I haven’t posted for a long time, partly because I’ve been so busy and partly because my life feels as though it’s in such turmoil right now. Have you ever had times in your life when you’ve felt as though you’re in transition? Well, that’s where I am right now, only I don’t know where I’m in transition to. I know where I’ve come from: finishing my PhD, moving into the city. Changing my life in a fundamental way. I remember what it felt like before that, while I was still finishing the PhD: the sense of stasis, as though I could not get out. The stillness, and the desperation that accompanied it. And now I’m in the storm, it’s not still anymore. Only, I don’t know where this particular craft is sailing. There’s new land somewhere, but I have no idea where it is or what it will look like.

These thoughts were prompted in part by looking in the mirror this morning. It was the hall mirror in my grandmother’s apartment, and it had been there since I was a child. Which means that when I was four years old, I looked in that mirror. Who could ever have imagined, then, that I would be back, at this age? Looking into that mirror again, so different and yet that little girl, all grown up. I could never have predicted my own life.

Which means that I probably can’t predict what’s going to happen either, even in the next year.

But right now I’m sitting here, having just drunk my latte and feeling a little shaky (it’s so strong, and I’ve been up since 4:00 a.m. Budapest time, because the birds at dawn are so loud). I thought I would post some pictures of the apartment. If you want to see more pictures of my trip, go look at my Facebook page. I’m posting a bunch of them there.

So first, let’s walk down the street. Do you see the coffee shop on the right? That’s where I am right now.

We enter the apartment building through this corridor, large enough to admit carriages (which may be what it did at one time). It leads to a central courtyard, but we’re going to go up the stairs.

They are stone stairs, and have looked exactly the same since I was a child. Getting my suitcase up them was probably the hardest part of my entire trip! (Of course, I was exhausted by then. I hadn’t slept all night.)

Let’s pause in the hall and take a picture of me in the mirror. Yes, this is the hall mirror that caused such introspection.

And here we are. The apartment is furnished exactly the way it was when my grandmother was living here. (She died several years ago.) Sometimes I think about how beautiful it could be, with those high ceilings. It’s not beautiful now, but it’s nice to be back here.

This morning, I called the shuttle company and reserved my shuttle to the airport tomorrow, when I’m heading to London. I will spend a week there, and then go to Oxford, then Glastonbury, then a small village called Chagford in Devon. Whenever I complain, and I certainly do complain, I remind myself how fortunate I am to have the life I do, to be able to do the things I do. There are things I want that I don’t currently have: safe harbor is one of them. But I think they’ll come? I just have to wait. And hope.

“Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.

“The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.” –Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakaur is most famous for writing the book Into the Wild. He’s the sort of person who’s been up Mount Everest. The sort of person who climbs mountains for fun. What bothers me about the quotation is that I think he’s right. For me, anyway: I feel most alive when I’m not quite sure what the future will bring, but I’m fairly sure it will bring something. What seems to scare me most is the possibility of stasis. But I think the new experiences he describes can take many different forms: going back to school is a new experience, having a child is a new experience, starting a business is a new experience. Planting a garden can be one as well. Some experiences are quieter than others, but they can still be new and exciting. They can still be adventures. Also, I think if adventures are to be effective, if they are to be adventures at all, you need a certain level of planning. There is, after all, a difference between an adventure and a disaster: Krakauer’s ascent of Everest was a disaster, although it did furnish material for another book. The adventurous spirit needs to be accompanied by the spirit of practicality.

A side note here: I always get a bit angry when people tell me there is nothing I can’t do. I hear this a lot, actually . . . The reason it bothers me is that it’s so patently untrue. There are all sorts of things I can’t do, because I don’t have the time, or the money, or because I don’t want to make the compromises that doing them would entail. There is an odd notion out there that life has no limitations. But life has plenty. That’s partly why it’s life.

Here is the second quotation:

“When we are doing something because it is expected of us or to please somebody else or because we are afraid of somebody else, we become further alienated from a sense of living authentically.

“If we just keep living out a role we know well, the cost of that is to become increasingly cut off from that which is in the collective unconscious, that which not only nourishes us, but also provides the raw material that allows us to mess up.

“Very often in transition periods, that’s exactly what is called for, a change by going through chaos, of losing the way, of being lost in the forest for some time before we get through and find our path again.” –Jean Shinoda Bolen

At heart, both of these quotations are about the willingness to accept uncertainty: in the Bolen quotation, for a while, and in the Krakauer quotation, as a condition of life. Although the Bolen quotation talks specifically about being lost for a while, of accepting that period of being lost before finding the path. That quotation bothered me because it felt so true, and in a way uncomfortable: it was like one of those signs saying “You Are Here.” Because that’s exactly where I am, lost in the forest for a while, doing the work I’m sure I want and need to do, but not knowing where it will lead. Trying to figure out the next adventure.

I think what I will take from both of those quotations is, that’s all right. Life is a series of adventures, and those of us who have adventurous spirits will seek them out. But that means we may feel lost intermittently: we will always be losing and refinding our paths. I think that’s what adventures are all about.

I do have faith that the path is there, waiting. And that it will become clear, eventually.

I have friends who do, and I hope they won’t be angry with me for what I’m about to write. It applies to me, and not necessarily to anyone else. But I don’t see the point of them. I don’t want to spend time going into a secondary reality if, when I return to this reality, I haven’t brought something back — some wisdom, some sense of beauty, something that has changed me and that I can use to change the primary world I live in.

As soon as I use the term “secondary reality” here, you know I’m referring to J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories,” in which he says that when we tell stories, we are creating a secondary reality we can enter. He justifies fantasy by saying we are allowed to create things that don’t exist, that those things may indeed have a greater reality than things in our primary world. Pegasus may be more real, in a sense, than the Chrysler building. I’m not so sure about the Chrysler building, actually, because it’s developed its own mythology. But I’m pretty sure that Pegasus is more real than the stock market. Perhaps being real isn’t predicated on actually existing. Odysseus feels real to me, as does Little Red Riding Hood.

What I’m trying to get at, I guess, is that some things feel real and important, and some things don’t. Daffodils and fairy tales do. Video games don’t, and much of contemporary popular culture doesn’t either. I know this is terribly subjective.

