Written Whispers

[Lol, forgot to post this after I wrote it.]

Had a great day today.

Went to therapy, said some things I wanted to say and almost bridged a topic I’m not very sure about anymore. We delved into the fact that some of my memories- considering how they were made- aren’t going to flow in the sequential way I’d like and that I have to work on breathing techniques.

And after that and went to Ni and Ju’s for a night of anime, sugar, and stories.

They had two other old friends over (I’ve missed everyone so much) and their adorable daughter- an angelic little creature who later said the F word on the way out the door, lol. We ate some wonderful homemade Chinese food and I, for my tiny stature, was picked up by just about everyone.

I’m so glad their closest neighbors are the band downstairs because we were so loud. Even Ree became social for awhile, it was wonderful! I meant to bring them some of my writing and a few other things but I’ll have to remember some other time.

It’s really great being around friends, I can’t even begin to tell you. I’ve made other friends these past few years but none of them are like the people I met during that certain time in my life when I felt most like myself. It really gives hope for all my anxiety that people like them can still find their way into my life.

Alas, eventually I had to leave though I was pretty tempted to call into work and tell them Ree and I had something contagious just so we could stay the night.

My poor hubby,… I imagine he’s glad it doesn’t take us long to crash from our sugar rush. One little odd asthma attack and a nap later and here I am all hyper again.

(now you know my mood’s improved- the long posts are back)

Last night I wasn’t doing so hot. I don’t feel like getting in on the details but I had one of my little episodes and it’s been stretching along throughout most of today in bits and skips. That’s not exactly a bad thing, I’d rather have it in the small increments even though it tends to last longer that way but it helps me feel more in control and less confused.

Moving on though- work was great. I’ve had some nasty stomach issues since I woke up but that aside it was an easy day. A coworker, she’s not really close to me but I think I can consider her a far off friend, was having a rough day- she has a lot of them, so I tried to help her out a little extra bit. Not sure it did much good but I’m thinking I’m going to mention something to one of the more trustworthy higher ups. She’s a great girl but little by little I see her putting less effort into things simply because she feels so unappreciative. If only someone who mattered could tell her what a great job she was doing… I think it would mean a world of difference to her. It’s not really my place to speak but I know own limits on the same thing and I hate to see someone who can smile on their bad days get burnt out like that.

As far as my writing life goes…

I feel like something has started to move forward. Like I’ve finally hit one of those spots where I move up a level and can call myself a writer with a little bit more confidence than I did a day or so ago.

I remember walking into Borders one day, making a bee-line for the writing/publishing/grammar section as I always do, and through the shelves when this thought hit me out of the blue: “I don’t need to read these books anymore.” I say ‘need’ because if it’s a book I ‘want’ it regardless of content and I say ‘these’ in reference to books that explain the basics. Don’t get me wrong the basics are good and it’s always great to see a new book out there that gives me a new perspective or refresher but I don’t ‘need’ those books anymore.

I know what plot it. I know my characters move the story. I know the importance of setting and dialogue. I know what voice is and why I have to be on the look out for redundant words and phrases. I know my writerly crutches and the top ten habits every writer wishes they had. I know that rejection should be expected but the greats are only great because they didn’t give up.

I can’t tell you how great I felt to have that thought. I’m still reading and putting half my paychecks into books, expanding my horizons as far as they can go- but just knowing I know what it takes to get where I wanna go is an amazing feeling and I’m having another one of those feelings right now for a similar but completely different reason.

I’ve taken another small step on my journey as a story teller: I know what the kind of writing I want to pursue feels like.

That’s a complicated sentence but just follow me on this for a second.

For the most part- and keep in mind that in my case this is a dangerous decision, I think I want to delve deeper into the world on creative non-fiction. I have so many stories to tell and it will hurt to tell a lot of them but as I look back on those tales I realize that all the best paths in my life have been born in scars. This one will have a set all it’s own.

I still want to keep up with the fiction of course, I have so many story ideas- I couldn’t bear to lease the land of my imagination even if I wanted to. It’s where things get healed the most but as far as the fiction goes… I don’t think I’ve found the flavor for me yet. In my novel I really got a taste for what pulling a plot together is like and divine yes’ness of what it’s like to complete a book but as far as my style in that genre goes… I’m still experimenting.

In my non-fiction things are different. It’s a much harder kind of writing for me because I’m pulling things from such a deep place but the thing is- I know the path to that place. I know what it feels like (sort of) when I’ve mined something worth wasting time on. I know what it feels like to have written something I want to hoard and share all at once.

I’m still learning bits about these things, about what works for me, and I probably always will be but I’m really excited to feel like I’m starting to know my style in this area- an area I might like to mention I thought I had no hope in. Just feeling like I’m not as out of my depth today as I was yesterday is… well, it’s a fascinating courage inspiring feeling and now that I’ve written about it I’m going to go take another leap of faith and go write some more.

