhelming feeling. She’s pushing him out. There’s no room for him here. I didn’t think it. I felt it.

And by the time we drove away, the feeling was so overwhelming, I knew they were going to break up.

They broke up a couple years later. We always know more than we know.

We’re like fly-paper as we move through the world: we pick up everything. We’re stickier than internet memes, as thin-skinned as newborns. Stuff bombards us — and we can’t possibly notice or act on it all the time. But it enters us, it settles in us like heavy metals in our blood, our organs. And when a given piece reaches a critical mass — a clot forms and breaks free and bumps us — the balance shifts — suddenly we’re struck with –

There’s no room for him in that house.

We know more than we know. Finding out what it is we know is a matter of distracting the conscious mind and seeing where your attention shifts. What non-sequitors pop up? What are you reminded of, out of nowhere? These things seem like they have nothing to do with each other. When looked at together, they make meaning. They tell you what you know.

One way to look at a story is an effort to distract the focus of your audience in order to make meaning out of the pieces that emerge when they’re not looking. By the end, the audience knows more than they know.

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16
May 10

Audacity

Hesitant, cautious, careful, wondering — no one gives a shit. I can get that anywhere, from anyone. From everyone.

I want to see audacity.

People warn you not to be audacious for fear you’ll get hurt, you’ll look foolish, you’ll hurt them. They speak to their own fear, to the voice that says they must follow the rules. They don’t. You don’t. Rules exist for other people’s convenience, not yours. They’re there to comfort and guide those who don’t know how, or don’t have the balls to create rules of their own.

Somewhere along the way we absorbed limits. This catalogue of stuff I’ve already seen in T.V. and movies is allowable to pitch, on the list. These stories and images and references are on the approved list. This is what we can draw from. We stay within these limits so we won’t be laughed at, so we won’t be challenged. So when we’re in the room and we pitch gay robots and people sneer or laugh we can feel okay about ourselves knowing they already did gay robots on Battlestar or wherever the fuck. So I know I’m not a complete fucking loon.

But you know what, they hired you to be a complete fucking loon. I mean, not completely. You have to understand the map before you veer off it. And if you’ve got a map that’s working, no need to bring in a new map. Especially if you’re working for someone else. But no matter what the map says, you always have the option to grab the wheel and drive off-road. Don’t be safe. Be audacious. That’s what people remember — both people who hire and people who watch. They — we — don’t care about how well you stay within the lines, follow form. That does not interest me at all. What we crave is stuff that thrills us. What thrills us is when you break rules. When you get big and then you fucking explode and take the ship down with you, leaving us feeling real fear and empowerment at once — those were all his options. Now what? That’s what storytelling is.

Know your craft, know the form you’re writing, the genre, make sure we’re rooted and hooked from minute one and then — blow shit up in our faces. Set up our expectations and defy them. Slow down when it’s time to speed up. Throw away jokes, as Jane Espenson says. Go psychological when all convention says it’s time for action. Surprise us. Be brave. Be bold. Shoot your wad — the more you give, the more you’ll get.

As the firemen say — the hotter you are, the faster we’ll come.

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14
May 10

Themes Emerge

Themes exist in our world.

Being awake means noticing when themes emerge.

Some people argue that invoking theme in your work is artificial — theme is a by-product of the story you’re telling, and your audience will see what they want in it.

I argue that watching and tracing the ways in which themes emerge — in stories, out there in the world — is what storytelling is.

This is an anxious time for T.V writers — staffing season, when the network shows hire their writers. This morning a friend let me know that my manager’s client’s show had just gotten picked up, and his agent told him they were desperate for women writers. I asked my manager about it, and she said not true, they’ve already got the women they want. And they’re all lawyers. Even the staff writer they want is a lawyer. The janitor’s a lawyer. The dog is a lawyer. Ok. Got it. I should have gone to law school to be a T.V. writer.

And I’m anxious about other stuff too. I want to be loved.