Video games and myths are both part of the continuum of the fantastic, and indeed video games can be based on myth. Could it be, then, that what I’m talking about has to do with the difference between Carl Jung’s idea of the collective consciousness and the collective unconscious? That video games are part of the collective consciousness, while the old myths reach much, much deeper than that? I’m trying to explain this intellectually, but really what I’m trying to explain is an instinct — a sense for the relatively realness of things. I always feel a little sick when I’m in a place that feels completely unreal to me. Being a corporate lawyer was like that. My work was consequential, certainly. But it felt unreal.

My goal in life is to live as real a life as possible, which includes those things that are fantastical but feel real to me. So I want a garden with daffodils in it, the old-fashioned kind that have such a sweet scent. And I want to read fairy tales, and write them. I want to wear clothes, not costumes, but I want them to be both modern and beautiful, which really means timeless. I want to eat fruit and vegetables from my garden. I want to hear birds, and streams, and the wind in the treetops.

I live in a large city, so I can’t have everything I want right now. But I’m trying to make life as real as I can. Until I can live here:

That, in case you haven’t guessed, is my witch’s cottage. Someday, I will live in a cottage like that, and write my books, and make magic . . .

There’s a specific line in the novel that we discussed today: in Poland, Rebecca meets a gay man named Josef Potocki who tells her about what it was like in the days before the war, when Jews were already being singled out and forbidden certain activities. But he and his Jewish lover ignored all that, for a while. Josef says that they were “living in the belly of the wolf” without realizing it. Of course that’s a reference to another fairy tale, “Little Red Riding Hood.” The wolf is a metaphor: for the Nazi regime, for the coming war itself.

In class, we talked about why certain stories, fairy tales in particular, have lasted as long as they have. Why do we keep retelling them, over and over? I think the answer is fairly simple: because they’re metaphors. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim treated them as metaphors for internal psychological processes, but I think they can mean more than that. They can certainly function as metaphors for historical situations, like World War II. In Briar Rose, for example, Sleeping Beauty’s sleep represents our own tendency to sleep, to be unaware of what is happening around us. The book itself is an awakening, to what happened in the Holocaust. To the horrors we can perpetrate, the unpredictability of human life — but also to its sweetness. The book is a Prince’s kiss.

That wolf is important to me, and it’s what I want to write about tonight. It’s a metaphor, of course, and it can mean so many things. The wolf can mean cruelty, poverty, injustice. All of those negative things. But it can also mean our own wildness, which is necessary for our survival, because we can’t be all good, obedient Little Reds listening to our mothers. We need to wander off into the woods sometimes. The power of a metaphor is not only that it can mean different things, but that it can mean opposite things at the same time. The wolf is both something to flee from and something to embrace.

In my own life, there are wolves I need to avoid. And by avoid, I mean that when I meet them in the woods, I need to not listen, to not let them get me off track. They are the wolves of fear, of depression, of loneliness. All the wolves that stop you from going where you need to go. And there are the wolves I need to listen to: my anger, my ambition, my passion. All those things are wild, and sometimes not entirely under my control. But I need to hear what they have to say.

We are all Little Red Riding Hood. We are all walking through the forest, with rules and duties to guide us. Sometimes we need to keep to the path, sometimes we need to go off it. Sometimes we are devoured, and we need a Huntsman to save us. Sometimes, as in older versions of the fairy tale, we learn to escape from the wolf ourselves. And sometimes, as in Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” we learn to accept the wolf, to sleep between its paws.

What I do know is that I want there to be more magical men. We need them. (Of course, I think we need more magical women too. We need more magic generally.) We need men who are trying, not to climb the corporate ladder, but to save the world. (In whatever way presents itself. Because you know, there are a lot of ways to save the world. Some days, it may involve writing a poem, or planting a garden.) I suppose what this blog post expresses, really, is a kind of longing. Let there be men strong enough to march to the beat of their own drummers, as Thoreau said. I know, I know, they’re out there. I just wish there were more of them, and that the men I know (and I am lucky to have wonderful male friends) felt more free.

There is something about relative powerlessness that can, ironically, give you more freedom. Men are expected to be serious, motivated, ambitious. Women are allowed to create an Etsy store to sell their art or crafts.  It’s a shame, really. So yes, I suppose I wish men strength, freedom, courage — to be magical.

I’m going to end with a poem I wrote some time ago called “Green Man” that is a love poem. I’m not sure if it’s the appropriate way to end this post, but somehow it feels right.

Green Man

Come to me out of the forest, man of leaves,
whose arms are branches, whose legs are two trunks,
rough bark covered with lichen. Come and take
my hands in yours, and lead me in this dance:

In spring, green buds will sprout upon your head;
in summer they will lengthen into leaves.
Oak man, willow man, linden man, which are you?
In autumn, they will fall, and through the winter
you will be bare, with only clumps of snow
or birds upon your branches.

Come and love me,
my man of leaves, my forest man. For you,
I’ll be an alder woman, birch woman.
In spring I’ll wear pink blossoms like the cherry;
in summer ripening fruit will bend my boughs;
in autumn I will bear, distributing
a hundred seeds, our children. And the birds
will sing my praises. Let us learn to love
the sun and wind together; let us twine
our bodies, filled with sap, until we make
a single tree on which two different kinds
of leaves are growing, where birds build their nests,
among whose roots the squirrels hide their nuts,
storing them for winter.

A hundred years from now, we will still stand,
crooked perhaps, the sap running more slowly,
our two hearts beating, separately and together,
under the summer skies, in autumn rains.

So I think it makes as much sense for me to talk about what a fairy tale means to me personally as to try to find some sort of universal meaning. To me, fairy tales are about the journey of the soul, and the one I’ve been thinking about lately, because I’ve been teaching it, is “Sleeping Beauty.” So what does “Sleeping Beauty” mean to me?

The fairy tale falls into three parts: the gifts of the fairies, the hundred-year sleep, the awakening.

I. The Gifts of the Fairies

We are all given gifts by the fairies, and I think it’s useful to be honest about what they are. After all, they are gifts — we did nothing to deserve them, we can only be grateful for them. Seven good fairies came to my christening. (But be careful: it’s difficult to tell a good fairy from a bad fairy. Gifts come with a price, and what may seem like a curse can turn out to be a gift in disguise.)

