After enjoying many Jordan Peterson psychology lectures on YouTube, I finally took his Big Five Personality test and signed up for his Self-Authoring Suite, which guides people through writing about their past, present, and future with the goal of learning from the past and present to plan for a better future. Since this in November (and some of us have NaNoWriMo goals to accomplish), the Self-Authoring Suite seemed the perfect birthday present to myself. (I will admit to “opening” my present before my actual birthday.)
Before writing about the present, I was prompted to examine both my faults and virtues. I wasn’t excited about either one. To quote Jo March from the movie Little Women (the line isn’t in the book), “I’m hopelessly flawed.” But instead of inwardly recoiling from a list of my flaws or ducking my head in embarrassment at a list of my virtues, I was able to clinically acknowledge them in the first steps. There was no sense of shame or embarrassment or guilt. The fact that these items were on the list meant that others have them too. And there is strength, and perhaps humility, in numbers. As I read the list of virtues associated with Extroversion and Introversion, I was supposed to select a certain number of virtues that characterize me or are important to me. From my experience with personality tests, I knew exactly where the “extrovert” characteristics ended and the “introvert” characteristics began. I cringed as I saw one of my main characteristics in the introvert section. I struggled to choose the right number of virtues since many of my main characteristics were in the “introvert” section. I read the extrovert section again and again, hoping in vain to find something resembling me up there. Then I had an Oh! moment. The instructions finally bore through the mental barrier society helped build in my mind. I was looking at the list wrong. I double-checked the instructions. Yes, it said to select from the list of virtues. Everything on the list was a virtue. All of the things at the bottom of the list that were clearly part of introversion were . . . virtues. Even though Susan Cain’s Quiet certainly helped me feel less apologetic about my introversion, even though I know that God makes extroverts and introverts alike and uses both equally, even though I’m actually very close to the middle of the extroversion/introversion scale, I still view most of my introverted characteristics as faults. I still feel wrong for not being able to accept every social invitation. I still feel guilty for needing to be home alone to rest. Excited about my breakthrough, I told a more introverted friend about my moment. She stared at me blankly before asking why I thought being the characteristics I mentioned were bad things. Not being American, she never learned that being an introvert was something that needed to be cured.
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Whenever I go to the beach, a part of me is aware that I’m visiting a mermaid graveyard. Perhaps it’s been a while since you read the original little sea-maid story and have forgotten that the sea people dissolve into sea foam when they die. The little mermaid’s dream of becoming human started long before saving the human prince—it began when her grandmother told her the merpeople’s fate. Her dream to become human was really longing to have a soul.
Naturally, whenever I wade at the beach with new friends, I remind them that the sea foam rushing around our feet is former sea maids. But there is another part to that story that I frequently think of too, not at the beach, but in the sky. I usually fly alone so I’ll share it with you since my seatmates don’t know me and might think me odd if I blurt out wild fancies about sea-maids. At the end of the story, the sea-maid cannot bring herself to kill the prince to restore herself to her sea-maid form. Instead, as the sun rises, sealing her fate, she plunges the knife into her own heart and dissolves, not into sea foam, but into a cloud, a spirit of the air. As we fly through the clouds today, I imagine what the cloud-maid’s new world must be like. The ever-changing terrain yet steady air currents might remind her of her lost home in the sea. The different strata seem incongruous to a land-maid like me. In a middle level, the rolling cloud fields rise into towering mountains with cloud castles no less grand than the sea-king’s. But in an upper layer, I see growing darkness with cloud armies amassing on either side of a chasm of gray, not yet fighting but waiting for the first flash of lightning to let loose their volleys of thunder. Yet, below them, a herd of cloud sheep play in a bucolic field, their shepherds too well hidden for my land-maid’s eyes to distinguish from the herd. The tiered terrain must seem less strange to a former sea-maid who was used to things living above and below her. How odd she must have found the terrestrial world with one plane of existence and such weighty gravity. As she glides through the air, does she feel as though she were swimming again? The story tells us that every thousand years one spirit of the air has the chance to become human. The little sea-maid has been a cloud-maid for a couple hundred years now. Perhaps she has a new dream. Or perhaps the fog at night is the once sea-maid creeping down from her lofty home to explore once again the terrestrial world she dreams of. Recently, I stumbled on an inexplicably popular YouTube channel. I wanted to like it. The channel shares fun or random facts about a variety of topics. But after watching each video, I asked myself why I had watched it since it wasn’t really interesting or even factual. Later, I’d see the thumbnail for the same clip again and click on it, not realizing until too late that it was a disappointing déjà vu. Scrolling through the comments to see whether others equally underwhelmed, I was surprised to find mostly praise for both the video and the channel.
