Theodora Goss

There’s a storm coming. I’ve seen it mentioned on social media, and there have been stories about it on the news. The university has written to tell me that I can cancel classes if I need to, and even the electricity company is telling me what to do in case of downed power lines.

I live in the city, and all the power lines are underground. Perhaps that’s part of the reason I haven’t really been paying attention. The other part is that this is Boston, and we’re told that we’re getting a storm of the century every autumn. I have a flashlight, I’ll probably go out later today to get extra water and food. And I’ll charge up the electronics. But I’m half a block away from my office, in a brand new building in one of the largest universities in the country, which has backup systems. And I live in a building that has been standing for the last hundred years.

So yeah, maybe I’m not taking it as seriously as I should . . .

I was thinking about the storm today because it seems to mirror something inside me. I’ve been asking myself why I haven’t been better about updating this blog. Even while I was writing my dissertation, I was quite good at updating on a regular basis. I think it’s because since I’ve moved into the city, into this apartment which seems so peaceful, so quiet, I’ve been living intensely.

You can’t see it on the outside. On the outside, I have a very normal life. But on the inside, so much has been happening. I’m not even sure I can describe what. It’s as though tectonic plates are shifting. I always think that you have to be prepared on the inside before something can happen on the outside. So what in the world am I preparing for? I have no idea. I sometimes think my body understands things better than I do. I also think that if you try to do things before the time is right, they don’t work out. I remember trying to apply to graduate school before I was mentally ready, even before my law school loans were paid off. It didn’t work. The next year, when the loans were paid off and I was ready, it worked so well that I had full support and a stipend. And I ended up at Boston University, which was the last place I thought I would go. I was sure I’d end up at one of the smaller Ivies, and I had that opportunity. But in the end, I chose to come here, and it turned out to be the perfect place, the place that allowed me to start becoming a writer.

Living intensely is actually quite difficult. I end up becoming impatient with ordinary life. I end up doing things that have a certain intensity to them: taking long walks by the river, writing. Those bring a kind of relief. And I think of adventures to have, even when they’re small ones.

I don’t know what this period is about, exactly. But I feel as though I need to go through it, because there’s something on the other side. When I figure out what it is, I’ll let you know!

Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve been listening to while waiting for the storm:

I’m so tired! It’s been an incredibly busy week, and in addition to all the busyness, I’m sick. Yesterday, I had no voice left.

I’ve been thinking about exactly what to do with this blog, because I don’t want to stop updating. But I’ve been so tired lately! I’m going to try to update very other day, and answer comments on the days I’m not blogging. That may or may not work, I’m not sure.

And this is a strange day to be writing the particular blog post I want to write, because I am so incredibly tired. But it’s on being fully alive.

It’s inspired by a blog post written by Marjorie Liu, who is another lawyer turned writer. Marjorie links to a blog post by a friend of hers, written I just realized exactly a year ago today. (What a strange coincidence! I didn’t realize, until I started writing this post, that it’s her post’s anniversary. That’s one of those Jungian synchronicity things, isn’t it?)

Her friend writes about dedicating the next year of her life to becoming unstuck. She says,

“I start this year of becoming unstuck with the premise that the sole purpose of my life is to be alive. Everything else is just a dance.

“Whether I work from a laptop in a café in Paris or from my home office, whether I could lose 30 pounds or whether I’m a size 6 . . . I am going to show up to life anyway. And while I’m here, I might as well do the best I can, for no other reason than it just feels better.

“Where I used to get overwhelmed by all that needed to happen in order to ‘get where I wanted to go,’ not even knowing where to start (so why not just put that off until tomorrow?), I am just showing up to my life. Not the one from my dreams, but the one I have. And turns out I like it far more than I ever realized. There can always be dreams of ‘more,’ but not at the expense of enjoying today. Over it.”

I spent the last year of my life becoming unstuck: from the PhD program, primarily. I changed so many things about my life, and I feel as though I’m in a place from which I can move forward. It’s a scary place, sometimes. It feels both free and sometimes as though I’m not entirely sure what I’m standing on. Maybe I’m not standing on anything, just sort of floating in space. Maybe I’m flying, I don’t know.

