Writing With Gratitude : No Snarking Allowed
Lately I feel I am surrounded by a sea of bitchiness, an ugliness that rears itself up like an angry animal.
Six months ago I decided to really "become" a writer. I'd always been a scribbler, but I'd never taken myself seriously and put myself in the position to allow others to read what I wrote. At first it was more like a grand experiment: it felt like the time I was five and decided I could fly, jumping out of a tree. I expected it to end the same way: the startled realization I could not rise and two skinned knees. I figured the worst that could happen would be that someone would gently take me aside and kindly explain that there had been some terrible mistake, that my writing wasn't that good after all.
Lots of people did take me aside to have conversations. Gently, no. Passionately, yes. Conversations about words, writing, my writing. Conversations that illuminated my days and kept me awake at night, typing away at my keyboard before I had to go back to my day job. Conversations that told me I was good, my stories poignant and meaningful.
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photo credit Wiki Commons/Vercer
It felt like the first time I ever went skydiving: that brief moment before the jump. Scary. Exhilarating. Except instead of a few precious minutes, it was a feeling that stayed way past the jump.
If you've never been skydiving, let me tell you this: at the very last minute, you have to push yourself to jump--or someone else does. You fight yourself until the last second to actually leap into midair, because the there's a big truth staring you in the face: you may die doing it. It's an unavoidable fact. It's very reasonable you that would change your mind.
Jumping out of a plane is a lot like writing for others: it requires you to be unrealistic, illogical, and allow appearances to take second place to the experience itself. (Skydiving requires an awful fat-suit, and when you land, your hair will be permanently tangled and your body will be painted with bruises. Writing requires sitting on your rump the entire weekend, your pajamas stretching to accommodate your growing waistline from lack of exercise, your hair unwashed, your face streaked with tears after getting a critique back from that idiot you sent your piece off to. Why did you send it to them? You're an idiot, too.)
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Years ago, after having had a hysterectomy and ovarian cancer, I made a bucket list. First on the list: go skydiving in the Nevada desert. Why skydiving, I don't know. Perhaps it was hidden ardent desire to break both my ankles. Why the Nevada desert, I can't tell you either. As a child sitting in the backseat of my family Honda as we drove through the Nevada on road trips, I always thought of that state as a place "on the way to somewhere else". Yet in between gas station stops and horrid all you can eat buffets, I saw glimpses of the desert from my window: stretches of scrub and nothingness, sunrises and sunsets, an occasional lone mobile home, perched impossibly alone. I spent those road trips imagining myself living in those little rusted trailers, living on canned baked beans and fighting rattlesnakes with relish.
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Cancer made me slow down. It made me feel three things: invincible, grateful, and profoundly alone. Invincible because I survived. Grateful because I got a second chance at life. Alone because no one around me understood what hell I had been through. I'd kept my cancer a secret from most people, not from shame but because I felt it was a burden. I felt I had to handle it on my own. Perhaps I'd been like that about most things in my life up until that point, feeling isolation was the best armor.
But then cancer surprised me with gifts, too. It led me to the desert of Nevada, where I jumped out a plane, jumped into the landscape that had always been on the way to somewhere else. Jumped not once, not twice, but twenty six times, until I did break both my ankles. Somehow I didn't mind: it was a privilege to break both of one's ankles after having have been told your life will be short. It was supposed to be over and yet there I was, surviving, thriving even.
Think about it: you're in the desert, it's beautiful, you just jumped out a plane, you've got two broken ankles. It's all wonderful: you're alive, here, feeling everything. Grateful. Grateful even for pain and for the irony of it all, grateful for the adventure.
That grateful feeling has never left me. There's not a moment I don't think: I'm not supposed to be here. My life was almost erased. I was supposed to disappear, vanish, melt away. But every morning I wake up, I think to myself, I AM HERE.
I get up grateful. I go through my day grateful. I go to bed grateful. I even wake up in the middle of the night grateful. Each birthday I add another year that wasn't supposed to be there.
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Yet, since I've decided to be a writer--a "real" writer, who doesn't just write secret stories for herself, but shares them with the world--I've found my pattern of gratitude rudely interrupted quite often. Not by my own thoughts or ramblings, but by the rants of other writers. Writers who seem to live in an alternate universe next to mine, where everything is terrible, everything is going wrong, and they feel the need to complain.
Since my decision to be committed to the craft, I've made more effort to read other writers: blogs, columns, articles, short stories. And although I've found a myriad of gems, I've found a lot of trash, too. I've spent the last six months religiously reading everything and everyone, stunned by their wordsmith ways. But many times I've been profoundly saddened to see it wasted on bitchiness and ugly anger pointed at whatever they have found unjust. Nasty snarkiness which takes away from the pristine shining quality of the words they use, making them disappear, leaving red welts in their place. Blisters on the page, whippings across the internet.
Reading these writers has made me wonder: where's the gratefulness? Where's the incredible disbelief that we get to be here, we get another day? Where's the joy in taking words and putting them together to make something profound, glowing, astonishing? Truth, too--even the awful almost unbearable truths, can be written about with graciousness. It stands to reason then that even the most daily complaints can move into a sphere of beauty, without losing their weightiness.
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When I was young girl and I finally learned to read, words changed my world. Up until then, my life had been one of stark contrasts: a series of patterns and magical protections, which I hoped would protect me from whatever violence lay waiting for me at home. It was a dark and frightening time, and my magical thinking never worked. But words became a reliable respite from both terrors and adults, and I came to worship the books that I read. They gave powerful totems, dreams which took me places, wishes that carried me into places that were waiting outside. Even to hold a good book in my hand was charged and mystical act. A well written book could change the view, change a mind, change me.
I still have this reverence for words now. I don't think they should be ill-used, particularly by people who actually know how to make them turn into extraordinary expressions of the human experience. I think writers forget that their words don't end with simply putting them on the page. They never end. They go on and on, forever, touching everyone and everything in their path.
It's not that I disagree with writing about the negative side of life. I've had my share of injustices and sorrow. But I think that there's a call to be heeded when one writes, a call that requires the writer to think deeply about the lasting quality of what they write. It's absolutely true that the world is somewhat shattered, a million pieces of glass on the ground that we are all stepping around somewhat gingerly. But at the same time, it's not. At least, not in my alternate universe, where everything is still a privilege, where humility takes it's place, where gratitude reigns.
Be grateful. You're here, you get another day. It's amazing. Words you write should be worthy of that miracle. Writing is a holy act. Living is a holy act, too.
Thanks for reading. Happy 2014! It's going to be a year worthy of the most marvelous words and stories I can offer. More to come in the next few days...
Amy Gigi Alexander
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