What the thumbnail picture promises and what video is about are two different things. While I might not be completely lied to, I sense a level of manipulation that turns me off to the channel. The thumbnail represents the two percent of the content I am interested in knowing more about which the videographer left underdeveloped, choosing instead to fill the remaining ninety-eight percent of the video with more or less drivel. If the material isn’t interesting enough to capture my attention legitimately, instead of tricking me into watching it, they could just make the material truly interesting. The other part that frustrates me is the lack of fact. Everything in the videos is presented as researched fact, but most of the information is hearsay, piecemeal data from studies that may or may not be conducted well, anecdotal evidence, and common knowledge that merely pads weak arguments. Yet, I find the comments section filled with people lauding the video as valuable, not just as entertaining but also as educational. Many of these videos are supposedly about personality subconsciously revealed through everyday tasks. But often, the studies they reference are about specific demographics not matching target audience. They ignore things like cultural norms (your stride reflects the culture you were raised in just as much as your personality), education (how you hold your pen reflects how you were taught), and training (how I cut a banana, fold a towel, prepare coffee, and replace toilet paper rolls has far more to do with my part-time jobs in college than with my personality). Perhaps the most disturbing part is reading the comments. After a video about unifying Disney theories (Probably the most unintellectual video I have ever seen, it attempted to argue that the Easter eggs hidden in Disney movies are part of an over-arching “history” of the “Disney universe,” as though the classic fairy tales and modern original stories that were all written by different authors from different eras and regions about different eras and regions were somehow part of a larger unified history.), people actually remind each other of other “factual” connections between completely unrelated movies. For every one comment I saw that logically popped their illusory intellectual bubble, I found ten more illogical confirmations inflating it. Perhaps you wonder why I continue reading the comments. It could be that it’s like a train wreck that I can’t stop watching. It could also be that it provides wonderful writing class fodder for my students to work through the logical fallacies of both video and comments. But, largely, it’s a modern form of people watching, one of my life’s simple pleasures. When I first started teaching, well-meaning colleagues or students’ parents would ask whether I were going “home” for the summer, meaning my parents’ house, a place I’ve never lived since they moved when I was in college. Because I’m single, the other adults in my life do not view me as “home” even after living in the same city for nearly a decade.
As a child, it’s obvious what home is. It’s equally obvious who will share life with you. I knew my siblings would celebrate my eighth birthday with me. I knew they would be there for Christmas and Fourth of July. But, as the youngest child, I watched in confusion as my nuclear family shifted into an extended family. My siblings moved away and celebrated more and more life events with their own growing nuclear families, as it should be. I was left behind wondering how I fit into this picture of family. Eventually, I realized that I was my now own family. I wonder if I should write a parody of the old song “I’m My Own Grandpa.” As a single adult, I celebrate most mile-markers alone or with an ever-changing circle of available friends. I have wonderful friendships, many of which have lasted since childhood or college. But even those have shifted as well as my friends have moved away, married, and had children. I woke up this morning homesick, not for a place or even a time, but for an idea: I miss having built-in people to celebrate milestones with. In the nuclear family or younger single friendships, invitations and planning are not necessary; attendance is a given. I wasn’t sent an invitation to my brother’s graduation or my sister’s wedding. It was a given that I’d be there. My friend Joy didn’t need a specific invitation to my high school graduation or even any of my high school plays or recitals. It was a given that she’d be there. Now, their lives are no longer closely tied to mine; it takes more planning and travel to do life together. Certainly, if I had invited people to join me for my thirtieth birthday, people would have come. If I had invited people to attend graduation when I finished my masters, people would have come. But it wasn’t a given. And I had invitations to join other families for major holidays, but those were pity invites, not a given. Here I am on the cusp of another one of those big milestones, and I wonder who will share in this moment with me. I don’t doubt my friend’s and family’s love. But I know their availability is limited. I know they will be happy for me and wish me well even though they can’t celebrate with me. So, I’m homesick for a future time and place in which my relationships will no longer shift and change, when I will be forever with my Family, and when we will be done with life’s milestones and simply enjoy eternity together. I failed. My students who had helped me prepare for my audition were incensed.