But I like what she says about being alive, about showing up to the life you have. Sometimes, when I’m anxious about the future, I try to just stop and be in that moment — see that it’s a beautiful day, with white clouds in the sky, the leaves lying red and yellow on the pavement.

She continues,

“Showing up for life is a different strategy than I’ve had for a very long time, and the results so far have been incredible. Funny thing is? By letting go of my dreams a little, and becoming more awake to life in this moment, I have begun the process of becoming ‘unstuck’ and I’m moving toward those dreams. They are now something I feel entirely confident I will achieve and I don’t put off the things I need to do to achieve them until tomorrow, I do what I can today. And if they don’t come true that’s okay too, because I’m still alive and that’s all I need to be.

“Who knows where I will be a year from now, maybe updating this blog from my macbook in a café in Paris, or maybe still right here in this chair — doesn’t really matter. Life will throw me curve balls and it will twist and turn and there will be suffering and unexpected joy along the way, but that’s part of life too and I’m going to show up for it either way. That way, I won’t ever become stuck again.

“I only have to be alive, the rest is just a dance.”

I checked her blog recently (remember that this was written a year ago), and she is indeed currently living in Paris. What a wonderful example of someone who came unstuck! So this year, since I’m unstuck already (and maybe floating or maybe flying), I’m going to focus on the being alive part. And maybe, just maybe, my life will take me in unexpected directions too. I hope so!

Since moving into the city, I’ve spent more time alone than I have for many years — in part because I’m just so busy and don’t have time to meet friends. But it’s created an interesting situation: I can hear my own inner dialog more clearly, and more often, than I’ve been able to in the past.

You probably know what I mean. I was wondering whether to call it an internal monologue, but I think there are two voices. One is the internalized voice of society, by which I mean everyone outside yourself. The voices of your parents figure in it prominently, but there are also the voices of friends, teachers and others in authority, and of course the media. That voice speaks as one, but it’s made up of all those different voices: it exists where they intersect. So if your mother told you that you are overweight, and that’s the message you received from your friends, and the images in magazines imply the same thing, guess what that voice is going to tell you? That you’re overweight, of course.

I’ll call it the Critical Voice, because what we internalize most often is criticism. The voice speaking in response is the Responsive Voice. It’s our inner self responding to that voice. It usually responds, rather than speaking on its own initiative, although I’m beginning to think it should.

I’ll tell you about a conversation I once had with my mother, which will indicate what sort of Critical Voice I have. The conversation took place about three years ago, in a train from Budapest to the town of Szántód, by Lake Balaton. It was a rickety old train, moving along old tracks through farmland. My mother was sitting on one side of the compartment, and I was sitting on the other. Ophelia was asleep, I think on my lap. My mother looked at her and said, “Ophelia looks like me.” She paused a minute and then added, “She’s a pretty girl. Sometimes these things skip a generation.”

I laughed and said to her, “Do you realize you just implied that I’m not pretty?” I laughed because that was of course the message I’d gotten most of my childhood. It was a deliberate message: my mother made clear to me, years later, that she had wanted to make sure I did not think being pretty was important, that I learned to rely on my brains and education. She did not believe in telling girls that they were pretty. It was bad for them. This, by the way, is something I find very Eastern European. There is a belief, among Eastern European parents, that praising children is bad for them. Notice that my mother only remarked on Ophelia’s prettiness while she was asleep.

Sitting in the train, she replied, “You’re pretty in a different way. You look like your father.” Which again made my laugh, since at that point she had not spoken to my father in twenty years. I took after that side of the family.

The things we hear, particularly from parents but also from society as a whole, forms the Critical Voice. Even when we don’t hear it, it’s there, telling us what it thinks of us, our plans, our ambitions. I can hear it more clearly now, and you know what? It’s wrong.

I think what I need to do is turn my Responsive Voice into something stronger. I need to let it speak first, let it indicate what my inner self needs and desires. Then the Critical Voice can respond, but the Responsive Voice (which I should perhaps call the Desiring Voice) can dismiss its criticism. It can say, you’re too late. I’ve already decided what I want to do. (Maybe it can become a Decisive Voice. Whatever I call it, I want it to speak — not just respond.)