The first fairy said, “I give her intelligence. She will always do well on standardized tests, and so she will be able to get into some of the best schools in the country. However, she will also be smart enough to see that the value systems she is is expected to live by are meaningless. This will make her try to live a different kind of life, which will cause her difficulty and heartache.” I told you, didn’t I? Gifts come with a price. Nevertheless, they are gifts, and we have to be grateful for them.

The second fairy said, “I give her strength. She will not always feel strong, but she will always be able to do what she needs to. She will always get through.” I’m grateful to that fairy.

The third fairy said, “I give her grace. She will be physically graceful, and will love to dance. But more than that, she will be able to accept defeat, and when it comes, she will be able to say, oh well, what next? She will have to do this more often than she would like.”

The fourth fairy said, “I give her empathy. She will feel what others are feeling, without wishing or trying to. She will not be able to stop doing so, and sometimes she will have to hide in a small room, or in a corner of her mind, simply to get away from other people.”

The fifth fairy said, “I give her beauty. However, she will never be able to see it herself, or believe in it, not when she looks into the mirror. She will, on the other hand, be able to see the beauty in the world, and in others.”

The sixth fairy said, “I give her poetry: the ability to hear the rhythms of language, and to write in language as though words were her natural element. This will be the most important gift she receives, and what will save her.”

That was, of course, when the bad fairy stepped in and said, “I curse the child. While she is still a child, she will lose her home: her country, her family. And she will never again find a place where she belongs.”

Of course, the seventh good fairy was hiding out (I think they’d been through this routine before). She stepped forward and said, “I can’t change the curse, but I can give her a gift that will help her bear it. She will always be a good traveler, able to pack efficiently and create temporary homes for herself wherever she goes.” I think that fairy was supposed to give me either humility or self-confidence, either of which would have been useful gifts. But she had to mitigate the bad fairy’s curse, you see.

We are all given gifts, we are all cursed in our own ways. That is the first way in which we are like the Sleeping Beauty.

II. The Hundred-Year Sleep

The sleep doesn’t always last for a hundred years, and it doesn’t necessarily happen once. It’s the state in which we fall asleep metaphorically, in which we forget who we are. I think I fell asleep for a while in my own life, during the years I was trying to finish the PhD. There’s one thing I can tell you about that experience. Awakening? Is so. Incredibly. Painful.

III. The Awakening

In different versions of “Sleeping Beauty,” the princess awakens in a variety of ways. Awakening to the prince’s kiss is actually a fairly modern development. In some of the earliest versions, the princess sleeps right through two pregnancies.

The thing about fairy tales is, we can always rewrite them. There are always new versions to be written. In my version, at some point the princess realizes she’s asleep, and she tries to wake up. She tries several times, each time thinking she is awake, but eventually she succeeds. She sits up in bed, and instead of a prince, sees a sign on the wall. I’m pretty sure it was left by the bad fairy. (I mentioned, didn’t I, that you can’t actually tell whether fairies are good or bad? They are both, and neither, and either at different times.) The sign says,

YOU MUST SAVE YOURSELF

Which, I’m pretty sure, is the beginning of a new fairy tale.

The ones I am thinking of as I write this are Jane Yolen and Terri Windling, and if you don’t read their writing, you should. And then there is a group of artists, like Iris Compiet and Jackie Morris, Ali English and Bryony Whistlecraft. (Terri is also an artist, of course.) And there are bloggers like Grace Nuth. I love the images they post, the parts of their lives they share with the world.

I think of them as magical women. They make the world more magical, show me the parts of it that are magical, in case I’ve forgotten. But they also write about work. They are all doing wonderful, important work: this week, I’m teaching Jane Yolen’s young adult novel Briar Rose, which was edited by Terri Windling, in my fairy tale class. I think that’s partly where they get their magic and power, that dedication to the work that is truly worthwhile. To the arts in some form, specifically to the mythic in arts, and to arts that change the world. I think it takes a great deal of courage to be one of the people who tries to change the world in some way — I’ve heard too many people say that they’re not trying to change the world, that they’re just trying to entertain (particularly in their writing). But that’s the point of that? If you’re not trying to change the world, what are you doing, and why? I mean, doesn’t the world need changing?

I still remember when I was a corporate lawyer, doing work that other people thought was important. In Manhattan, working with major corporations, flying around the country. I certainly looked and sounded important, and yet I knew the work I was doing was not, ultimately, worthwhile. That it changed nothing, except by making corporations, and their wealthy shareholders, richer. I could feel the hollowness of it. That was why I left.

The life I have now can be exhausting — it’s been particularly exhausting this year. But I know the work I do, whether it’s teaching or mentoring or writing, is all worthwhile. It’s all work that changes the world, even if only in the most minor ways, by changing one person’s perception. I wonder if that is, after all, the definition of magic?

There are all sorts of things I wish for right now in my life, but one consistent wish is to become one of those bright spirits, who speak honestly, directly, clearly. And with courage.

While I was thinking about this blog post, I ran across two videos that I want to include here. The first is an interview with the artist Evelyn Williams, who died late last year. Her art has such intensity. It is sometimes almost too much to take, but how interesting it is — as she was.

The other is a song from Noe Venable called “Sparrow I Will Fly,” which somehow seemed appropriate just now. The song goes, in part,

I’m still waiting
in the cyclone’s eye
for the day when like
the sparrow I will fly

Two videos by two magical women . . .

“Sometimes I think it’s like I live in a big giant head on a hilltop
made of papier mache, a big giant head of my own head.”

The poem describes how the man lives in a house shaped like his own giant head, cleaning the windows (which are the eyes), mowing the grass around it. And people drive past, waving not to him, but to the giant head, because “they think the house is me.” It isn’t, of course.

What it is, is a metaphor. I suppose a giant house shaped like a head would have to be!

The most important lines of the poem, to me anyway, are these:

“I’ll be sleeping there, or polishing the eyes, or weeding the lawn,
but no-one will see me, no-one would look.”

