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Very recently, by way of my snappy new blog, I've shared my writing with a few people and they have come to the encouraging (but, frankly, rather burdensome) conclusion that I should continue. Although I felt instantly relieved and excited, I have also gone through waves of nervous chihuahua-shakings: if only I hadn't shared.
Not so long ago, there was still time to have escaped; I could have slinked away to some night courses at
Ah, Boldness... sometimes I totally fucking hate you. Like the premise of a bad sitcom, it's as if the ambitious side of myself is some scrappy and spastic terrier I have been court-ordered to live with - one that will ruin any perfect day, charging off ahead of me, free of its leash, knocking over garbage cans and mauling postal workers. All I want is peace - some empty canvas on which to scrawl my laziness - and maybe a coffee from Starbucks (a large, please, none of this "venti" crap), but what I inevitably get is always something more to chase after, or to clean up.
And yet it was this same spazzy terrier who came to my rescue a few years ago, when I was trapped in the mine collapse of a bad job with nothing to hope for. I was living in a southern
Worse (with the admitted exception of a few good people), I was completely invisible at work. I mean like Sue-Reed-from-the- Fantastic-Four invisible. I sat through legions of meetings, unable to say anything that I was actually thinking... I guess now would be a good time to mention that I was working in a fancy real estate office, one that was largely responsible for all of the gentrification downtown. (So now you see.) I am sure that, had I even said half of what I was actually thinking at any given moment, I would have found myself two hours later shuttling my personal effects out to the car. (I can almost see the New Guy now, what with his spider plant and the cutesy picture of him and his girlfriend playing miniature golf, laughing uproariously at their shared ineptitude.) And yet - in small fits of optimism - I would still occasionally try to speak up at meetings, thinking I could productively contribute some small idea, thinking I could make a difference, thinking - like the spouse of an alcoholic - that if I cooked the steak just right that somehow the relationship would be okay.
Now, I know I am occasionally prone to exaggeration, but I swear to you that whenever I tried to say something in that meeting room, and I mean any time, people would instantly pretend to have auditory nerve damage, or to suddenly become fascinated with the dogwood outside the window. And then, after a tiny breath of a beat - just enough time for a small piece of my soul to flake off and die - they would all continue their conversation from the last thing that was said before I had spoken. I would sit there in that odd floating moment, wondering if I actually existed.
And then - without fail - five minutes later it would happen...
Someone would suddenly say the exact same thing that I had just said five minutes earlier. Every single time that this happened (and if memory serves, it was many) I would look helplessly around the room for the slightest microburst of acknowledgment - a reassuring nod, or a kittenish "hang in there" glance - but it never came. Besides, by then, tens of nanoseconds had passed and everyone else had moved on. They had other things to do, so busy were they congratulating the guy who had just presented his Big Idea, patting him on the back and high-fiving him and carrying him around the room, dumping the big orange bucket of Gatorade over him, in a manner of speaking.
I would sit there like Helen Keller at a poetry slam, wondering just what the hell it was about myself that was not telegraphing. Was I not using the English language correctly? Did I forget to use nouns? I would start to float away from the conversation then - like Leo DiCaprio in the cold north Atlantic letting go of that bobbling door at the end of Titanic. I would dissolve into the world of my notebook, drawing tiny jagged scribbles... all the while hoping they didn't notice that I was drawing tiny jagged scribbles. (God forbid, I know, but my activities might have been interpreted as not giving a shit.) I would draw a sphere, and then a cube, like I learned to do in high school. And then I would shade it, always on the left side. After a few moments I would look up, tuning back into the present, into the Echoing Canyon of Injustice, where the voices were still bouncing off the walls, saying the same thing over and over: Oh, my god, I have never - ever - in my entire life heard such a truly fantastic idea!
Right. Except that they did. Five minutes ago.
You know, for all their simple gingham innocence, the Amish are really advanced in one terrible way: they know best how to torture and kill a man. With the same elemental elegance they use to raise a barn, or to churn butter, the Amish have found that all you have to do to make a soul slowly twist and die is to excommunicate them, to let them flap soundlessly in the void. There is nothing more painful than feeling that you don't matter. And after four years of clinical trials, I am here to tell you that their method absolutely works. Is 100% effective.
. . .
Another fond sepia-toned memory of this time in my life revolved around producing roughly half a billion colorful and detailed reports for a very muckety-muck executive of this same muckety-muck company. This was a man who, under extreme duress (if they waterboarded him, say), might have been able to come up with my first name - and even then it would have been a coin-toss as to whether he actually got it right. Now mind you, this was after working for the guy for years. Passing by him in the hall, too, would leave you feeling no more reassured: as he approached, he would seize up like a man soaked in gasoline being forced to walk on hot coals. Now, I will never know for sure, but I think his secret fear was of having to say hello, of having to look you in the eye, of - egad! - having to acknowledge you as a human being. I think the contact would have ruined him, would have somehow destroyed that fragile, grumpy, baby-bird ecosystem that he had going for himself.