Being able to hear that Critical Voice has made me so much more conscious of how much it’s there, and how much it says about what I am not and what I should not do. I want to start talking about what I am and what I should do instead. (Maybe I should call that inner voice the Affirming Voice.) It will continue to be a dialog: both voice will always be there. It’s just a matter of which one I listen to, which one I take more seriously.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I went through a period of depression that lasted for about two years, although I wasn’t depressed the whole time. It came and went. It was no surprise: those two years were the years I was writing my PhD dissertation, and although I doubt much research has been done on this, I think working in such an intense way, for such high stakes, can and certainly does lead to depression — many of my friends who have done PhDs report similar experiences. Of course, I was also teaching full-time and I had a child. Those made finishing the PhD even more difficult.

The depression ended some time after I received my diploma, and it hasn’t come back since. But now that I’ve had it, I’m aware of it: sometimes I can see the shadow of its black wings. I can feel when they come near me. They never would have when I was younger, but this is what I believe: those of us who do difficult creative work can’t do it without making ourselves more vulnerable to things like depression. To do any creative work well, you have to open yourself up — to the world, to other people, to whatever is out there. And you have to make the barriers in yourself, the barriers that keep out your own fears and desires, thinner. Because in order to write well, you have to feel things, understand things, and that means the membranes between yourself and yourself, and yourself and others, have to be permeable. You become more vulnerable to all sorts of things. If you’re going to be sensitive, and you have to be as a writer, you can’t have a thick skin.

So I find myself managing my moods, living in a way that leaves me feeling balanced and healthy. Well, as much as I can. At least, I have a much better idea of how to do it now than I did when the depression first hit. (I did the right things, by the way: started going to a therapist, started working on recovering from what is not a mood, but an illness.) I’m going to write what I learned down, in case it helps anyone else. Here are the things I pay attention to now:

1. Sleep. You must get enough sleep, and not only sleep but also rest. I don’t get as much sleep as I should, but if I don’t, I know that I’m going to teeter on the edge of sadness, and I will feel as though there is something wrong with me, or with life, but no: it’s just a lack of sleep. It’s purely physiological, and I know that I will feel better once I get some rest. So I don’t push myself as hard as I used to. I know my health depends on it.

2. Food. When I told my therapist how I manage my food, she initially though it was strange, that there might be something compulsive about it. But I told her that I did it to manage how I felt throughout the day, so that my mood was always stable. I think everyone’s body is different, and everyone has to learn how to do this for themselves, based on how different foods make them feel. But I feel best when I eat whole grains, lean proteins, fruits and veggies, and healthy treats. Four meals a day, about 400 calories for the first three, about 600 for dinner. Each meal has to have whole grains, lean proteins, and fruit or veggies. Except the treats. So a typical day will be oatmeal with milk, orange juice, and a chai latte for breakfast; a cheese sandwich and an apple for lunch; something sweet for a snack (like the brownies I make); and beef stew with vegetables for dinner. I try never to get either full or hungry. I try to make sure that any grains I eat have whole grains in them, and while I eat plenty of sugar, I buy the organic kind — those brown crystals — because I’ve noticed that it doesn’t seem to affect my energy level as much. It’s pretty simple, really. I drink water, tea (herbal except for the chai in the morning), and sometimes juice. And I eat low-fat but not non-fat (cheese, mostly). I think non-fat foods just make you hungrier.

3. Exercise. I hate gyms. So I don’t go to gyms. It’s pretty easy getting plenty of exercise in the life I’m living now. Since I’ve moved into the city, I haven’t had a car, so I either walk everywhere or take the T. I can easily cover five miles just running errands. I walk every day, and when I have a chance to, I choose to walk rather than taking the T. But I find that yoga and pilates, morning and night, help me stay balanced and feel healthy. I haven’t been very good at doing them recently, but I feel so much better when I do! It’s something I definitely need to get back to. And I want to set a good example for my daughter: I want her to see that her mother is healthy, and cares about her health. But mostly, I want the feeling of calm that it gives me. If I can stretch and do yoga for half an hour in the morning, I know that I’ve done something good for myself that day.

