Writer. Coffee Drinker. Digital Media.
I’m not writing here anymore, but that’s not fair to you, the great subscribers who have supported me all these years. Instead, you will find me writing on Substack, where I am the once-a-week, sometimes twice-a-week, Chicken Fried Mascara. These aren’t fast pieces. I’m writing about things that are close to my heart in hopes that I can support people by helping them see bits of themselves and not feel so alone.
If you want to check out what I am writing there, I would be honored.
Coming back to the page, especially one so public, after a long time away, means that there is trepidation when it comes to sharing my thoughts. So I’m going to develop a weekly exercise in sharing the “this and that” of life. Little things that I am reading, drinking, thinking about, or viewing online. This post is a look inside my brain, which, quite frankly, is a scary place. But I’m sure that’s true for us when we focus inward and remove the noise bombarding us daily.
— “remembered rapture: the writer at work” bell hooks
remembered rapture celebrates literacy, the joys of reading and writing, and the lasting power of the book from a wide-ranging intellectual scope from an independent-nonconforming-feminist-black-woman-writer from the South.
— Good News For People Who Love Bad News – Modest Mouse
Modest Mouse is one of those American Rock Bands that helped define the Pacific Indie Rock Scene. Their music compels me to tap my feet to the quirky, discordant, and unstable rock elements they are known for.
— Help! I Sexted My Boss (podcast)
William Hanson and Jordan North are an unlikely pairing. One is a radio presenter, the other an etiquette expert. They help ordinary people manage the calamities of everyday life.
I work on the Internet for a living, and this means that I find the most random, intriguing STUFF — for lack of a better word. Instead of leaving it in my brain, I’m sharing it here so you will either say WOAH! that’s so cool; or allow it to turn into a festering pile of WTH?.
— Behind the Curtain of the 1940’s Chinatown Nightclub that Shattered Asian Stereotypes – Messy Nessy Chic
— The history behind the Langston Hughes poem used in the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing – NPR
— Why community matters so much — and how to find yours – Vox
— When will Hollywood discover Georgette Heyer? – Vox
Hi. My name is Lisa. I love Regency novels. Now keep calm and carry on.
— Stress-Relieving Stretches for Caregivers – Yoga Journal
The stretches found in this article are great, but one thing I do have to say is that there is nothing informal about being a caregiver. It’s hard fucking work and often involves tasks that are unimaginable to the greater public. For example, people who have never had to create a place in their home that is always kept at a high level of cleanliness so they could, oh, say, drain a lung or an abdomen using a PleurX and dispose of the bodily fluids when finished.
That’s all for this week. I cannot promise there won’t be mini rants, but I can promise food for thought.
This has been sitting in drafts since June 2020. So today felt like the right time to publish it, nearly two years later.
I have been thinking a lot about solitude. The world is in the midst of a pandemic, and many of us are alone or experiencing the deep pangs of loneliness infiltrating our homes and psyche. I can safely say this is not an easy time for anyone.
Solitude is the state of being alone without being lonely. Research has said that this type of isolation can lead to self-awareness, and I think they are on to something.
My days before the COVID-19 virus were spent alone for the most part. I work from home, and aside from the odd meeting, I would go all day without hearing a voice other than my own. So muttering to myself while walking through the house or singing along to whatever was playing in the background is how I kept myself company when the silence became too much to bear.
Looking back at the solitary times explains the volume of Spotify playlists I have created, as well as the notebooks filled with scribbles for future novels, screenplays, and random philosophical thoughts all waiting on — something.
Covid-19 has thrown my world into a tailspin. I was already spinning due to issues out of my control which thrust me into the role of caregiver, but it was slow and heavy like a category one hurricane. There is going to be residual but manageable damage. With the novel coronavirus — it’s bearing down like an F5 on the world – brutal, hard, fast, leaving nothing but destruction in its path.
Solitude is dear — a comfort — to me. For many years I was hell-bent on avoiding any solitary time by filling my days with as many mind-numbing, distracting activities as possible as a way of escaping past trauma. (There is a reason one of my Twitter accounts has nearly 100k Tweets.) Finally, after eleven days in the hospital, many of them in ICU, I stepped away from my devices and allowed myself to be truly in the moment.