There’s a sense in which this is a poem about being someone like Neil Gaiman, someone so famous that he is no longer seen as a person. People no longer see him. They see the giant Neil Gaiman head. But it’s also a metaphor for how we experience other people in general: we so often don’t see them, and they so often don’t feel seen. Instead, we see who we think they are, the giant heads of themselves. The houses they inhabit, not the selves that are the inhabitants.

Strangely enough, some of the most authentic people I’ve met have been people who are famous. It’s as though they insist on authenticity — they insist on being themselves, specifically because they feel as though they are being made artificial. They know that people don’t see them, and so whenever they can, they insist on being seen as they are, even if that image is not particularly flattering. They take actions or express opinions that may be controversial, that may cause debate, but reflect what they think and feel. They want, so much, to be seen not as constructs, but as people.

It’s uncomfortable, not being seen as a person.

But we all get that to a certain extent: the giant heads we live in are constructed partially by us, but also partially by others, by who they think we are. And if we are writers or artists, there’s an assumption that we are our writing, our art.

There’s something I’ve learned about writing these posts, which is that when they become hard to write, when the sentences feel like snakes twisting around in my hands, it’s because the subject it too personal. It hits too close to the giant head that is my home. And this subject is personal, I think. Because we all get this, and I get it too: the sense of living in an artificial construct that is perceived as my self, that is addressed instead of me. The value of friends is that they see you, the real you: they automatically look through the windows and know you’re in there. One of the saddest thing, I think, is meeting someone you would like to be a friend who doesn’t do that, who can’t seem to see the person in the construct.

There is a particular pain in not being seen. In not being perceived as a person.

A friend of mine and I were talking about this last summer, sitting in my grandmother’s apartment in Budapest: two women who write fantasy, discussing how easy it seems for people to confuse the writer with the work, or even simply with an image online.

As my illustration for this post, I’ve chosen A Woman’s Head by Fernand Khnopff. She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Iconic, almost. But she must have been a real woman who modeled for the artist. I wonder who she was, and what she was like as a person . . .

And yet we’re human beings, made to connect with one another. We evolved as social animals, and without that connection, we feel a little lost, a little aimless. We don’t quite know what to do. It’s as though we are all, after all, incomplete, and are completed only by each other. Not one of us is sufficient onto ourselves.

And so I thought, what is it, exactly? What is loneliness?

There was a quotation I put on my tumblr a while back: “Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.” –Carl Jung

I think that starts to get at what loneliness is. It’s not being alone, and people often say they can be lonelier in a crowd than by themselves. That’s because in a crowd, the lack of connection becomes more obvious to them — they feel it more. I think Jung is right to stress that loneliness comes from a lack of communication, of genuine interaction. But I want to offer a different definition:

Loneliness comes from being treated as a means rather than an end.

We all want to be seen, and to mean, as ends: as the people we are, as complete wholes. And yet so often we exist for other people as means, as the parent who will raise them, the spouse who will support them, the teacher who will help them. That’s unavoidable: we will always to a certain extent be seen as means. But we also need to be seen as ends, and when we’re not — that’s when we get lonely. When we are in a crowd and feel as though we’re not seen. I suppose that’s why fame also creates a kind of loneliness — you become a means for other people, who read you or watch you. You become a part of their internal landscape, but it is not after all you. It it whoever they imagine you are.

We all need at least one person in the world to see us as we are, and to accept that. To love that, because the opposite of loneliness is being loved, and loving is seeing and accepting.

And you know what? It is very difficult to find. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because at heart, we are all impatient and afraid, and truly knowing and valuing another person takes time and vulnerability. We all want to be loved, without necessarily doing the work of loving. But it doesn’t really work that way, does it? You have to do both. One way out of loneliness is loving, but you need it back, eventually. It can’t simply go one way, which is why taking care of a child can be a lonely endeavor — a child, no matter how affectionate, can’t yet see you as you are, and won’t for years.

I feel as though I should have some sort of grand pronouncement here at the end, but all I have is this: try to find people who love you, and love them back. I think it’s as simple and as difficult as that.

This image is Dreams II by Heinrich Vogeler.

It was after meeting a friend for chocolate. There is a famous chocolate shop in Boston called Burdick’s. That’s where we met, and when I say for chocolate, I mean to drink chocolate, or eat any one of the chocolate items that Burdick’s carries. In my case, it’s a chocolate orange hazelnut cake that is one of my favorite foods in the world. My friend is one of those delicate, graceful women who look as though they wandered out of a fairy tale. She told me about the things that had happened recently in her life, which included death threats because of some things she had written. She had handled them as she seems to handle everything: gracefully, with strength and resilience. And I thought, wait, there’s a pattern here.

The strongest people I know are delicate, graceful women who look as though they wandered out of a fairy tale. (Yes, I know a number of these. I suppose it’s being a fantasy writer, because they are all writers and artists of the fantastic.) They post about finding pink taffeta dresses in second-hand clothing stores, and have overcome incredibly difficult childhoods. They have become famous writers, scholars with international reputations. They have created magnificent lives for themselves, despite opposition, sometimes illness.

They remind me of ballerinas, who look so delicate and graceful. And yet, when you get close to them, you realize they are all muscle. They are a combination of will and art. So the pictures I’ve chosen for today are Degas ballerinas.

We live in a world where physical strength is and will always be useful. Yet it seems to me that these women are stronger, in their own way, than the six-foot tall, two-hundred-pound men I know, and I know a few of those, too. (Sorry, guys.) Their strength is in not knowing when to give up. Giving up never seems to occur to them. Setbacks and adversity are seen as a part of life, a matter of course. Things to learn from, to grow from. And when these women get down and discouraged, as we all so, they talk to their friends. (It’s important to have friends.)

They support each other.

I’m not sure why this struck me so hard, recently. But it was a good realization to have: that strength means going on, doing the things you want and need to do. It means resilience. It even means stubbornness, as in not knowing when to give up, to take no for an answer. Doing what everyone tells you can’t be done, not because you believe in yourself, but because you may as well try as not. Thinking, “I’m not sure I can do this” every step of the way, but doing it. It means flexibility: thinking all right, that didn’t work, what other way can I try to do it? The women I’m thinking of aren’t tough: they get hurt, they cry. They don’t try to be tough. They remain open to the world, to the wonder and the pain of life. They remain vulnerable. They fail and fall, then they pick themselves back up, try to understand what went wrong, what they can change in themselves that will produce a different outcome the next time. And, like beautiful, unstoppable forces, they just keep on going . . .