“You should have gotten the part,” one student said. “No,” I replied, “the director chose the best person for the part.” “But you have a cold. He should have considered that.” “I could get a cold before the performance. Based on my audition, he made the right decision.” “But you worked so hard,” other students said. “And so did others,” I countered. “Hard work does not mean I deserve the part.” When I first asked my students to be a test audience for me, I thought I was modeling for them how to prepare for an audition or interview. I allowed them to see my nerves, my rough early audition, and later my polished audition. They saw the difference in my stages of preparation. They saw mediocre transform into quality. When they asked me the day after my audition if I had gotten the part, they did not doubt my answer would be yes. And that’s when I realized a lesson that they had never learned. The entertainment industry tells story after story of how hard work pays off: Rudy struggles with grades, tuition, and physical limits, but still has his moment in the end; in Save the Last Dance, Julia Stiles’s character struggles with a new school and the loss of a parent, working hard to be accepted into Julliard, and, in the end, she succeeds; even in the comedy She’s the Man, Amanda Bynes’s character works hard and is allowed to play soccer on the guys’ team. We tell our students that their hard work is what matters, but we don’t tell stories of people who work hard and don’t achieve their goals. These stories teach that hard work ensures success. Hard work has become a reason for giving a higher grade than was earned, an excuse for giving a position to an unqualified candidate, and a mitigating circumstance for any situation. Recently, I started watching Mayim Bialik’s YouTube channel. I wish I could share one of her videos with all my students and, more importantly, the influential adults in their lives. Mayim shares about a humiliating experience in which she failed. Not sure what take-away she was going to close with, I was surprised and relieved at what she said: instead of numbing the feeling and hiding from it, she thought over the experience and learned from it. As I listened to my students excuse away my failure, assigning blame to circumstances (my cold) and the director (he wasn’t “understanding”) and downplaying the others who auditioned (“You were better.”), I realized that my failure was perhaps the first time my students were seeing a story in which hard work did not equal success. Of course they were crying “foul!” They had never learned that sometimes hard work isn’t enough. Suddenly, the lesson I thought I was teaching was dwarfed by the opportunity to show how to fail. I had worked hard, I was thoroughly prepared, but someone was better. I had no regrets or complaints because my audition was the best I had to offer. And when my students came to our performance, I was glad that they could see the higher quality performance of the lady who got the part I had auditioned for. I can continue to work hard and continue to audition. And if I ever do get the part I audition for, my students and I will know it will not be because the director took pity on my hard work; it will be because I was the best choice for the part. On vacation, I toured one of the historic sites I have been looking forward to visiting for nearly three years: the Terracotta Warriors. Conflicting thoughts filled my mind as I followed the hostel’s tour guide through the excavation pits to see the remains of a long-dead emperor’s dream of immortality. Two-thousand-year-old clay warriors fill the pits to protect the emperor’s burial grounds—a monument to his greatness and, according to the guide, his insanity. We joked and laughed at the cultural disconnect as our very Chinese tour guide treated our hodgepodge group of Western adults as though we were children and would be forever lost if we strayed from her for even a moment. But even while I laughed, I felt frustrated because I felt Thoughts hanging over me, but I wasn’t allowed to reflect quietly and take in the somberness of this monument to what? Hubris? Cruelty?