I was more present during those days than I have been in two decades. Realizing how precious time literally is is the best gift I have ever received. I work very hard every day to make every second count, where before I was kissing that time goodbye on mindless activities — doing heaven knows what for the past 20 years.
That two-week period in the hospital also taught me about solitude and how precious it is when you are trying to create or to heal. When there are people in your room every hour on the hour to check something, and all you want to do is sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time, you become a quick study.
Goethe says, “No one can produce anything important unless he isolates himself.”
My first instinct during periods of great emotional distress is to retreat inward and shut the world out. But unfortunately, the withdrawal is immediate, painful, and shallow. Friends have told me that it feels like Thanos snapped his fingers, and I disappeared from the earth. Nothing but dust left where my body once stood.
I know now that this is not solitude but my reaction to something much greater at work in my life.
My own anxiety has reared its ugly head on more than one occasion of late. I’m lucky to have had many years to develop coping tools for my anxiety disorder. I don’t know what will happen with the entire world gripped in anxiety. However, I’m afraid that the trauma we will experience from this time period will be cataclysmic. For those suffering from anxiety disorders, the noise that is normally an annoying hum is now Niagara Falls.
Coping tools are great to have, but I am a realist, and the harsh reality is that I lose myself during times like this.
The only way to explain is to ask you to imagine a chicken egg. Inside is the chick who has been incubating inside the egg and is waiting to peck its way out and join the other baby chicks, ready to explore their new light-filled world. Instead, I withdraw into a fragile yet tough shell, where I am encapsulated in darkness. Try as I might to peck my way out of it; there is no escape until I have matured enough to force my way out of the safety of the shell.
How am I managing? I am treating this time at home with my husband and son as a gift. My natural inclination is to withdraw and block everything with the aforementioned mindless activities. Instead, I am attempting to be mindful of this gift of time that has been handed to me. Instead of running multiple errands all over town or sitting in rush hour traffic, I can be.
What does it mean to be? It’s different for everyone. My personal meditation practice of many years is hanging by a thread, so I have opted to adapt.
One of my favorite pastimes was to sit on the stoop at my grandparent’s house, listening to bluegrass concerts with my PawPaw that he had recorded on his portable cassette player, and sip from an endless glass of sweet tea. So I sit on the porch in my favorite rocking chair, focus on my breath, and let Ralph Stanley, Doc Watson, and more of my beloved favorites soothe my senses. Rock, breathe, rock, breathe, rock, breathe.
Focusing on the breath (chosoku) is part of my personal meditation practice. I used to be quite the purist and would only sit if I could be very still and use the zazen posture.
“The body does not move in zazen posture. The mouth is closed and does not speak. The mind does not seek to become Buddha, but instead stops the mental activities of thinking, willing and consciousness. By removing all signs of bonpu from our legs, hands, mouth and mind (which ordinarily act only on behalf of our deluded human interests), by putting the Buddha seal on them, we place them in the service of our Buddha nature. In other words, when our bonpu body-mind acts as a Buddha, it is transformed into the body-mind of a Buddha.”
https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/zazen-is-not-the-same-as-meditation/
Rocking is a form of zen for me. It is like floating in the ocean when the waves are sizable but smooth. Your body is lifted up one side of the wave and dropped back down the other side, the sun beating down on your face, bleaching the fuzz on your cheeks. Up and down, up and down, up and down.
Right now, our solitude is not voluntary, and I worry about people who live alone, like my Grandmother. I worry about people who are trapped in relationships where domestic violence is the norm. I worry about my friends who are essential employees. I worry mother, the ICU nurse.
For solitude to be beneficial, certain preconditions must be met. Kenneth Rubin, a developmental psychologist at the University of Maryland, calls them the “ifs.” Solitude can be productive only: if it is voluntary, if one can regulate one’s emotions “effectively,” if one can join a social group when desired, and if one can maintain positive relationships outside of it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/the-virtues-of-isolation/521100/
The world is struggling. Due to how we are structured as a country, we don’t have certain protections that other countries do – – healthcare, etc. As a result, protests are popping up in different spots throughout the United States. Most are staying in their car. The ones who are not are endangering the people who are on the sidewalk with them and the law enforcement who are there to manage their protests.