I was able to step out of the busyess for at least a little while last weekend, at ICFA (the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts). It’s my favorite of all the conferences, either academic or industry. I like it so much because it’s small, and I know all the writers and many of the scholars there, and so it’s like meeting a group of your best friends again, many of whom you haven’t seen for an entire year. There are things to do: I gave two readings, one of “England under the White Witch” and one of my story “Estella Saves the Village,” which is in Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells. But most of my time was spent catching up with people, hearing what they had been up to, what they were planning on doing. And such people! The very best writers in the business. Writers like Kij Johnson and Andy Duncan and Jeffery Ford. And I got to meet Neil Gaiman, which was of course a pleasure.

I’m going to include two photographs here. The first one was taken at the banquet, which occurs on the last night, by Ellen Datlow.

I’m rather proud of this dress because I found it at Goodwill for $10. I bought it specifically for the banquet, but by the time ICFA came around, I had lost some weight and it no longer fit as well. Which isn’t usually a problem, but this was a strapless dress. There were loops for straps, so it had once come with them, but no straps with the dress. So I hunted all around town until I found some ribbon of the right color and matching thread (at two different stores). And I made straps!

The second photograph was taken by Jim Kelly, and it’s of me with fabulous writer friends Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard. I thought we looked pretty smashing!

What I value most about ICFA is the sense of camaraderie, that we’re all in this together. That those of us writing and studying the fantastic are part of a community — we care about and take care of each other. Now that I’m back in Boston, I miss my community, but I know that I’ll see them all again, while I’m in Europe this summer, when I teach at Alpha and Stonecoast, and of course at Readercon, where one of the guests of honor will be Patricia McKillip, who influenced me so much when I was a teenager. And of course I’m in constant contact with them, and with the larger community all over the world, online.

Writing is such a solitary activity! I think it’s important that we come together, we writers. We need to hear what others are doing, tell them what we are doing — check in with each other and with other parts of the industry. Which I suppose is why we have this yearly round of conferences and conventions. It’s expensive, and there are many conventions I wish I could go to but can’t afford. Still, whenever I do manage to go, it’s so worth it.

Also, it gives my evening dresses something to do . . .

Yesterday, the snow came down all day, and today my street looked like this:

I live on a street with both apartment houses and university buildings, and you can see the mix in this picture. The snow was at least two feet deep everywhere I walked, except of course where the streets and sidewalks had been plowed. (That’s one nice thing about living in the city: all the plowing is done for you.) As I walked around the neighborhood, I stopped to take a picture of myself reflected in the post office window:

That’s me dressed for winter in a Land’s End jacket and Timberland boots. When you live in Boston, you have to be ready for winter weather. I walked around a bit, watching the students enjoying the snow. We have so many students here from other parts of the country, and from all over the world; some of them have never seen snow until they arrive in Boston. Today, I saw students building forts, having snowball fights, and taking pictures of themselves having the New England university experience. By Monday, the city will be moving again, and they will all be in classes.

I walked back to my building, which looked very much as it probably had on a winter day a hundred years ago:

It was nice to have a quiet weekend, because usually I’m so busy. This is a transitional period for me: I’m still doing all the things I was doing, and I’ve started doing all the things I’m going to be doing, and those are going on at the same time, which is exhausting. That will be my life for the next few weeks, although after that it will get easier. Transitional times are hard . . . But they’re necessary, because otherwise you can’t actually get anywhere. You have to go through the transitions.

There’s something I do to help me through them, a sort of mental game I play. I pretend to be the person who has already gone through the transition. I’ll give you an example. In the next month or so, I need to lose five pounds. (Don’t even start: I know that I’m perfectly healthy at my current weight. But I dance, and when I go to events I get photographed, and I know the weight I prefer to be, which is five pounds less than my current weight. Any less than that, and I start to look underweight.) So I think, what sort of person would weight five pounds less than I do now? Let’s call her Theo. Well, Theo would not be in the bad habit of staying up late at night, which would leave her tired and hungry and in need of a midnight snack. She would take care of her health, which means getting enough sleep and exercise. So the mental game is pretending to be Theo. I think, what would Theo do? And even more importantly, how would Theo think? And then I try to do and think that.

It just occurred to me, as I was writing this, that I actually have a picture of Theo. Here she is, just after her ballet class:

Doesn’t she look responsible, as though she’s sleeping and eating right? I wish I could be her all the time . . . But for now at least I can pretend, and that actually helps me through the transition, whether it’s a transition to being healthier, or having the career and life I want. Transitions are hard, and in some sense we’re in transition all the time, because life never stays still. But the major transitions, those times in our lives when we’re changing rapidly, and it feels as though the earth is shifting beneath our feet — those are when it can help to visualize who you will be after the transition is over, and pretend to already be her.

The problem was, I couldn’t get the alarm to turn off again. It just kept beeping, in that incredibly loud, industrial, university fire alarm way. There’s a button you can push to turn the alarm off, but it wasn’t working. So I had to call building maintenance. The maintenance man came in about half an hour, but in the meantime, I put Persephone the Cat in the bathroom, which was the quietest part of the apartment, since I didn’t want the alarm to hurt her sensitive ears. And I went out into the hall, to escape from it myself.

That did give me an opportunity to meet my upstairs neighbor, a lovely woman who lives in the beautiful nineteenth-century apartment above me. She’s a Trustee of the university, and a friend of Elie Wiesel, and when she mentioned that she had met Katie Couric at a graduation event, I mentioned that I had met her too, at a cocktail party, since I had worked for the same firm as her husband. (She is much smaller than you would think, but just as perky.) So there was a silver lining to that particular cloud (of smoke).

This experience has led me to formulate a principle for myself: When you’re tired, don’t cook. Make yourself a cheese sandwich, eat a cereal bar, cut up an apple . . . But don’t turn the stove on!

