Once upon a Time...

When I look back on the course my life took as a teenager, it's amazing to think that I ever took up running, or writing for that matter (especially writing a blog).

In the case of running I'd always enjoyed sprinting through crowded places like malls, but I never had very much endurance.  This fact was driven home when I joined the "polar bears" in high school, which was a gym program where students ran progressively longer distances outdoors in progressively colder temperatures as fall turned into winter.  I think they topped out in the neighborhood of three or five miles.  For my part, I found just one mile to be a struggle.  I'd push for about a quarter mile, then have to take a long break, then try pushing again.  It was getting so that I wouldn't even be able to complete the class's mileage before we had to go back inside, so eventually I gave up and switched over to the weightlifting class, where I could go at my own pace and stay in relative warmth.  I remember lifting the entire rack on the squat machine in that class, which my young back fortunately survived.

Then there was the writing, which I had a couple of odd experiences with in middle school.  The first was when I took an admissions test for a specialized school and had to write an essay, which was something I'd never done formally in my life.  I had a vague notion that an essay was like a story, so in order to write mine---on the topic of the difference between intelligence and wisdom---I told a clumsy allegory that heavily ripped off a scene from The Princess Bride.  Needless to say, I did not get into that school.

Then a year or two later I took a summer writing course out in the wilds of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  I'd done other courses through the program the two previous summers---in math and computer programming---and had a pretty good time both those years.  Math and computers have always come easily to me, and beyond that I fondly recall setting many a high score on the Star Wars pinball machine in the tiny mall across the road from the college campus where the program took place.  That year it was different though.  I thought I had gone there to write stories, but it turned out that they expected us to write nonfiction.  Nonfiction about our own lives.  I panicked.  What had I ever done that was interesting enough to write about?  I didn't know the first thing about structure, or choosing an event that represented a theme.  And there was so much reading we had to do...  After only a few days I couldn't take it anymore, and went to see my resident advisor about dropping out.  He said that I wouldn't be able to leave unless I was considered a suicide risk, so I went so far as to say that I was seriously thinking about killing myself.  He let me play Doom on his computer that evening while my parents were contacted.  They picked me up the next day, and took me to Action Park (which I've since learned was something of a death trap) to cheer me up.  I recovered, but I never did go back to that program again (though that may not have been my choice to make---my parents kept those kinds of details away from me back then).

Looking back on those experiences, the high school running I can live with, since that was long before I discovered how to breathe steadily and pace myself (which they didn't really give us much help with in the class).  Maybe I'd have been able to accomplish something in track and field on the academic circuit if I started running earlier in my life, but then again that could just be wishful thinking, and at any rate I'm really happy with where I am with it now.

The writing, though...  It bothered me then, and it still bothers me now.  Granted, it came at a time in my life when I was bullied relentlessly, to the point where I developed an instinctive fear of expressing myself.  Even so I wish I'd found a way to stick it out, especially given how dramatic the circumstances of my exit were.  I've learned the most in my life from the situations where I've gone out of my way to make myself uncomfortable---to shake up my routine and try new things.  But even that realization wouldn't come to me until many years later, so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on thirteen-year-old me.  There are only two things I know for sure.  The first is that there's nothing I miss about being that young, naive, selfish, and lost.  The second is that I now have events in my life worth writing about (and probably always did).

Regarding Arrogant Jerkiness

My wife wondered about that "arrogant jerk" comment I made about myself in the last entry I posted to my blog.  When she pressed me for an example of that happening, I couldn't come up with one.  Now I'm starting to wonder whether those perceptions were mostly based on me reading my past writing and thinking what an arrogant jerk the guy who wrote it must have been.  Granted, that persona was trapped in a world of his own mind most of the time, but it grates on me just to know that I used to think that way.  But maybe I didn't even think that way, and was just bad at expressing myself in words.  That certainly explains why I didn't (and still don't) talk too much, even though I don't consider myself to be a shy person.  I'm still trying to find my words.  I can pump out forty a minute now when I do my daily entries, and I've gotten better about just letting them flow instead of getting stuck on trying to find the perfect phrasing for everything.  I still write slower when I think I'm going to post something to the blog though.  I feel I have to be more careful if there's a chance that other people are going to read what I'm writing.  To a certain degree that makes sense, since I know how much grammatical gaffes and inarticulate phrasing bother me when I'm reading, and I wouldn't want to inflict that on anyone else if I could help it.  But it's still a form of self-censorship, and I have to be wary of that.

...And Doggone It, People LIKE Me!

I've been reading a book by Lawrence Block, Write for Your Life, which has had a lot of great advice so far that can be applied not just to writing, but also to a wide variety of other creative pursuits.  It's reintroduced me to the concept of affirmations.  You know what I'm talking about: writing positive statements out repeatedly, or reciting them to yourself in a mirror (calling to mind Al Franken's Stuart Smalley sketches from SNL back in the day).  It seems like a good idea that a lot of people could benefit from, but I haven't gotten around to really trying it myself.  Part of that is just not thinking about it when I have the time to try it, but I think there's also an element of concern in there.

As I look back across my life, I've found that when things go well for me long enough, and my confidence gets raised high enough, I tend to turn into somewhat of an arrogant jerk.  It's not that I mean to put other people down, but there's a point at which I stop paying enough attention to other people's feelings, and that inevitably sets me up for a fall.

So how do I deal with that?  Should I try to temper my feelings, and never become too confident in myself?  There's a part of me that fears affirmations could have a disastrous effect on my ego.  (And there's another part of me that thinks I'd look just plain silly talking to myself in front of a mirror, of course)  But is that the kind of thinking that's holding be back from being successful as a writer?  Should my affirmation be "Success with my writing will not make me a bad person"?  Or would it be arrogant to presume success at this point?  In some ways it feels like saying I'll remember the little people when I win the lottery.  Surely it can't be THAT random, though.  A big part of success comes from desire.  A lot of people aren't successful because they can't find the energy or the self confidence to commit to their goals strongly enough.  There's that "self confidence" thing again.

In a bizarre way, I see Martin Scorsese's movie The King of Comedy as an inspiration.  Sure it's about a madman who resorts to kidnapping in pursuing his dreams of show business success, and sure a lot of the scenes of Robert De Niro pushing himself on people are intensely uncomfortable.  But how many of us have the guts to be so self-assured that we can just walk right up to the people capable of fulfilling our dreams and ask that they do so?  Maybe the character's methods in the movie are highly suspect, but he's still doing more that most of us do.  It all comes down to reinforcing our beliefs enough to take risks, and maybe affirmations could help me and a great many of us to accomplish that.  We just need to be careful not to overreach.  You can't tell when you've gone over the line though until you reach it.  Maybe it's time to think more about just getting to that line in the first place.  Mirror, here I come!  I apologize in advance.