The guide told us that each statue’s face was unique, matching the artists’ faces rather than the historical figures they represented. She presented the idea as though seeing those hundreds of unique faces immortalized in statues honored those artists, even though she told us that they were slaughtered later to protect the secrets of the burial chambers. I struggled with the feeling hovering around me, refusing to coalesce into words, as I obediently followed the tour guide around the ancient site that continues to draw tourists and impresses them with its ancient magnificence. Days later, returning home on the train, I was reading a book about a Holocaust survivor, and epiphany struck. Looking at the Terracotta Warriors, I felt as though I were visiting a Holocaust Museum except that everyone else was pretending that it wasn’t. What is the difference between a pile of left-behind shoes and eyeglasses in a Holocaust museum and a pile of broken clay faces in a history museum? Each pile represents lives spent because of unbridled pride and power. Because one site is ancient, we admire the “human accomplishment” of a “less advanced” society. Will future (more advanced) generations, untouched by the horror of the Holocaust, visit a museum and express admiration for “human accomplishment” at the medical discoveries Dr. Mengele made from his experiments on prisoners in the concentration camps? Perhaps plaques will name the many twins in his famous studies in a show of immortalizing the victims while still celebrating the Angel of Death’s accomplishments. I couldn’t escape the feeling that while the Terracotta Warriors began showcasing one amazing absolute authority that now it is showcasing how amazing another absolute authority is trying to be. It is a source of cultural pride. As part-German, I cannot view the Holocaust as a credit to my heritage. We in the West would be appalled at the inhumanity of celebrating a tragedy. Yet, as one of my friends explained, Eastern cultures are more honest. They celebrate these monuments, not viewing them as symbols of man’s failure to be human, but rather as proof of the power and greatness of their civilization. They excuse the countless deaths because of the ruler’s “madness,” but they laud the result of that madness. Perhaps the West is becoming more honestly depraved, too. Someone shared on social media an article about a missionary killed by the tribe he was trying to reach. The poster added a single-word caption: “good.” His post had received likes and laughs. How could someone applaud a young missionary’s death? Hours after seeing that post, I was watching tv. After several episodes of the smug villain tormenting Chuck with impunity, one of the good guys abruptly kills the villain. And the word “good” escaped my lips as my heart added, “Someone needed to do that.” Why do we admire an emperor commissioning a monument to his greatness at great human cost, but condemn Dr. Mengele’s achieving scientific discoveries at greater human cost? Why am I appalled at seeing a social media post approving a death and then have the same thought myself hours later? Whether East or West, ancient or advanced, we are human with hearts of darkness that only the True Light can save. There comes a point in every trip that I dislike. Everything is packed. My apartment is neat and clean. I’ve triple-checked dates and times and given copies of my itinerary to people who would track me down should I disappear. I, the uber-planner, am ready to leave, but it’s not time to leave yet. The window of un-usable time leaves me antsy: too much time to stand there; too little time to start something. I’m stuck in the in-between.
On regular days, I encounter this too much time/not enough time conundrum occasionally, but it’s easier to manage that time disparity on a normal day when I don’t have to leave my apartment in pristine vacation condition. My recent vacation brought me once again to this in-between. My trip hadn’t started yet, but it controlled all my decisions for days. In the grocery store, I planned carefully all my meals so there’d be no leftovers (the trip I forgot to throw away the leftover kimchi left an indelible mark in my pre-trip fridge-cleaning process). I moved laundry day later in the week so that the right clothes would be ready for both pre-packing and packing. Even when I took out the trash changed. I carefully considered automatic, mundane tasks for a week. Even though my active decision-making was finished once I reached the in-between, I still judged my options against the trip. Did I want to read? Sure, but my trip book was packed and starting a new book just to leave it behind was not fair to either me or the book. And besides, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on reading; there was too little time to get lost in a book. Did I want to work on a craft project? Of course, but I had just forcefully convinced all my yarn to coexist peacefully in one drawer. I was pretty sure that if I pulled one skein out, they all would burst out in a cotton/acrylic explosion. As I waited in the in-between of my vacation, I appreciated these musings, especially as this vacation coincided with Holy Week. Every day I am caught in the in-between—already saved, not yet home—living in this present world, remembering that I’m not of this world. That reality is easy to remember for the big meaningful tasks of the day. But those mundane ones, well, I barely notice them. One of the mercies of daily life is routine, the automation of the mind which spares us the mental labor of concentrating on every task. I’m not suggesting that I should second-guess every step of my chores or that I should decide whether—in light of eternity—to switch laundry detergents. What comes to mind is what Thornton Wilder’s Our Town highlights: our mental absence during routine, our forgetfulness that life is comprised of a string of mostly insignificant moments. Yet, even as I teach Our Town to yet another group of young adults who don’t appreciate the play’s mundanity, I think Wilder addressed only half of the picture. He shows that the insignificant moments are life here and now, and that the sweetness of those moments is more than we can handle noticing all the time. And certainly, Wilder is correct. It is nice to savor the sweet mundanity of smiling across the room at a friend I don’t get to see every day or be pleasantly overwhelmed by the swelling of the chorus in Handel’s “Worthy is the Lamb.” But the joys awaiting us are also far greater than we can imagine here in the in-between. I started growing up this week. Just like that. After years of thinking that I was an adult because I paid my own bills, took my car to the mechanic when it was sick—er, broken, and made my own holiday meals, I crossed a threshold into maturity that I didn’t even know was there.