The central problem is that I’m exhausted. There’s just so much work to get done, and it’s going to be like this for the next six weeks or so. After that, I will only be teaching three classes, rather than the current four, and my schedule will get easier. And then the summer will come, and I will be traveling around Europe in my usual way, going wherever I wish, seeing whatever I wish to see, meeting people. That will be lovely . . .

This is all worthwhile, all worth the exhaustion, because I’m in the process of changing my life into the one I want to live. I just have to remember, in the meantime, to take care of myself as much as I can. Which leads me to another principle for myself:

While creating the life you want to live, try not to kill yourself.

I’m tempted to post two pictures that I posted earlier on Facebook. Should I? Yes, I think I will. The first picture is one I took of myself last week. It’s of me completely exhausted, taken in the bathroom mirror.

The second one is of my street in Budapest. Yes, that’s Múzeum Utca, with the park around the Nemzeti Múzeum to the left, and the California Coffee Company on the corner. That’s where I go for my latte and free wifi in the mornings, and for a sour cherry brownie when I’m craving one . . .

I’m in the process of rearranging my schedule and my life, and this is the hard part. But eventually, it will all have been so very worthwhile . . . (I just have to not kill myself in the process.)

This seems like such an obvious thing to say, and yet I think it’s not obvious at all, partly because we have such a vague sense of what love actually is. We use the word for so many things! I love roses, for example. I love them because they’re beautiful, and because of their scent, and even because they can be so difficult. And I do not love the hybrid teas that to me are not really roses. (You know, the roses that you get on Valentine’s Day, which have long stems and tight buds and are impossible to grow. For me, real roses are the old Gallicas and Albas and Damasks.) If only we loved people the way we love roses, or books, or houses! Books and houses we also love because they are beautiful and difficult. And yet, when we love people, we get frustrated by the difficulty . . .

I think that when we say we want to be loved, what we really mean is that we want to be understood, and accepted, and valued. Understood for who we are, and accepted and valued for that . . . And that’s where the difficulty lies, doesn’t it? Because so often when we love people, we want them to be different. We love them despite, rather than because. And yet, who among us wants to be loved despite? We want to be loved with our thorns, and even because of our thorns.

One of the reasons I’ve only been thinking about this recently is that in my family, we never talked about love. We were supposed to behave in a certain way: to become educated and cultured, to dress properly and act appropriately. The emphasis was always on our accomplishments rather than our relationships. But loving well is a sort of skill, really. Truly understanding, accepting, and valuing another human being is not an easy thing to do. Often love has something else mixed into it, a bit of dislike, a bit of disdain. That small thing will kill it, eventually. Because we can tell when someone does not truly love us, when that love is mixed with something else. We always know, even when we try to hide it from ourselves . . . Loving is something that takes honesty and courage.

It would be easy to love a rose without thorns, a book with no complicated passages, a house in which the windows did not stick in summer. A human being without old hurts or habits that displeased us. But perhaps that would not be love, just a sort of easy pleasure. Perhaps love is in the accepting, in the valuing.

Some time ago, I found a quotation from Jeannette Winterson that struck me. Here it is:

“There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.”

She’s talking about understanding: the first step in being loved is to be truly seen, and understood. You can spend your whole life in a relationship and realize that you’ve never really been understood, that the person you’ve been with has never known your name. That’s a horrible realization to have . . .

But if you can find a person who does . . . Well then, it’s as though you are no longer on a planet spinning through space. It’s as though you’ve found, in this universe that is ceaselessly in motion, a place on which to stand. Solid ground . . .

When I was going through depression, I was public about it too. I’m not sure there’s any other way you can be, particularly when you have a public presence, as they all do. People begin to wonder what’s wrong with you, why you’re not tweeting, blogging, writing. Still, there’s such shame associated with it, with admitting that you are less than all right. That you can’t, in fact, deal. And people can make it worse in a variety of ways, by saying it will pass, you will be all right. That you should cheer up, shouldn’t be so sad. The worst is when they remind you of how lucky you are to have what you do have, when they tell you that you are so much better off than many other people. The implication is that if you have a best-selling book, or a major award, or significant publications, you really shouldn’t feel depressed. That your depression is a sort of ingratitude.

Which ends up making you feel depressed, ashamed, and ungrateful.

When you’re depressed, it’s impossible to ignore the criticism, because it’s an external form of your own internal dialog. When you’re depressed, nothing rolls off your back.

(Funnily enough, a blog post I wrote recently received a similar critical comment from a nameless reader — that I was unaware of my own privilege, and ungrateful for it. I left the comment up because it demonstrated, better than anything I could have written, my point that if you have a public presence of any sort, you will be criticized by people who don’t know you or where you’ve come from. But that criticism is much harder to take, almost impossible to take, when you’re depressed.)

My depression was connected to a specifically difficult time in my life, the two years in which I completed my doctoral dissertation. It took a while to go away, even after I graduated. And it changed me permanently. I’m stronger than I was before in some ways, but more fragile in others. I will never again have the easy toughness I once had. I miss it, sometimes. Nowadays, my sense of joy is more delicate. I am more aware that beneath the sunlit earth, there are Shadowlands. (I used to call depression “going to the Shadowlands.” Depression isn’t sadness. It’s blankness. It’s when reality loses one of its dimensions and becomes flat, monochromatic.) I can feel them there, and I can tell when stress or loneliness or tiredness, those things we all experience, brings me closer to them.

I’m not writing this blog post to say anything in particular, except that it makes me sad (not depressed, but sad) to see such wonderful friends, such creative, artistic spirits, going through that. When I heard them speak out about it, I thought, what is the appropriate response when someone tells you they are dealing with depression? Back when I talked about my own depression, there were a few people who gave me the only response that helped, which was “I’ve been there too.”

I thought that for this post, I would use one of the photographs I took at Stonecoast, of a stone wall.

It fits the mood of this post because it shows the cold monochrome of winter. But the truth is that when I took this picture, I was wonderfully, gratefully happy, because I was in an environment that was all about writing. I suppose that contradiction is appropriate . . .