We miss our family. We miss our friends. We miss the normalcy of everyday life.
The most transforming influences in life are personal friendships. Everyone who meets us influences us, but friendship opens the heart to the ideas, ideals, and spiritual quality of another life, until we are susceptible to everything that the friend is and sensitive to everything that he thinks.
The Meaning of Prayer Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1915
There are days that I sit here and wonder why I write. I’ve asked myself that question more often than not over the past decade. I had hopes and dreams, and I stopped somewhere on the path called a growing career.
What were once wild optimism and fun every time I sat down in front of my computer dried up. I was left hanging, rotten fruit clinging to the topmost branches, knowing the only thing left for me to do was drop and return to dust.
I don’t know what happened along the way. There used to be a lot of camaraderie in the writing community. It was small and beautiful until it wasn’t. Then, one day I woke up, and in its place was a farm where people concentrated on growing platforms instead of discussing the language.
These days, I have a hard time looking at my journal, let alone writing. Yet, there are piles of journals, all brimming with words. Filled with hopes, dreams, fears, and the inane bullshit we’re all guilty of.
There is also a novel. One I have labored over, poured my heart and soul into. And now, when I am so close to having it where I want it to be, I am struggling and have considered axing everything past page 100.
My life centers around the mantra do not harm. I would rather die than hurt someone intentionally. (Writers and their drama, right?) My characters are not real people, but they are real to me. What if the way they are written hurts others unintentionally?
I don’t know what to do and feel so very lost.
My writer’s group disbanded. People moved away. Life happened. Thanks to COVID, and my husband’s near-death at the end of February, we are shut in until there is a tried and true vaccine and doctors say we are allowed to leave the house. I’m optimistic that maybe I’ll be able to do something simple, like walk into a grocery store again, in Spring 2021.
There is no backtracking, no retracing of my steps to find what I’ve lost. From the looks of things, the soles my shoes are wearing thin, and the bread crumbs along the trail were picked up by the birds flocking in the trees, crying their weary song.
So, dear reader, I fling these random words into the wild blue yonder and hope this pseudo prayer to the universe is heard. And while I work through whatever I am supposed to do, I’ll listen for its response.
“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/58240-being-a-writer-is-a-very-peculiar-sort-of-a
― Neil Gaiman
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
Eudora Welty
The leaves are starting to fall and there is a crispness in the air. Autumn is slowly arriving and bringing with it NaNoWriMo. On October 5, all of the number counts, message boards, etc., over at NaNoWriMo will reset and thousands will line up in an attempt to slog their way through what is, at its core, a 30 day writing marathon. I will be one of those writers who sets great expectations and will attempt to write at least 1,667 words per day.
What is this NaNoWriMo? National Novel Writing Month, where folks from all over the world will sit down in an attempt to write 50 thousand words in 30 days. Now, 50k words is not a novel. A good young adult novella is about 60k words. But it is a good start of material that once edited will probably be 40k words (if you cut 20% of what your write during editing).
NaNoWrimo is a great starting point to make you glue your ass to a chair and put words on paper. Writer’s write, but you’d be surprised how many people call themselves a writer and they never touch a keyboard or notepad.
How do you do it?
Sign up. Understand that you will probably will fall off of your current hygiene regimen, drink more coffee than you thought humanly possible, type and scribble until your eyes cross and see mirages of beds beckoning you to lay down in them. I like to use NaNoWriMo as an exercise in stream of consciousness while others go in with full outlines, plot/character developments, and pages already written. For me, I like the exercise of pushing my creativity and diving deep into my subconscious with something that’s bubbling under the surface. Many would call me a fool, and there are just as many doing the same thing.
Do I have any tips for surviving NaNoWriMo? I do. Some humorous, some serious, all understanding that we’re in this together.
NaNoWriMo isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. Average daily word counts, copious amounts of coffee, outlining, etc., are all just tools you can use to achieve your goal. If you make it to the end and you’ve written 50k words, that’s great! If you’ve made it to the end and have written 50 words, there’s always next year.
“The moment a writer knows how to achieve a certain effect, the method must be abandoned. Effects repeated become false, mannered. The writer’s style is his doppelgänger, an apparition that the writer must never trust to do his work for him.”
~ Joy Williams