I am an honest person, but I struggle telling the truth. Perhaps that sounds like an oxymoron. But I view it more as a paradox. The words I speak are true, so I am honest. But there are many words I do not speak. I can be completely honest chatting with friends while never admitting the hidden fear that I think I’m not welcome. I am completely honest when I end a long-distance phone call with “I miss you” without adding the secret desire that I want to come for a visit. And I can have a truthful conversation about my latest news without admitting that I was hurt by a thoughtless comment. These hidden fears and secret desires have colored all but my closest relationships. I’ve held them inside. After all, I can’t be rejected if I never ask. Part of me fears direct questions because I will answer them honestly. And part of me longs for someone to ask them, to open the door let those hidden fears escape. Yet, I’ve developed skill in answering questions without answer questions, which means these insecurities continue to fester. Some questions I would rather avoid. My mom has a talent in asking about the very things I don’t want her to worry about. This week I am going on vacation; I coached myself to volunteer the information that while on vacation I would see a guy that I was Talking to. But I got as far as announcing my upcoming trip before Mom asked where I was staying. Yep, a direct question. I froze and said the truth, “A hostel.” Thirty minutes later, while we were still discussing the hostel, I decided not to volunteer information about the guy. That would probably spark an even longer worry for Mom, and I felt nervous enough about the visit without borrowing her worries, too. If our Talking becomes anything more, I can volunteer the information then. So, that was a lot of rambling to get around to my step into growing up this week. I actually acknowledged a desire to visit some people (without getting an invitation from them) that would inconvenience them. I put the idea out there with no strings attached, no ridiculous idealized expectations. Just the truth: I miss you and want to see you. And my happiness and security in the relationship does not matter on whether or not they accept the idea. I know they love me, and I also know that they are human and life is crazy. They can say, “No, that won’t work,” and I’m okay with that. I think taking my car to the mechanic when it’s sick is easier than this part of adulthood. But I’m already thirty. If I just started growing up this week, I’ve got a lot of ground to make up. I love reading. Books, advertisements, cereal boxes—you name, I read it. During one of my moves to a new apartment, my love of reading was very obvious to the men from church and school who were helping with the heavy lifting. With my usual thorough organization, I had the boxes labeled with a number and a color. The men quickly learned that the small green-labeled boxes were heavy. After a few more loads up to our new third-floor apartment, they discerned that these heavy boxes were books and that there were still many more of them in the truck. Setting down a couple of boxes, one of the men jokingly asked, “Did you know that they make electronic books?”