If you don’t understand why I used to say Quack and you just happen to care I recommend reading the post prior to this one.

I’d met her at one of the protests I’d arranged. My little way of showing my peers how little I cared if they thought I was strange, showing the teachers I was smarter than they thought, and showing the principal that at least one of us had read the rule book inside and out and could ‘use’ it just as well as anyone. Not to mention I wasn’t about to let us, even those I didn’t like, be segregated by jock, cheerleader, dork, and delinquent categories. Not for my sake or anyone else’s- simply because it was wrong.

And it was a damn good little protest if I do say so myself. Well organized with a decent turn out if only because the others had been curious. I’d even used the school’s resources and time to set it up. That’s all another story though- one I’m too tired to tell tonight. The one I do want to tell tonight is about how I met her.

She’d come only because the poster said to, sitting quietly at a table with a book in her hand, completely drawn into the world of words and art. I’d been preoccupied at the time but something in my radar went off, something in her aura. Something that made me think of how quiet I was before… everything happened.

After spending several hours in the office being told why I was wrong- though I must have been right somewhere along the lines as my method eventually worked, I found myself sitting in biology class right next to her. Still really shy myself I didn’t say anything to her the first or the second day, not even on the third. I’d never take the initiative to make a friend before. The few I had had always found me first but I was damned bound willing to give it a try.

She sat alone at lunch, spent all her time in the library, drew instead of paying attention in class, always had her nose in a book and sucked at math. I think somehow I’ve always known we were supposed to be friends.

Back in Biology class later down the week we had this in class thing to do. We each had to stand up when a part of the cell was named and make a sound to help up remember it. Our teacher started with the front row and everyone was making, pardon me, the most stupid sounds. A clap, banging a fist on the table, a stomp. They all sounded the same to me so- when it came to me, in the middle of the class, Miss Too-nervous-to-stand-up I said the first thing that came to my mind.

Quack.

And the girl next to me, the one no one had ever head speak, said:

Roar.

Several notes, a pencil, and a near detention on my part later we were friends and we’ve been that way since. Five years later she was my maid of honor, six years later and she still lives with me.

Here’s to friends! The real ones are never far behind.

I was chatting with Xean this morning and there was something she said that made me think about the past. I was telling her about my dorky moment with Ni and Ju and she h ad said something about the wacky moments that bring friends together. It just made me think of how some of the most treasured people in my life came to be in my life.

See, I wasn’t always wacky and strange. I used to be quiet a sullen creature. I cried a lot and spoke to no one, seeing everyone as a potential threat and treating them that way. When I moved in with my adoptive family I learned, in a very slow and painful but rewarding process, that a lot of people have good in them and even the ones who aren’t so great… well, I wouldn’t be here without a lot of bad people.

When I started learning things like this and being forcefully pried from my shell I was… I don’t know how to put it. I felt like an unprotected stick standing upright in the sand while the wind rages all around me. Completely vulnerable, scared, breakable, and as far out of my element as I could possibly be.

But with every way you can fall into a hole you can learn a way to go around, over, or through it. A.k.a. coping mechanism. I don’t know how it really came about but I developed a rather odd one. See, I was still learning how to hold conversations and because I’d hardly spoke I didn’t always know what to say- duh.

So, whenever one of those nerve rupturing silences would pop up… I’d say Quack Quack.

It’s an instantaneous ice breaker. Silence scared me, giggles and ‘what the f’s’ did not. Even if you don’t know what to say I can guarantee you that if you walk up to a random person (be it someone you know or not) and say Quack Quack 8 out of 10 times they will respond with some other animal sound and then everything is rolling again.

Now here’s the real kicker and pardon my shoddy explanation of the events before hand but I’m trying to keep it short. Before I lived with my adoptive family I attended middle school A then I transferred to high school B in another town. I didn’t come back to high school A for nearly my entire freshmen year. My point being that I knew people before but we didn’t have much day to day contact till I came back from being somewhere else.

I hadn’t changed much at first but it was while I was in high school B that I’d met my adoptive family, and shortly after my transfer that I moved in with them. My old friends,… people I’d spent time with because there was no one else and people who spent time with me just because I was there… didn’t quite understand the changes. They couldn’t understand why I was dressing different, blurting out things (first attempts at standing up for myself), and asking them all to call me by a new name. My signature changed, my style changed, my hobbies and goals changed. Everything.