So this was the fun fella I spent lots of long days trying to please (why?!), producing these mammoth, but ultimately meaningless, reports. I won't get into the sad ins and outs of it, but these documents required barges of effort, and tons of photos of buildings were needed - photos that... well, guess who ended up taking them every time? It is much easier (and will help move the narrative along) if you just stop asking and accept the fact that it was always me because basically no one else in the office was going to do it, that's why. Now, no one ever quite said it, but I strongly got the impression that, for everyone else, it would be entirely beneath them to have to go out on the street and actually take pictures. It was grunt work. The one or two times I suggested to someone - as nicely as possible, mind you - that they might enjoy taking their own photos (which, after all, were for their own project and had nothing to do with me), that it was a beautiful day outside and it would make for a nice walk. Well... you would think I had asked them to go scrape barnacles off the side of a ship with a rusty tuna-can lid.
And so it was - many tearful times - that I would find myself on the streets in the dead of winter, camera poised, my fingers like hotdogs in dry ice, waiting for just the right pedestrian to wander into frame in front of one of our special buildings (preferably someone who telegraphed a jaunty propensity for spending). Sometimes I would literally be climbing onto a rooftop - in dress clothes - to get just the right shot of the city at dusk, or a particular building at a particular angle, or whatever. And then I would sprint back to the office - Jackie Joyner-Kersey-like - hoping these pictures were the ones that would please him, and work them into the report.
And yet, more often than I care to say, his assistant would briskly hand a draft page of the report back to me. Without fail, there would be a thick red line through the latest photo, with only the cryptic clue "No!" scribbled nearby. Then I would head out into the cold again, hoping that I would be more accurately psychic this time, never knowing what the first photo had either too much or not enough of. Now I know you are probably thinking that all I had to do was ask him, that I was making things harder for myself. But, trust me, this was not a guy you just popped in on, like asking a lady-friend out to lunch. His was the realm of dead stares and dismissive monosyllables, and you would often leave his office like the last survivor in a zombie movie, who finds that his best friend had just been turned: you would ease away from the scene, with halting backsteps, mentally calculating how close you would land to your all-terrain vehicle once you turned and ran, leaping through the plate glass window onto the street below.
. . .
So, anyway, that was just the photo portion of the report. Rest assured, there was a whole lot of other stultifying horribleness packed in there as well, all of which had to go through countless revisions and discussions - and more revisions. And then, at some point, finally - mercifully - it would all be done. It was over. I would sit there, giddily exhausted. I would hit "save" for the final time, and arrange a few stacks of colored post-its on my desk, making them look just so. And then, the same way every time, she would suddenly appear. The Big Guy's assistant would materialize in the darkened space of my doorway and before I can even say a word - like a cunning slave maiden - she would whisk the report away from me... like the baby Moses being run down to the river.
The next day I would arrive at work, all crises ended, and the silence would set in, like water seeping into the cracks of an abandoned foundation. Weeds would grow. Time would pass and life would go on, and I would wonder in small moments about my little report: where is he, how is he doing? I would hope he is happy, wherever he is. But word would never come. I knew I had created something really rather super-great (or, well, at least I think I had), but I would inevitably end up feeling as if I had painted a Picasso and then immediately fed it into a paper shredder. I just never heard anything about it, ever again.
One day, months after one of these phantom births, I was at my desk (which, I might mention, was more like a countertop in windowless supply room), feigning interest in something, anything, when all of a sudden there came a knock. I turned around to see a face I might have passed once or twice before in the hall - he was from the department downstairs, which might have been called Yet Another Department of All Things Boring, or somesuch - I was never good keeping track of all these corporate names and titles. So, anyway, this guy just stood there, staring at me, a little too intently for my taste. And then - right then and there - he just proceeded to open his mouth and say all of these magical words to me...
He said he wanted to tell me that they (whoever they were)... "they" had all been having a meeting, during which my report was presented. He asked, in a hushed and reverent tone, if it was actually truly me, the one who had created it, looking - but for the discount business suit - like one of those monks charged with finding the next Dalai Lama. I didn't know what to do. So I just sat there for the next five minutes as this guy positively beamed and just showered me with petals of praise.
Like I often am in this kind of scenario, I reacted inwardly with pigtailed giddiness and outwardly with just the flattest of stares. I have always had this problem: I don't know what to do with compliments. Most of the time, even when I am at my most calm and collected, I am positively dying for positive feedback of any kind, whatsoever. I am very much a tropical plant in this regard, requiring monsoons of kudos to stay healthy and blooming.
But I am also terrified of compliments. There was this horrible - really truly horrible - reality show a few years back now where they auditioned all these people for "talent" - and then - week after week - encouraged them through round after round of competitions. But what they forgot to tell these sad and defenseless people was that they were picking the worst singers, the worst dancers. It was only revealed at the end of the final competition that it had all been a "joke". This was on live TV, mind you, in front of millions of viewers. How these people did not commit suicide I will never know. Thankfully, the show only lasted one season. But I think it was the worst thing I have ever seen on TV, because it was my total personal nightmare.
