The Thing About Being Misunderstood

Bully by S. Babikovs

Bully by S. Babikovs

The first time, there were just three of them, my used-to-be-friends, with their wild hands latched onto my arms like vines imbued with dark magic, pulling me down to the earth; their fists turned into impossibly hard knots of bone, like so many dead stars crashing down from the sky against my head, shoulders, chest, gut; their feet stomping breath from my lungs, as if they were boys suddenly reduced to nothing more than steel toe, steel toe, steel toe.

It was the darkest three-foot section of the school, just outside the gym doors, where the hallway zig-zagged back into the locker room. . . .

That’s how my memoir would begin. If, you know, I started at fifth grade. Actually, I’m in the process of writing a fictionalized account of that very story.

I’m not sure if all writers have been through a “bad childhood or a good childhood interrupted by several years of badness” as Piers Anthony suggests, but there’s a good chance they write, to some degree at least, to better understand things they’ve either lived through or witnessed.

I know that’s true for me. I write to make sense of things that, at least when they occur, just don’t deem to make any sense sometimes, like bullying, but I also write to have a voice, as I’ve mentioned before, as a way of expressing myself in the hopes of being understood.

In looking back on my life, I’m pretty sure my need for understanding and, especially, for being understood started during those dark days of fifth grade or became magnified then.
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Dreams

Mask and Unveiling

Mask and Unveiling

“Writing is both mask and unveiling.” ~ E. B. White

That quote seems to sum up one of the most rewarding byproducts of writing for me: the paradoxical duality of simultaneously concealing and revealing oneself. On one hand, I’ve spent a lifetime trying to be invisible. On the other hand, I’ve spent many of those exact same moments trying to find a way to be heard (by myself first, by others second).

When I was about seven or eight-years-old, I revealed to my mom my dream (my grand life’s plan was all laid out in my mind and it seemed so simple back then to just know in your heart that you were going to do a thing and not question it at all). I was going “to make $100,000 a year,” I told her. And I was going to buy her a huge house and give her and my dad a whole heap of money (as an aside, I was reminded last year by my aunt who is now in her eighties that I had apparently promised great sums of money to other members of my family as well . . . oops).

How, my mom wondered, was I going to manage this.

It should be noted that back when I was eight-years-old settlers were still bartering with glass beads and animal pelts, so that annual salary was quite a lofty goal.

“I’m going to be an actor,” I said.
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Stories I Inherited

Hobos Walking the Rails

Hobos (Bindle Stiffs) Walking the Rails

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.” – John Lubbock

There are two small scenes in my favorite novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, that reveal a truth I had never contemplated until I was in my twenties: how we tend to see the people in our lives who were here before us only as the person they are to us, not as someone who’s lived another life.

It’s a perspective thing.

The first scene I’m alluding to is when Scout and Jem watch their dad, Atticus (the man they perceive as so-old-he-can’t-play-football-or-do-much-of-anything-worth-doing-outside-a-courtroom), as he’s asked by Sheriff Tate to shoot a rabid dog and Atticus does this seemingly impossible feat with his one and only shot.

The surprising prowess Atticus demonstrates in that scene, of course, is juxtaposed against his inability to win the larger battle he’s currently fighting, but through the responses of Jem and Scout it also reveals how, when we’re born, we enter into all these other lives.

We just tend to get so caught up in our own that we don’t often recognize the parts of our story that came before us.

And how would we even know to look?

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