I know a piece — whether it’s a pilot, a blog post, a joke, whatever — feels like one of mine when it starts dovetailing –

Writing I want to be loved just now brought me close, after roaming on this post for two days –

I went to a teahouse in Koreatown and back to my couch, changed clothes three times. I’ve eaten and eaten — am I getting fatter or is that another feeling I’m dodging, that wants to speak?

I abandon most of these posts. I write far more of them than I publish.

The word “abandoned” is such a fucking cliche. I hate saying it, and I wouldn’t if it weren’t such an accurate word. It’s such a joke now to talk about people with abandonment issues, but how do you explain people who roam, whose thoughts are restless, who can’t or won’t focus until they finally write the words “I want to be loved.” And when you do , a fresh wave rises –

I vowed the other day to be funnier in these posts. They’re getting Czech arthouse dreary. Next thing you know I’m going to have a table of indigent old people sitting around cracking hard-boiled eggs until one of them gets dragged away by the state interrogators.

So the anxiety is not free-floating. It’s specific, and it emerges. It shape-shifts. It takes the form of lawyers getting all the T.V. writer jobs. And it takes the form of my hunger. Of not knowing where my next meal’s coming from, if it’s coming at all. My lack of faith. I don’t know if I’ll have a job, and I don’t know if I’ll be loved. I don’t know when I’ll find out.

Themes emerge. I knew I wanted to write about theme, because I loved what John August said about it here, and blogging is a conversation. But when I started this post, I didn’t know how I was going to write about theme — in what context, with what examples. You start, you have an idea in mind, you find places in your story to bounce that idea around. Your story becomes an echo chamber, and you carve out more and more interesting folds in the walls. The tracing of the bounce becomes your theme.

In the story here, I wanted to write about theme, I wanted to make it immediate and personal and emotional. So that narrowed the frame greatly, because what’s going on today? Anxiety. But I could have told any number of stories about anxiety and staffing season, anxiety and love — it becomes a story about theme when you draw the parallel between them, waiting, the hunger for them both, the jar of sunflower seed butter I won’t stop eating — a jar that never fills my hunger. The way I can’t stop touching my belly. What connects T.V.-writing-lawyers to the touching of my belly.

The joke I wrote on Twitter last week about douchey guys who try to worm their way in by reassuring you about your body — and I’m like, reassure me about my career, jerk-off. This joke hits deep with me, where stuff hurts.

Hey, I put a joke on here — and proved I’m completely incapable of being funny here. This must be my ponderous, serious space, like when Americans go to Europe and feel we have to prove ourselves. This is my Europe. God help you all.

For theme to emerge, give it a space, a context, two adjoining contexts, and then pop your idea inside like a pinball. Watch it bounce around. What emerges will be a tracing that’s dense, provocative, layered. This is your theme.

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9
May 10

Clutter, Emptiness

I struggle with clutter, emptiness.

At times my mind feels cluttered. Thoughts pile up like one of those 40-car wrecks on the Interstate. There’s poetry in the crash, but the thoughts are difficult to separate and impossible to drive away. It’s why I’m attracted to stories with layers, ruffles, depth, holes: these are stories about me, about what it’s like to struggle with clutter. What’s it like to have more thoughts than space to think them. That’s what feelings are.

I often wake in the morning with some new idea — send that novel excerpt to my agents, dig that old Calvin Klein bag out and get it sewn up, go back to sleep.

Yesterday morning I woke with the thought of an empty room. Like, a Zen temple. Empty. Fragrant and far from here. It felt safe and comforting, and I returned to it throughout the day.

I spent yesterday cleaning out my files, which proved emotional. I have a meeting Monday with my agents and manager to strategize what I’m going to write next, and I was partly going through just to find all my uncompleted projects, idea files, notes. I was happy and dismayed to see how many there were, ideas and projects — happy because I’ll have a lot to pitch, dismayed because this material represents years of my life that could have been spent earning money for this same output –

This is what I mean by clutter. This is in my head, so it’s in my files. It’s in my living room. It accumulates, in a pile of twenty scripts on the dining room floor. In drifts of post-its covered with notes from many different projects. I have trouble letting go of things. Because without my things, the feeling is — I won’t have more things. I’ll be left with what I have. Emptiness.