And this is how I feel about compliments. I feel like I am always potentially on that TV show. That the walls will slide away, the stage lights will come up, and the cameras will zoom in towards me as the audience is revealed. Can you believe he believed it? they would holler as they elbowed one another, laughing.
Now, I know I can be ever so slightly mistrustful. Suffice it to say I am working on it.
So anyway The Guy From Downstairs, as quickly as he had appeared, was suddenly gone. I sat there in silence, holding his compliment in my lap like a dead fish. An odd sensation arose then as I realized that all of the work I had been doing for Mr. Muckety-muck, all of this time, was actually seeing the light of day somewhere - others were seeing it. All of my children were leading productive lives in faraway lands, maybe not the lives I would have chosen, but they were OK. And with this thought there suddenly erupted a radically unfamiliar feeling: the tiniest sense of pride, like a lemon seed sprouting up above the rim of its styrofoam cup.
. . .
So this was the place I was in at the time that my terrier began to stir, and to growl. Despite my one wonderful little movie moment, the growling lately was coming more and more. That scruffy guy of mine, he knew - better even than I - that this was not the best use of my existence, of my ticking time here on earth. Basically, I was killing myself for people who would not have shed a tear if I suddenly dropped dead - they would probably have just stepped over me on their way out to lunch... lunch at a fusion restaurant. I was in this very upscale company and yet, for all the hard work that I did, I still walked into that office every day feeling I was viewed no differently than an unwed mother plastic-spooning her Peanut Buster Parfait at the Dairy Queen. I suppose I could have just pulled the plug on my crappy PC, gathered up my up my plastic owl and my dinosaur poster, and walked out the door. But, really, Kids with paper routes probably had more money in the bank than I did back then (although not much has changed in that category - ha ha). I just didn't know what to do or where to go. Frankly - I was a frustrated mess. Had I written my story back then it would have been called, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Swings," and on the cover would have been the image of a parakeet, hanging from a noose.
But this is why Maya Angelou is on Oprah and I'm not.
But honestly, despite the tendency to break myself down like a used cardboard box, there really truly is always (in some great subterranean cistern) this bubblingly potent optimism that I have in reserve. It's not a sunny-Sunday buttercup-yellow form of hope - god knows I am only momentarily capable of that variety; it is much more like pewtery rainclouds that swell and then release, dousing the desert. The water, like a flash flood, wipes the landscape clean, but it also brings new life...
I knew I had to make a change, but I didn't know how. But my little guy had been keeping an eye out for me, scouting the trail on up ahead of me, sniffing in the dark, looking for the slightest whiff of air or oxygen, anything that would indicate finding my way back to the surface, back to a life that - frankly - I never quite had, but that - by this time - I sure as hell was ready to start living.
The light of the tunnel that he finally led me out of revealed another state. I mean literally another state: Massachusetts. A whole new place to live, and to explore, and a bazillion new and friendly people I would never have known, all moving through brightly-colored days, with none of the repressed anger or soullessness I was surrounded with in that bad land behind me. All of this new life in this new land was due to him. But I guess that it also helped, too, that I finally started turning down my inner iPod enough to be able to hear him. Like someone slowly waking in a burning house, his barks of alarm had been going off for a whole lot longer than I had actually been hearing. But thank god I finally did hear. I wouldn't be typing this if I didn't.
I didn't used to believe it, but that guy looks out for me, 24-7. Yet, even to this day, I still often don't listen, and he gets really quite angry, barking wildly, and I end up yelling at him, "What, goddamnit, WHAT?!!!" But most of time, we get along, and I have learned to trust him. Best of all, he has also learned over time to sniff out and growl ominously at anyone who appears on the Universal Registry of Bad Apples: anyone who maybe has a few too many ice cream scoops of The Crazy in them, or who appears friendly but is actually so invisibly negative that they slowly melt you, like a chocolate bunny in the microwave. My early-warning system, he spots all these problems for me from 20 miles away.
I am so glad that he woke me, a little over two years ago now. I would certainly have died back there, in that windowless office with the dripping ceiling tile. OK, I know: not died, per se... that's melodramatic. But, certainly, I would at least still be there withering. Looking back, it really was just in time, though. Because, you know, when it comes to your life, any amount of wasted time is a form of death - it is life that you are just never ever going to get back. So when I see others now, in similar circumstances of blandness or emotional devastation or just plain horribleness or whatever, I offer the simplest of advice. It is what has worked for me. Do what you have to do, I say. Life is short, I say. Listen to your inner terrier and just, please, wake the fuck up. He's barking for you; he wants you to live, I tell them, when nothing else will work.
Although I tend to leave the terrier part out.
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