4. Pleasure. I think you have to deliberately do things that give you pleasure. Every day. It may sound silly to say this, but being able to take a hot bubble bath at the end of the day changes my perspective significantly. Playing music. Walking by the river, which is so beautiful in autumn. Going to the art museum or a concert. Making sure that each day, you do something that pleases you, that if possible brings you joy. Even, for me, walking through a bookstore . . . You have to treat yourself as though you were someone you loved.

I have some more thoughts on this topic, but I have other work to do tonight — perhaps I’ll write more about this some other time. I’ll end this post with a picture of me by the beautiful river:

I’ve been teaching Ophelia “Miss Mary Mack.” Do you remember the rhyme? If you’re a woman about my age, and you grew up in an English-speaking country, I’m sure you do. It goes like this:

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
All dressed in black, black, black,
Had silver buttons, buttons, buttons,
All down her back, back, back.

She asked her mother, mother, mother,
For fifteen cents, cents, cents,
To watch the elephants, elephants, elephants,
Jump over the fence, fence, fence.

They jumped so high, high, high,
They reached the sky, sky, sky,
And they never came back, back, back,
Till the fourth of July, July, July!

There are variations: the version in Wikipedia (yes, there’s a whole entry for this rhyme) is a little different. Wikipedia says it’s the most common clapping game in the English-speaking world, and I’m sure that’s true. When I started teaching Ophelia clapping games, it was the first one I remembered, although “Miss Lucy Had a Baby” also came back to me pretty quickly. I started teaching her clapping games because she would get bored on the subway, and I didn’t want her playing games on my cell phone. I needed a way to keep her amused, and clapping games required only hands.

Once I started teaching her, I was surprised by the realization that she didn’t already know them. After all, she’s eight. Didn’t I already know clapping games by the time I was eight? Perhaps it’s because she plays primarily with boys, but I think it’s more than that. I think that the culture of childhood is disappearing.

If you’re my age, you probably remember having your parents tell you to get out of the house, particularly during summer vacation. We would get out of the house and just go — a group of kids, usually all the kids from the neighborhood. We would go down to the creek, wherever that was (there always seemed to be one), and play all sorts of games. Older kids taught younger kids games like Cat’s Cradle, and Slap Jack, and all sorts of jump rope rhymes. Songs like “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg . . .” (I bet you remember the rest.) Ophelia goes to one of the best schools in Lexington, which is one of the best school districts in the state, probably the country. Kids from the high school go on to Ivy League universities. The parents come from all over the world to work in Boston, primarily in medical and technological fields, and they live in Lexington for the schools. After school, their children go to chess club and robotics team and violin lessons, to karate and riding. They play together only at school or on playdates. And on those playdates, they play Pokémon or on their Wiis. Even Ophelia has an iTouch, given to her by her grandmother, so she can play Angry Birds and whatever else is on there. They don’t play clapping games.

Think about what we’re losing. Our children will be ready for a technological world, but we’ll have lost games and rhymes that have been handed down, child to child, sometimes for centuries. I think that’s terribly sad.

(On the other hand, I just realized that Miss Mary Mack would be an excellent Halloween costume. All you need is a black dress, silver buttons to sew down the back, fifteen cents (unless you’re doing the more expensive fifty-cent version — evidently, ticket prices have gone up) and a stuffed elephant. I think that would be a brilliant costume!

Elmore Leonard famously said about his writing, “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”

Fairy tales do that, of course. They leave out all the boring parts. Because they started as oral tales, they are almost pure plot. That’s one reason they are so much fun to read, although when we read them, there are also things we miss: character development, descriptions of setting. For those, we go to other kinds of stories.

I was thinking about this today as I was walking to the grocery store. I thought, what does it really mean to live life as though it were a fairy tale? Do you try to leave out all the boring parts? Well, of course in life we can’t do that. There are always going to be boring parts. And in fact, those boring parts are represented in fairy tales as well: Cinderella has to spend a long time cleaning the kitchen. Fairy tales can mention those parts briefly, but the fairy tale characters, if we imagine them to be real, have to live through sweeping the hearth, and being a goose girl, and climbing the glass mountain. They have to deal with wearing a catskin day after day.