Alas, it wasn’t more than a month after I’d developed my new coping mechanisms that they started to tell me I was annoying. I didn’t do it all the time but I was learning that I loved talking to people so they heard me say a ot more of anything to them than I ever had before. It’s needless to say it but over the months we all drifted away…

And the ones who would quack back at me and be patient with my odd little habits are still my friends today. It really proves that true friends are the ones who accept you for who you are even if that person changes and doesn’t know quite who she is.

My little coping mechanism did more than just this though. It also brought me together with one of my best friends, current roommate and constant sister, Ree/Kei but that’s another story that- like this one, deserves a post all it’s own according to me.

On a brief side note, some other odd coping things I had was that for awhile (and occasionally today) I’d almost refer to myself in third person. Not in an obnoxious way as I see the habit in general but just as easily as I say I. I think it’s because I’d changed my name and was constantly reassuring myself that I was the person I was becoming and not the one I had been.

Odd

Ah, so as you know (or don’t) I spent last Thursday with my long lost (3 years) buddies Ni and Ju. We had a wonderful time and the only reason I haven’t written a full post dripping with hyper spazticness all about it is because the recent reunion gave me some things to think about which are still cooking inside my head- all the base ingredients are there but I need to wait a little bit for the chemistry to kick them and turn it all into one solid thought I can better grasp.

In the mean time though I’d love share my beautiful moment of stupidity. There are very few people I can let my guard down around so despite how flighty it made me look it also makes me happy. It doesn’t hurt that they’re also pretty used to my odd little flighty moments.

Okay, so we Ju and I were in the supermarket looking for Ni who’d gone on ahead of us. As two relatively short attention-span-lacking people Ni has a much better chance of finding us than we of her but we did try.

Trying lasted all of two minutes before Ju pulled out her cell and started texting Ni to let her know we were looking for her, explaining to me it’s their way of playing marco polo (they’re so cute together ). I laughed and we waited a bit for a response… it didn’t come.

After a moment Ju said Ni must have left her cell phone in the car.

Not a second after Ju had told me that, still holding her cell phone out in front of her, I very enthusiastically started going through my purse saying “Oh, hold on. Let me get mine and you can try to call her on that.”

…

Oh, yes. I totally said that. Ju was laughing for a good ten seconds before I’d figured out what I’d said and just what was wrong with it. I could have slapped myself in the head, lol, but it made me laugh too so it’s all good.

Mahaps it’s because I’m one of the few cell phone owners left on this continent who doesn’t text?

More likely it was because I was so spazzy, lol, but in that moment I have to admit it felt like all of us had never been apart. Like it was just another day and I’d never gone back into foster care. I can’t deny that I yearn for those days but I’m also looking forward to the days ahead of us- and all the dorky moments that come with them.

I have another wacky little friendship story to share but I want to keep this post short so I’ll go ahead and make another one.

I have wasted my day away- from the moment I woke up till the moment at hand. Nothing I’ve done has achieved anything.

Or has it?

Like a coin I have both my positive and negative moments. Everyone does but I do like to think I acknowledge flip side more often than a lot of people so forgive me if this is stretching things a bit.

I woke up, I played Sims3. For 11 hours straight. No, I’m not joking. I’d be a lot less embarrassed to be typing this if I was but as it stands I’m too lazy to type it if I don’t mean it. 11 hours.

So, you can see why I feel like I haven’t gotten anything done today but the more I sit here thinking about it the more I realize that maybe I did do something. Games are a great distraction, a great way to let the mind drift without quite as much potential for getting caught inside it. In short- it’s hard to think about the stress that’s trying to pile up on me whenever I’m not looking when I’m busy trying not to kill the little people in my town.

I’m not much of a gamer by nature but I think I can start to understand the lure some people feel. I know when I start getting real anxious- the peace and quiet inside my head too still to hold back the darker darkness, I find a quick online game of Tetris. The thing that just amazed me so much is that I actually spent a whole day doing it. Usually Ree has to beg me to come game with her online because despite the pretty colors I just can’t go that long. Usually my muse steps in and says ‘No, I have an idea. You need to log out right now and let me take control.’ and then he hits me over with his newest pet plot bunny.

Did I mention said plot bunnies are usually rabid?

Well, they are.

Anyways, so yeah, I did not expect to be gaming that long at all but now that my eyes have readjusted and I’ve actually left my seat for more than an hour (even walked from one side of the house to the other) I’m glad I did because despite feeling like I’ve somehow managed to waste my entire day I feel pretty good. Relaxed even.

I do know this means I’m going to have a hell of a time falling asleep because when I spend multiple hours on any one project I tend to see myself doing it when I close my eyelids (this hasn’t just happened with games like Sims, it also happened when I took up knitting). I can tolerate that sort of thing with writing because I don’t see my fingers on the keyboard or the words forming on the screen- probably because my eyes are usually closed when I’m writing, but I see the stories themselves and it’s about the same as dreaming. Though I still have to be careful with that because if I’m working hard enough on a plot then I’m just laying there with my eyes closed, thinking.