I remember the ways to reach them (because there is always a journey). Sometimes you have to climb over the mountain ridge before you see the valley. Sometimes you have to wait on the shore, until the boat shaped like a swan comes for you. It takes you to the island, and the castle. Sometimes all you have to do is step into the tapestry and find your way through the forest. (You will find your way, because you’ve been there before.)

I wonder if we are born imaginative, or become imaginative by circumstance? I think it’s a combination of both. It made a difference for me that I was a shy, dreamy child. When other children were playing kickball at recess, I was reading. My mind became populated by the things I was reading about, but there was also a consistency to my imagination, to the countries I had inside me. They were based on the fundamental premise that the world was alive, that animals and trees could communicate, that even rocks had things to say. That the true things were the old things: cottages made of stone, and ancient books — mountains, seas, and the great sky above. And that the world was filled with magic: shoes that took you wherever you wanted to go, mirrors that showed you whatever you wanted to see. I think J.R.R. Tolkien would say that my countries exist in Faerie, which he describes as the state in which magic can happen.

Of course, they still exist: I still have those countries inside me. Nowadays, I don’t visit as often as I used to. I have work to do, and there’s not as much time for dreaming as there used to be. But because I have them inside me, I’ve never accepted a simulacrum, a false country of the imagination. I don’t play video games. I barely watch television, and when I do, it’s because a show reminds me of the true countries of my imagination. They’re created by people who have true countries inside them as well, or so I believe. I would rather live in this world, and find in it places that remind me of those countries: I would rather have reality, and glimpse in it pieces of the countries I’ve known since a child. (I see pieces of them quite often: a stream running under a bridge, a horse standing in a field, a tangle of wild roses . . .) And since I am an adult, and a writer, I have the power to bring parts of those inner countries into this one — to write about them, or make them manifest in other ways.

I think that’s part of the writer’s, and more generally the artist’s, task. To bring his or her inner countries into reality, whether by showing where they exist in our world or describing and therefore creating them. Art changes our perceptions, which changes our reality (because our experience of reality is so fundamentally determined by our perceptions). The way an artist describes a copse of birches can change those birches for us.

When I see a copse of birches in winter, I can see the women sleeping inside them . . .

I have a friend named Joe. Except that Joe is not his real name. In fact, he doesn’t exist: Joe is a composite of various people I’ve know. But he’s a convenient example.

Joe’s a big guy, about twice my size. If you put him in a movie, he would be either the martial-arts expert hero or the martial-arts expert villain. He lives in a small town in the South, and he owns his own business. Let’s say he’s in construction. He builds things, makes things, some work that gives him a relatively steady and reliable source of income. He has a home, a family, a community. If he wanted, he could live exactly as he is living for the rest of his life.

How do I know Joe? I’m pretty sure we went to high school together. Or not, it doesn’t much matter. He’s just an example, remember.

What struck me recently, rather hard, is that of the two of us, I’m the one who lives an unsafe life. I don’t mean physically, although I live in a large city and regularly receive reports of local robberies from the university police. No, I mean in another way.

I’m the one who ended up going to law school, working as a corporate lawyer. There were days when I got on a plane in the morning, and got on another plane at night. I made telephone calls that moved millions of dollars around the world. It was a world in which the stakes were high, the responsibilities great. And I left that world for the even less safe one of being a writer and scholar. Less safe because after all, corporate law had been a path. If you followed the path, you would do well. But a writer and scholar has to create her own path. She is rewarded for her originality, her insight — her ability to say what has never been said before. To shed light.

I don’t think I ever expected to be where I am today: teaching at one of the largest research universities in the world, whose freshman class is larger than the entire population of Joe’s town, and in a well-known MFA program. Publishing steadily, being respected as a writer. But it’s difficult too: I am responsible for performing, for producing. Standing up in front of sixty students a day, showing them what they did not know before. Flying to conferences, speaking on panels, reading my stories. Delivering new stories, hopefully (but not always) by deadline. There is a point at which people ask you to do things not because you have the right training or skills (like a corporate lawyer), but because you’re you. Because they want a Theodora Goss story. Which is wonderful — but which also means being an artist, doing the work to become an artist, always questioning yourself. Always pushing yourself. Getting better, going deeper. And, of course, accepting criticism, because you’re out there. Presenting yourself to the world.

If I make it sound hard, that’s because it can be very hard. At least for someone like me, who is an introvert and would love to dream her life away, maybe reading books or planting a garden.

I have no idea what the future will bring. Sometimes I sit in my apartment in this great city at night, and feel afraid. And sometimes I envy Joe’s life. It seems so peaceful, one day essentially the same as another. He can grow a garden. He can read for fun. But I realize, looking at my own life, that I’ve always chosen the more difficult path, as though by instinct. The path of greater challenge, and greater freedom. I’ve always gotten on the plane and taken off, to wherever I’m going.

I’m not quite sure why. I think it has to do with the fact that I’m an artist. I think perhaps living an unsafe life is the only way to create art.

I think I go to museums with Ophelia so often because I was taken to museums so often as a child. And not just museums: we were always going to ballets, operas, plays, concerts. (I was usually bored at the concerts.) Without thinking about it too much, my mother was steeping us in culture — I say without thinking about it too much because it was the way she herself had grown up. You did not necessarily have money — my family lost all its property after the war, and was only compensated for it after the fall of the communist regime — but you could always have culture. You could always know music and art. Where I grew up, in Washington D.C., most of the museums are free, so we would go in whenever we wanted, and often on weekends I would simply wander around the National Galleries or the Hirshhorn. Museums still feel like home to me: I feel perfectly at ease in them, as some people do in churches. I love to wander around and then sit in the café (there is always a café) with a cappuccino, reading or writing.

At the Gardner Museum, I took Ophelia to the café, which was terribly overpriced. But I suppose that’s part of the experience I’m giving her — I want her to feel comfortable in museums, and know how to behave in cafés and restaurants. (She’s eight, so I’m in the midst of that — trying to make sure she knows how to behave appropriately in public, knows the codes. Because living in society means knowing and negotiating a set of codes, doesn’t it? And I want her to know it, so that if she later wants to break the rules, she’ll know what they are and how to break them. You have to know a system if you want to rebel against it.) Today we are working on how to dress for an evening at the theater, because we’re going to Boston Ballet’s new Nutcracker at the Opera House. (I wanted to write this blog post before it was time for me to get dressed.)