But what fairy tale characters get, in compensation, is meaning. All those things have a greater meaning that will become clear by the end of the tale. They are the ordeals the fairy tale characters have to go through to prove that they are worthy of the happy ending.

So I thought, perhaps living life as though it were a fairy tale doesn’t mean never being bored. Perhaps it means finding meaning even in things that seem meaningless.

Now that I’ve returned from the grocery store, and I’m sitting here eating soup and consolidating my thoughts, this is what I’ve come up with. If you want to live a fairy tale life, you need to start with the following.

1. Minimize the boring parts as much as you can: either get rid of them or, if you can’t, try to make them more interesting. I find doing dishes boring, and I can’t not do dishes, because I wouldn’t have anything to eat on. But I’ve bought myself very pretty dishes, so I like to see them emerging all clean from the soapy water. That turns doing dishes into a kind of sensual pleasure. And finding dishes that go together, usually at Goodwill, is an adventure — each dish has its own story.

2. Fill the remaining boring parts with meaning. Find the meaning in them. I’m very lucky to be doing work I love, but there are certainly boring parts, as there are in every job. I remind myself that my work supports my writing, and that I’m climbing the glass hill because on the other side is the ogre’s castle, and I need to get to the castle to find and free what I love. (This is an elaborate metaphor of some sort, although I’m not entirely sure how it’s working. What is the ogre? The publishing industry? Have I mentioned that it’s Friday and I’m very tired?)

That’s what fairy tales offer us: meaning. And if we want to have fairy tale lives, we have to find or create the meaning of them.

These, by the way, are some of my dishes:

Here I am, trying to write a blog post! Even though I’m tired and I have a lot of reading to do tonight for the classes I’m teaching tomorrow. But it’s so easy for me to focus on everything that needs doing, and neglect the things I want to do. (Although, I have to tell you, I’m working on the novel! I’m very happy about that.)

Tonight, I thought I would write about a quotation I found on Facebook. It was posted by Jonathan Carroll, who is always a wonderful source of quotations. It goes like this:

“We are, if not exactly ‘saved’ by reading, at least partially ‘repaired’ by it: made the better morally and existentially. To those who find that idea fanciful I would put the question: when were you last mugged on the Underground by someone carrying Middlemarch in his pocket? We read to extend our sympathies, to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves, to educate our imaginations, to find liberation from the prison of the self, to be made whole where we are broken, to be reconciled to the absurdity of existence, in short to be redeemed from flesh, the ego and despair.” –Howard Jacobson

Doesn’t that sound wonderful? The problem is, I don’t agree with it. We try so hard to justify reading, in a society in which many people simply don’t read, that we assign it some sort of moral value. We say that reading will make us moral. It will save us from becoming the sorts of people who mug others on the subway. And I think that’s absurd. The sorts of people who carry around Middlemarch in their pockets have generally received an expensive enough education that they don’t want to jeopardize it by having a criminal record. But also, perhaps they haven’t read Middlemarch carefully enough. Because if you read it, really read it, you might become the sort of person who mugs people on the subway in sheer despair. You might realize that you live in a society that limits your choices, in which love and authenticity are difficult to achieve. You might identify with Dr. Lydgate.

Don’t tell me that reading The Stranger or The Metamorphosis or 1984 is going to keep you from mugging people! Or even The Hobbit.

Reading is just as likely to wound you, to make you hate other people or the society you live in. To long for something else, to reject the absurdity of at least contemporary existence. The people who ban books are wrong about banning books, but right about why one would ban them: because they are a bad influence. They make us discontented with our lives. They are subversive. They do not reconcile us; they encourage us to rebel. Writers understand that: Flaubert warned us in Madame Bovary.

Books are not spinach. They are brownies. (Coincidentally, I just ate brownies. They were desert, after a dinner of a ham omelet with buttered toast.) If they were spinach, do you think we would want to read them?

The justification for reading, the importance of reading, is that it damns us, wounds us, makes us thought criminals who reject the status quo. But in the process, it opens us up to new possibilities, which include the possibility of changing the world we live in. Or rejecting it.

I am sorely tempted to write a short story about a man who mugs people on the subway specifically because he has read Middlemarch. Because I can see exactly why he would.

George Eliot by Alexandre Louis François d’Albert Durade