When I was President of Karen Nazor Literary Agency (lofty sounding isn't it), I had this saying taped above my desk. The piece of paper was actually about the size of a fortune from a cookie, but it would catch my eye while at my desk and kept me on track while working alone. Over time I had various assistants/interns working with me, and they'd ask about it. I've recreated it for the purpose of discussing it tonight. The ink splatter seems appropriate, as it's dramatic and distracting.
Here is what I'd tell my assistants/interns:
I grew up in a large family. A large family filled with depressive and brilliant minds. Minds that liked to latch onto narratives and explore all the possible directions they could go. And our already large family, constantly had people being added or traveling through it. Some for a season and some for all the seasons of my life so far. Those people added to the narratives and distracted us from our own stories and feelings of being stuck along the way. Many of us wrote the stories as they happened down in our journals or as lyrics/letters or cartoons. Some of us just tried to ignore them and stay so busy we could dodge all the telling and retellings of the tales. The endless machinations and permutations of a family this large could tax even a Streep or an Einstein.
Imagine for one moment being born one of two children. You are the oldest.
Then, between the ages of 5-7 you become one of eight children. You are now in the middle.
Roughly 20 years later, when you've been living on your own since you were 17, you become one of fourteen children (all of whom you've known since you were 8 years old).
New England is a small place when you share a certain esthetic, penchant for private high schools for your children, and are adults who have attended ivy covered colleges and Graduate schools.
Being in the middle of a pack of eight children in the 60's and 70's was not like the Brady Bunch. First of all I had two houses, not one. No maids to do the chores. Alternate weekends at my Dad's with his rules and routines. Week days and alternate weekends at my Mom's with her rules and routines. Two parents in both houses. Four kids at one house. Two-Six kids at the other house. In one house I was the oldest, although I wasn't always treated that way. You see my brother, who was 10 months younger than me, was often "left in charge" because my father knew what he could "trust him" with, since he'd "raised him". Wrap your head around that for a minute. In the other house I was either the oldest or second to youngest depending on how many of us were home. See how drama could obscure reality. Nothing was every simple.
Imagine being told every Monday night, "stop acting like your father", or Friday Night "stop acting like your mother". Now divorce and codes of family conduct have come a long way, baby, but then it was tough. Divorced kids of that time period were supposed to be resilient and silently endure, kind of like housewives through the 1950's. Can you imagine the fight or flight impulses of a teenager under these circumstances.
It was also the 1960's and 1970's. The parents were all experimenting with what it meant to be divorced and create new families together (blended wasn't a term yet). I first moved out of my mother's house to live with my father for a year in 1979 (from Lincoln to Concord. Walden Pond and it's promise of simplicity and self reliance, was perched perfectly halfway between their houses). I moved out of my father's house, three days after High School graduation, in 1980.
We were all told we could be what ever we wanted to be. Being a girl and young woman, I was well aware I was the first generation who could really "have it all" (which later turned out to be all about choices and when you made them, really). The 70's were sort of lawless years to be a teenager. Aids wasn't on the map yet and contraception was readily available to most middle class girls. Drugs were being sampled by everyone, especially the private school crowd. Parents didn't condone it, but they also seemed to choose to be blind to it, for the most part. For most people it was just a temporary experiment, for an unfortunate few it became a way of life and their lives grew limited or ended early. There were Dead Heads traipsing around the country, teenagers following bands for bootlegs and brave new adventures. It wasn't exactly the "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out" generation, but some were desperately trying to recapture or continue that idea.
For me the world was already going too fast in 1980. I'd taken a deferred acceptance to college (to appease my parents), and moved to Maine to find an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker. I'd built a solar water heater for a science class and the school bought it for an out building. That felt satisfying and my love of Maine, and a perceived slower pace, also called to me. Now that is another long story and it all went amazingly smoothly, but it lead to me moving onto a boat and sailing off into the sunset instead of going to college right away. I knew then that if I didn't follow the narrative to it's natural end (sail off into the sunset - Maine to St. Croix, USVI), I'd always wonder "what if", and I knew young that I didn't want any regrets.
Let's just say this. What I would tell my assistants is that we are attracted to the familiar. People or situations that are family-like will always draw you in ahead of the new, unless you train yourself to trust the new or unfamiliar. My family, as you might begin to suspect from the mere sketch of the foundation, constructed our home with love and compassion, but also lots of drama. So naturally that was attractive to me, as it was familiar. For the most part I was attracted to positive drama, but I often, until really recently, actually, kept myself too busy and distracted looking for narrative threads (real and imagined) for their potential development. I was lucky that the advent of anti-depressants came to my family shortly after our final formation. I think many of us have benefitted from them.
I had self medicated with drinking and experimenting from an early age. First toke at 6. Started drinking at 12. Stopped drinking at 23, this summer will be 30 years since my last drink in Lubec, Germany. But that is another story.
Basically, when I stopped self medicating (on top of rigid diets and exercise regimes to help me feel balanced) and started anti-depressants (and continued regularly exercising and eating healthy) much of the spinning my wheels with no exhibit ramps stopped too.
What I didn't stop was looking for the familiar. Not that takes a lot of personal deconstruction and mindful (that word again) reconstruction. I married a familiar person and it wasn't positive. I was never consciously looking to get married or have children, but when I met him my mind suggested it to me. There was also the infamous, and dare I say dramatic, handshake when we first met. Fractured fairytale, is more like it in retrospect. I heard the warnings, but I wouldn't let myself see them (see last nights entry). I'd done enough renovating on myself to know the difference, I just ignored the cautionary events and then I'd built a house of our own quickly: met, 7mths later engaged, 7mths later married, 7 mths later pregnant, and 17 years later divorced.
Basically, what I"m trying to say tonight is this: I'm awake and my eyes are wide open. My house is my own, no cracked foundation and I want to literally and figuratively write my way into my next chapter. The only narratives I'm going to follow are those that I create or those connected to the ones I love and will always love, not matter what. Reality isn't about drama, but compassion and being there for each other. And although I come from this large and sprawling family, I know that we are all there for each other and any of us would come running with just one phone call saying, "I need you".
That may sound dramatic, but it is my most treasured, very unobscured reality.
Good night, dear ones near and far, G'night.
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