Monday, May 9, 2011

Wanting To Write

I want to be a writer. For as long as I can remember, as far back as I can stumble, all I ever wanted to do was write. Ridiculous, isn't it? I don't know that I realized how patently absurd my desire was until I heard my freshman year roommate, a well-meaning girl with whom I was very, very poorly matched, affirm repeatedly and with pride “I've wanted to be a writer since I was five years old.” Me too, I thought uncomfortably. How distinctly uncool the admission sounded coming from someone else, how odd and desperate. Why would anyone be so deluded as to think they were called to such a thing? That they were called, even as a child, to create? I realized, with more force than I had ever encountered before, that any illusions I had about being “special” were false. I was not special. Here was the roommate, badly dressed and poorly groomed, thinking that she, too, like Joan of Arc, was destined, was meant, to do this one, silly thing.

When I was very young, three, maybe four, my grandfather died. I'd been very close to my grandfather. He'd had a beard. When he had served in Italy during World War II, he was often mistaken for a native and there are black and white photographs of him as a young man, arm wrapped around women who were not my grandmother. My memories of my grandfather are distilled, mainly, to these facts and a single image: myself, very small, looking up at a couch, tapping against the open blur of a newspaper, being shifted wordlessly into this grandfather's lap. I had looked to my grandfather as a place of respite. He was quiet where my older siblings were loud. He was poor and hadn't finished high school, but he read books. He always read books.

My grandfather's death was a sudden one; he was allergic to bees and, while moving rocks for a wall on his property, he uncovered a nest of yellow-jackets and was stung repeatedly. It was my aunt who found him, still alive but unconscious, sprawled on the steps of the front porch, reaching, presumably, for the reaction kit which would have waited not feet away. These are not my remembrances. I've been told, vaguely and in smallish bits, this story over a period of many years. Every so often, I learn a new detail. It's an event never spoken of in depth; I would imagine depth comes too painful for my mother, though it's been many years. These aren't my remembrances, but I've written of them more than once. What I've never written of is my own memory of this event. What I've never written is the fractured, light-soaked thing which passes, I think, for a factual record of my feelings at the time, though I can't be sure what I really remember and what's been told to me and what's been slipped, like the other details. What I remember is this: my mother on the phone, on and off the phone for days. Myself, on the couch. I have crayons. The crayons are Crayola because I don't like the RoseArt kind, I don't like how thin the colors are. I have, on my lap, the little cardboard desk with the bears and the ice cream shop which someone has given me. People know I like to draw. On the back of this desk is red fabric, filled with little styrofoam pills, like a beanbag. I am drawing a picture of my grandfather as an angel. I have not been told he has died.

This is an event which deeply unsettled my mother. We're a family who records history mostly by regret. It's through what we regret doing or not doing that we explain our experience of the past; in this way we can take on blame and, thus, an element of control, over the things we're incapable of changing. We're a family who has a hard time admitting to sadness or softness, and so it is that the story my mother most often relates when confronted with questions about her father's death is this story of the drawing. She regrets not having told me he had died; I was an odd child and she feels she should have known that I would have picked up on the feeling around me. I don't really remember picking up on any feeling, though, I just remember drawing, with certainty, my grandfather as a heavenly dweller. I had drawn it, and so I had sensed it, not the other way around.

I learned to read young, and without much specific instruction. My mother read to me often and for long periods of time. Some books she read to me so often that I was able to memorize them. Once they were memorized, I began picking out which words were which and, so, not long after my grandfather died, I began reading to myself. Not long after that, I began to write. I can't, however, remember when I began making up stories, the stories always simply were. I created things and then came to understand them. I memorized the book and then learned to read it. I drew the picture, and then understood my grandfather had passed on. Always I have seemed to perceive things indirectly, to understand things not from direct interaction but from creation and reflection. Life never seemed to happen to me, I just seemed to make up other lives and watch as they happened. I was the lens, not the catalyst.