Thank goodness for Tylenol PM and a weak tolerance.

[Wrote yesterday but forgot to post. I should edit it but I'm not going to. ]

Yesh! I have my new keyboard and it’s sooo tiny. Possibly even a little shorter than my laptop keyboard and all non letter buttons are compacted together. It’s wonderful. I have to work a bit to get used to it- my happy go lucky back space button is a whole row up from where it is on the other two keyboards which is something that has caught me in this paragraph a total of four times and my shift buttons are only half size so I have to be careful not to hit the next one over. Lol, all in all though it’s a nifty piece of hardware I already cherish.

If you’re a new reader and you’re wondering why I plan on ‘wasting’ a whole blog post about my brand new keyboard then you clearly haven’t read much here. Some writers have a favorite pen, a preferred kind of paper or notebook, some have a special seat or song they need to get their muse to come forth.

Me- I have a keyboard.

Some writers have told me there’s nothing like having a pen and paper and as a writer I should embrace it more. I tend to agree on some small level but only as I won’t always have a computer at all times and I need to have some meek skill for reading my own handwriting but in the end I derive more pleasure from keys. I love the sound they make, the feel beneath my fingertips and how I usually have a better chance at keeping up with my thoughts.

Mostly, this past year or so, I love how I don’t get the huge headache from reading what I write. With and without my glasses on.

Thinking back, when I was six and living in one of the foster homes my bio parents had given me a children’s type writer. A lightweight plastic thing that you plugged into the wall. It was red and white. I don’t remember asking for it though I may have- I was an early reader, or it’s possibly my bio parents were hoping I’d send them letters they could use as legible evidence against ‘the system.’

A few years later, my first reprieve from foster care, when I’d gone to live with my bio parent, uncle, and grandfather my parent let me play with her big electric typewriter. A huge thig that had to weigh more than my eight year old body. For the next two years, roughly, I’d spend most of my time sitting in front of it on a milk crate clicking away the hours word by word.

I wrote some small poems and a story- which later nearly got me kicked out of school but that’s a much longer tale. We moved to Michigan around my tenths birthday, moving into our very first apartment on our own. No one else living with us so all the junk that had been in storage since the incidents that led to foster care came about could were taken out and put in their respective places including a PC- Windows 95 and all.

I’d used computers at school but never at home. Now I used them in both places, constantly working on my stories. It was years later when I was 13/14 that I actually managed to have one not get deleted long enough to reach 100 pages. It was printed instantly and not read by another soul for one more year. I moved into my adoptive family’s home where they let me type all the time on their computer.

Then I went back into foster care and all was lost. Everything I wrote there was instantly trashed. I didn’t begin writing again till after I’d escaped and my Hubby bought me my very own laptop, gently, quietly urging me to pick up the craft once again.

Long story short- I love typing. It’s so much a part of my life. I can measure whole spans of my existence by the typing I’ve done.

I’m full of thoughts right now. They swim in my blood and buzz in my brain. Constantly keeping me alert of so many things… cracks in the world, cracks in the people around me, and cracks within myself. Sometimes I think it’s amazing to see so much- there was a time when I didn’t see anything at all, but now… it’s like looking at colors we have no human word for. It’s so much to take in sometimes. Things are still so new to me.

Part of it is from where I’ve been and part of it is where I’m going. I’m never sure it’s part of the present because it’s like a special kind of perception that doesn’t alter. It stretches from one side of my existence to the other and I’m never quite sure what to do with it.

Sometimes I get so anxious I can’t sit still. Spikes of fear bombard me from the very core of myself and it’s rather hard to overcome something that comes from yourself. Sometimes I see so much beauty around me and so many different connections between things that I want to take a magic marker and carve a colored path through the air and show it to everyone. Sometimes I see the rock hard surface of the world around me and I feel that overwhelming urge to accept things as they are, the softer side of my heart telling me it will never change but then I remind myself that even stones can be worn away by time and the elements- and if given enough effort, the human hand.

I don’t know really why I’m writing about this but there’s just so much going on inside my head all the time. If I could type, and type, and type for a year straight I still don’t think I’d manage to find a moment of silence. I’m not sure I’d be thankful if I did.

Everything has meaning and meaningless things are nothing.

I wonder at it all and have so many questions for the universe. Forget the big ones- everyone wants to ask those, I want to ask about the smaller things. The over looked, under cared, little tried things. I want to do so much, say so much, and show so many people my thoughts and share them.

I’m working on it, so maybe someday, I’ll find a way to get this urge out of me. This constant need that fills my brain with wordless… something. Someday I’ll figure out how to express the things I’ve never known how to let out.

Someday.