I am rich in emptiness. So I gather, I accumulate — thoughts, notes, clutter — in order to fill that. My things make me feel like I have — something.

But clutter takes from me, because what I am is — empty. Clutter surrounds me, like fat, like drugs, keeps me from expressing what I really am. Empty.

The more days I wake with the thought of an empty Zen room, the more I can hold that, the safer I’ll feel letting go of my things. Accepting that all I am is — empty.

Clutter is denial, resistance. Emptiness is what I am.

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4
May 10

Resistance Is Futile

Man. People do this every day? Really? Okay.

Forcing myself to write here regularly, whether I’m inspired or not, is good for me because that’s good writing practice.

Not wanting to write or not having anything to write about can be a sign of resistance — there is something there but for whatever reason you don’t want it to be there.

So when you develop the practice of writing every day, it no longer matters whether it’s there or not, resisting or not. You do it first, force the ideas to follow you.

We lead. By putting pen to paper, thoughts to words. The world and its ideas follows. We lead. They follow.

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2
May 10

You’re Entitled To The Work

I got my first book agent when I was 25.

What followed was a few years of the publishing industry stringing me along, keeping me on the hook with the hope that my novel would be published if I would revise. It ended in wasted years of my life that could have been better spent elsewhere. I wish I hadn’t spent so long revising one book because editors and agent told me if I did it would be published. I wish I hadn’t spent so long living in poverty. Because that did something to me, that imprinted on me in a way I can’t shake. I wish that hadn’t been acceptable to me. I wish that for myself as a child. Most of all — I wish I could let this go.

I tend to lapse into self-pity.

When I see others whom I perceive have had it easier than me, my habit is to tell myself the story of that injustice over and over, rehearse it. Going “see?” is an excuse for why I’m not doing better, evidence that injustice exists in the world, or … I don’t know what it is. A bruise I can’t stop touching. My fear is that by constantly being on the look-out for these stories, feeling them so keenly and obsessing about what they mean for me and my life –

I create this. My behavior conforms to my expectations. I am so keenly sensitive to this that I subtly reproduce it. That’s the working theory anyhow.

“But why has is it taken me so much longer than so many other people to succeed?” whines the childish, self-pitying voice.

I quiet that voice by reminding myself of a mantra I read August Wilson posted above his desk. I find this mantra comforting and remind myself of it often, because no matter how hard this life might feel to be — I get to spend my life writing. I create works of art. I keep my mind loose and uninhibited because I like it that way. Because the work likes it that way. I have work that gives my life meaning and that is in itself meaningful. And all I have to do to earn the joy I get from doing it is to do it.

What August Wilson posted above his desk is a Buddhist mantra –

You’re entitled to the work, not the reward.

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29
Mar 10

Teach Empathy

I have a day job: I teach empathy.

I write action scripts and I write comedy and I write novels and I do all this shit but the reality is — my job is to teach empathy.

Story’s job is to allow us to feel the feelings of others. Our job is to craft the story so that we see through another’s eyes, so that, given enough context and circumstances and choices, we understand how it feels to be another human being. Stories teach empathy.

Your job is to teach empathy.

Even in the darkest, most life-denying piece — you set up a world that helps your audience feel despair. So that when they leave the theater and encounter a person who lives in despair, they see themselves in that person. They’ve had that person’s experience, in the world of your darkest, most life-denying piece. You’ve given them a touchstone of recognition, added to their emotional lexicon. You’ve taught empathy.

Every kind of story teaches us empathy — comedy, drama, light, dark. What matters is we feel what someone else feels. Every kind of story has an emotional heart, a character whose feelings we make our own.

Failures of empathy underlie most of the problems we face as human beings. Sharing stories with one another — teaching each other empathy — can set us straight.

What kind of asshole am I? I sit around lecturing people they don’t have enough empathy.

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