I got something very special out of going to museums as a child, something I think most children don’t get. It seems to be reserved for an elite, although it shouldn’t be. (I was certainly not part of a social elite, as a child. Except perhaps educationally.) It’s the sense that human culture belongs to me, and I belong to it. That I participate in it. Picasso and Matisse are not intimidating. They are brothers in arms, and we are all trying to create something, to produce art of various sorts. Of course, some parts of that culture belong to me more than others, simply because of my own cultural heritage, and I would be wary of using material from non-European cultures. I would use it, but with more care. Nevertheless, there’s a sense, not so much of ownership, but of participation.

That matters to me deeply in my own art, and it’s something I want Ophelia to have as well.

Now, you should never trust a Facebook quotation, and of course I checked to see if Campbell had ever said this. He probably hadn’t, in exactly that form. What he may have said is something like this, in a lecture: “Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave, that was so dreaded, has become the center.”

So you’re afraid to enter the cave, you enter, you stumble in the darkness because the ground is rocky. But somewhere in that cave is the treasure, the thing you are looking for. To find it, you have to enter the cave in the first place.

I could write a blog post on overcoming fear and venturing into the cave. Except that’s not my problem. I always go into the cave. I’m not even sure why. I think I do it on principle, because I know that if you give in to fear once, you are more likely to give in to fear twice. You are more likely to hold back the next time, to say no, the cave is too dark, the ground too rocky. The things I’m afraid of are the same things I think we’re all afraid of. We often think of bravery as jumping out of airplanes, but seriously, who’s afraid of jumping out of an airplane? No, the things we’re afraid of are failure, loneliness, poverty. Being lost, facing rejection. Ultimately, death.

Being a writer means that you confront all of these. The path itself is a lonely one, and you face a continual possibility of rejection and failure. (You may remember that some time ago I wrote about how I deal with negative reviews? Everyone gets negative reviews. Well, to deal with mine, I read James Joyce’s negative reviews. I scroll through his one-star reviews on Goodreads. Seriously.) A book may be rejected by every publisher, a book may be published and fail. Poverty is a very real possibility. It’s easy to become lost. You can’t be a writer without going into the cave. I go into the cave so I can get used to being afraid. When I started going to conventions, I would always volunteer to moderate panels, in part so I would be put on panels, because there was always a need for moderators. You see, for some reason people are afraid to moderate. So I would find myself in front of two hundred people, moderating a panel that consisted of writers such as Samuel Delaney and Barry Malzberg and John Clute. When you do the things you fear, over and over again, you lose your fear of them. And you become used to the feeling of being afraid, so when you have to do the next thing you fear, you’re already accustomed to it. You know what it feels like. Eventually, you begin to want it, the feeling of being at least a little afraid, of moving past your comfort zone. You start to realize that if you’re not, to at least a certain extent, staring into the abyss, you’re not really living. You’re not even really writing.

So my problem isn’t going into the cave. My problem is that I always go into the cave, and then I stumble and fall. Not always of course, but sometimes. Then I feel stupid, and blame myself for having stumbled. For having failed to live up to expectations. That’s what I need to work on. Because I’ve met so many people who never even venture inside. People who tell me they have traveled the world, but when I ask them about it, reveal that all the trips were planned, were comfortable. People who call themselves romantics, but are afraid to fall in love — deeply, passionately in love with another person. Writers who are afraid to work on longer projects because of the fundamental fear that they will fail — that they will not finish, or the book will not find a publisher, or once published it will not sell.

What I need to do is pick myself up, mend anything that’s been broken, and say to myself, but I ventured into the cave. Of course I failed — that’s the sign of having tried. And then I need to look around for that treasure.

We should wear our failures as badges of honor, I think. Show off our scars, as soldiers used to show off the scars they gained in duels . . .

You see, hellebores are among my favorite flowers. I value them particularly because they bloom in winter, when all the other flowers are asleep, underground. They are a promise: that spring will come again, despite the darkness, despite the snow. Facebook is silly: you and I both know how silly it is. But sometimes it does allow you to see something magical, simply because it’s populated by human beings, who are intermittently magical. Some more than others, of course . . . Seeing this hellebore was like getting a glimpse of another country, like getting a sign that said “Wait, hope.”

Here, in case you are wondering what I’m talking about, is the image:

Tonight, I was trying to answer a question, which was, “Why do I feel so sick?” I thought, it’s the rich food — I never eat the way I’ve eaten in the last two days. (I had marzipan for breakfast.) I thought, it’s the lack of sleep — I’ve been overworked for so long now that I don’t remember how to be anything else. But no, I concluded. It’s something else, something deeper, a sickness not of the body but of the soul — and any sickness of the body is a symptom of that underlying sickness. I’ve gone too long needing something that is difficult to find — that deep connection with the world, or the world behind the world: the reality behind all our human games and constructs. I’ve gone too long saying and doing what I’m expected to, being who I’m expected to be. Moving through the world automatically, in a way I’ve learned to move through it, because don’t we all? So as to create the least possible friction.

Once upon a time, I lived in a teeny-tiny house in a forgotten town close to Boston, and I had a garden, in which I planted hellebores. They would come up every winter. I always dreamed that someday I would have a house with a large garden, one which bordered a wood, and in the wood I would plant all the wild flowers: hellebores, which are wild, and the old species daffodils, and fritillaries. I mention this because gardens can connect you to what is real, if they are real gardens, magical gardens. (Mine was magical.)

I’ve been so busy that I’ve barely been writing, and when I do write, it’s because someone has asked me for a story and offered me money for it. I barely write poetry anymore, because there’s no money in it. And yet I think poetry keeps us from becoming sick, and I think I’m healthiest when I can write poetry. It’s a sort of thermometer for the soul. (It occurred to me tonight that there is a certain irony in the fact that the world will pay me enough to live on for teaching others to write, but not for writing myself.)

The hellebore: it reminded me of all this, and helped me diagnose my own illness. But it cannot answer the question that remains, which is, what then? How to effect a cure? And that, I don’t know. But it does hold out the promise of spring after the snows . . .