Of course, I knew that, but e-readers do not have that wonderful book smell or feel. Now, living overseas with my books packed away in, yes, green-labeled boxes, I have resigned myself to trying to read e-books. I think the designers perhaps don’t share my love of reading everything. Every time I open a book, the reader skips directly to the first page of the first chapter. This completely ignores wonderful nuggets in the copyright page and the dedication page and the forward. I know I’m not the only one who reads the dedication page: there’s a book out there entirely about book dedications (Once Again, for Zelda). Reading the dedications is like getting a small piece of hard candy that I enjoy slowly, especially as dedications can link to others. There’s the pleasant surprise when you see that a beloved author dedicated his novel to another of your beloved authors. I love that “huh!” moment when the dedication hints at a whole story behind the book I’m about to read. If I ever manage to finish and publish a novel and dedicate it to someone important in my writing life, then I would hope that my readers would honor that someone and read the dedication. And I can’t be the only who reads the copyright page for hidden treasure, otherwise authors like Lemony Snicket wouldn’t put gems in there. And those gems are worth countless dull copyright pages for the handful of laughs they hold. I have this same view on movie credits, a treasure trove of interesting information and names. Having worked in various crews for stage performances, I know the amount of unseen work that goes into making a play come alive. So, I watch movie credits, noting who the gaffer and the best-boy grip are and who provided craft services (and wondering what exactly a “best-boy grip” is). Long after the theatre is empty, I still sit reading the credits, laughing at awesome names, and pointing out interesting tidbits to my patient friends. In America, this was merely eccentric behavior. Now, overseas, I think I’m confusing local people when I go to the theatre. They all leave as soon as the last line is finished. But then some of them notice those foreigners sitting there (because my friends learned that I watch the whole movie, including ending credits); some of them will sit back down, thinking that the foreigners must know something about the foreign film that they don’t know. Perhaps they wonder why Americans read the credits. Recently, one of my friends saw a new release and messaged me that I should go see it. “You’ll enjoy the credits,” he assured me. He was right: they were awesome. I was minding my own business on November 2 when I realized that it was November 2. More specifically, I realized that it was already the second day of National Novel Writing Month, and I hadn’t even decided if I was going to accept the challenge for another year. As exhilarating as writing the first full draft of a novel was two years ago, I couldn’t even hope to participate last year in the middle of a career and continent change. While I’m more settled now, I hate starting things late. I’ve been known to completely skip events if I arrive even five minutes late. So, starting NaNoWriMo late (already behind) was bad, but waiting another year was unthinkable.
The first (technically third) day of writing was amazing. My fingers flew across the keyboard; I updated my Ideas notebook (which is a notebook from the amazing children’s storybook What Do You Do with an Idea); I ploughed through a chapter of revisions. And then the second day came. It’s amazing how much more exciting washing dishes or cleaning out my drains are when I should be writing. Even less productive things like coloring become riveting. Zinsser said that he liked to have written. How much I usually agree with him. But my struggle this month has not been with writing pains but with revision pains. I was at the brink of tossing my whole novel out the window, which would have satisfying dramatics since I live on the twentieth floor. The plot was shapeless and unwieldy. I wanted to cut entire story arcs. I felt like my second-grade self who decided one day to write a mystery story, so sure that I knew the right way to accomplish such an impossibly large task. I don’t remember when I gave up on that mystery story; I just have snatches of the beginning of that memory. Perhaps I tossed those yellow scraps of paper out the window. (More likely, they were thrown out by someone cleaning who did not realize the value eight-year-olds place on odd, tiny things.) Taking a page from my eight-year-old self’s notebook, I spent three days writing the main events of my novel onto yellow scraps of paper—sticky notes. Then I realized that yellow just wasn’t enough. I added green, blue, pink, yarn, highlighters. Now, as I work on my novel revision, I sit on the floor staring at my wall, a pastel and yarn outline. The physical act of rearranging the sticky-note-plot-points and connecting them with green yarn released my brain from trying to keep track of the different threads of the main plot and subplots and themes. Suddenly, I could see in the collage of sticky notes and yarn a unity in the formerly warring story arcs. By dissecting my novel, I unified it. Since college, I have been in awe of Charles Dickens’s ability to write beautifully complex novels serially. Small, insignificant details in the first volume of A Tale of Two Cities seem like a waste of words and an author’s indulgence in pretty prose, but in the end of the novel, each thread comes together with precision. Staring at my wall now, I wonder if the inside of Charles Dickens’s brain looked like my wall. Or perhaps, his walls were also a web of paper scraps and yarn. |
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