Another memory: I am in elementary school. How long has my grandfather been dead? I'm not sure. Not too long, but I no longer draw the pictures. I am a dutiful schoolchild. I never break rules or speak in class. I almost never ask to use the bathroom which is, perhaps, why this day is extraordinary. I remember this day because I have asked to go to the bathroom. And here I am. I exit the stall and wash my hands. Everything in this bathroom is small, scaled down to the size of a young child. I realize this as I look in the mirror. I consider how strange this tiny bathroom is, with its tiny toilet and sink, the mirror adjusted to a tiny height. I wonder if, hidden somewhere, there is a full scale bathroom which only the teachers use. I wonder, then, if the teachers ever think how strange it is to have a bathroom just for children. I wonder if the thoughts which occur in the heads of others are like the thoughts which occur in mine. I wonder if anyone else wonders.

It must not have been long after this that my first story was published. I'd been sick and dictated, not handwritten, a story to my mother about a pair of unicorns. My mother sent it to my teacher, to prove I had been working while at home; the teacher was thrilled. She entered it to the local paper and they published it. The day they did, my bus driver paused me before I left to offer congratulations. I was proud and also puzzled. What was the big deal? Wasn't this how everyone came to understand the world?

I've come to learn, in recent years, through more regretful slips, that my grandfather was, perhaps, not an altogether happy man. That he was, in fact, what we would now consider seriously depressed. Of course, back then, and still in the language of my mother and grandmother, he was only vague things: melancholy or sad, not content. Troubled. There was, it would seem, one period so dark that my grandmother went to my grandfather's doctor with her concern. My grandfather was deeply displeased. Funny isn't it? That I was drawn, so strongly and so young, to my grandfather to find, now, that he may have shared the same maladies which have always haunted me? Strange, how the weight of a family trickles down. I wonder if I could have known that my grandfather and I were similar souls in the same inexplicable and instinctual way I have always known that I wanted to write. Could these things possibly be fated? And then, of course, there returns that roommate and her refrain “I've wanted to write since I was five years old.” The worst part was finding, upon reading some of the roommate's work, that she really wasn't all that good. And I have seen many people like her: people sure that their destiny lies in a certain direction and yet, really, they aren't that good. I can imagine nothing more horrible, and now, in my darker moments, I wonder if the same cannot be said of me. I worry I am hopelessly mediocre and yet unable to imagine doing anything else. I worry that I may be fated to write, but will never be able to. I often doubt so heavily I refrain from sharing any of my work. I don't know that any of my family, with the occasional exception of my mother, has read anything I've written. I'm just not sure enough in myself. And of course, a big part of achieving success is self-promotion. My father says I lack confidence. I suspect he is right. And yet, you are, right now, reading my writing. Why would I do such a thing if I really worried I was no good? No one told me my grandfather died, and yet I drew the angel, and I knew. I doubt, and so I write it. I write it, and so I come to understand: I want to be a writer

2 comments:

  1. Sabrina,

    You are right. I have never read your writing, other than the bits you post on Facebook. This is excellent.

    Reading this choked me up. I never knew you were so in-tune Granddad. I wish you could have known him better. He was great man – quiet, respectful, loyal, and yes, a tortured soul as you suspected. He had a harsh upbringing, which haunted him. He joined the Navy before he was eighteen to run away from it. The Navy was his adopted father. It gave him the structure, sense of belonging, respect, and guidance he wanted as a kid.

    I fear that as he aged and retired from the military, he missed his adopted family. That sense of meaning, belonging, and productiveness was gone. His body started to fail him and he couldn’t do the things he could as a young man. His machismo faded and this was difficult for him. The physical failures brought regrets of what could have been and life gone by.

    What lesson should you learn from this Sabrina Barnett? I will tell you. Live your life with no regrets. No fear of rejection or failure and always hold onto your goals no matter how crazy they might seem. All great accomplishments begin with a thought and an unwavering belief in that thought. If you fear you will fail, you will. If you know you will succeed and have the picture of that
    success in your mind daily, you will.

    Now go be writer.

    I love you!

    Your brother,

    Paul

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  2. PaulBro, thank you so much for this thoughtful and insightful comment. I am very touched and appreciate the sentiment and kind analysis that went into this (I feel I should clarify I am being completely genuine in saying this as it seems everyone assumes I am being sarcastic all the time). You are the wind beneath my wings!

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