A world apart

I have been visiting a world in which I do not belong. A right brain world. A world of real writers. A world where given a prompt of “chain linked fence” one ends up with an intriguing riff of exquisite words. Sites and sounds and scents appear. Souls are revealed. And civilizations come to an end. All this in twelve minutes.

Upon initially visiting this world (back in, let’s see, the winter of 2008?) I met warm and welcoming writers: Laurie, then Marc and Libba, and, the young woman who told me what I had written enhanced her own reaction to a friend whose professor had made unwanted advances. Along the way, I met inspiring teachers: Sandy and Sheryl, even Amy, who liked what I had to say, even if she never liked how I said it. It was fun roaming around there. While it lasted. While I believed I could write something worth the work of writing, and reading.

Worth something. It had to be worth something. Even now, if I talk out loud about what I've been trying to write, it sounds worth doing: small t trauma (as in PtSD) happens, and often; denial is a misunderstood coping mechanism, one that can exacerbate small t trauma; there is a parallel to physical trauma that might elucidate emotional trauma; but mainly, it might be worth knowing that PtSD can come from a relatively minor assault, like getting grabbed or groped on a bus or knocked down on the street for your purse.

I’m not talking about large T trauma, like rape, or old trauma like child abuse, or ongoing trauma like domestic violence, because people seem to get that already. I’m talking about a full blown grief reaction to an early miscarriage; a shattered self-concept after a birth experience that appears “normal” to an outsider; or a compound reaction to an attempted strangulation at work, where one would expect to find large T trauma, but finds instead that the difficulty lies in internalizing the trusted boss’s reaction – “what did you do (read: to deserve it)”?

This sounds worth writing about. Maybe I should hire someone with better skills. How bourgeois is that? Being a homeowner, I spend much of my time hiring people: contractors, roofers, painters, plumbers; why not hire a ghostwriter or a regular writer who can spin a story of exquisite words? A story that shows what I have just told. Because, after an enjoyable trek through my own right brain, I've returned to my left, from where it seems clear I do not have what it takes for the task. For today, at least, it feels as simple as that.

Essay for Application to Chatham University MFA in Creative Writing

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Writing. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was doing it for the attention. I suspect I didn’t get enough as a child. Don’t get me wrong my parents were great. Best ever, I’d be willing to wager, the kind you just want more of. But, just as it’s said to a woman having her third child -- take care when the new one arrives, as you will be out of lap room--by the time I came along, fourth in a family of six, five girls and the youngest, a boy, I guess I was left hanging onto my mother’s left leg. My younger sister must have been stuck with … an elbow, maybe. And baby brother? Well, for some reason he ended up with a spot on her lap just the same.

The first time this shortfall of attention hit me was during an evening meal when I was eight. We lived in a row house half way up the hill on Limit Avenue in Baltimore, Maryland. A wide sloping alley connected the back yards of everyone we knew and loved. From her kitchen window my mother could respond to, “Hey, Mom, watch this!” no matter whose yard we were in.

Our dining room looked the same every night of the week. Patty, our little green parakeet stood chirping in her cage in the corner. Dad sat at the end nearest the window next to Theresa - the middle child and his favorite. Mom and baby brother Jack, or “Jackie,” as we called him until he begged us not to, were at the end closest the kitchen so Mom could jump up and down a dozen times during meals. On either side an older sister sat next to a younger one - Kathy along side Donna and Eileen next to me. Everyone who needed it had someone to cut his or her meat.

Dinnertime, for the most part, was lively and warm. Everyone chimed in. I can’t recall everything we chattered on about, but I know it was competitive, each one trying to hold the floor a little longer than another, or even better, get a good laugh out of the rest. This included my father, who usually won.

This particular evening I had been trying my darndest to tell everyone something special about my second grade day but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. So I huffed and I puffed and I finally screamed: “No one ever pays any attention to me!” and slammed my fork into my pile of peas. I stood up with gusto, my chair would have tumbled to the floor behind me had there been room. I stomped off through the kitchen and as I rounded the bend at the big white fridge with my final, “I’m running away!” I turned to see necks craned and forks frozen in space.

I’m sure my parents glanced knowingly at one another - possibly amused, and, I’d like to think, a tiny bit guilty, before my mother calmly placed her napkin on the table and said, "Kathleen, keep an eye on your brother," then excused herself to come help me pack.


Forty-six years later, with a child of my own and a successful practice in family medicine, I’m no longer stomping off when people don’t listen to me. But, I've recently weathered a brief but serious bout of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, which included a run-in with an unsympathetic legal system. Soon after, I decided to take writing classes at Chatham University to help me to make a coherent narrative out the months of journal entries I had been keeping during that process. There, I found that I had a reasonable ability to write in prose form, including scene and dialogue (though I feel my real strength as a writer may be my ability to be honest).

Thus, I’ve decided to officially apply to the MFA program. I see Chatham as a place where I can not only backfill the educational deficits left from a career focused on science and medicine, but also further my writing with guidance (and deadlines) from the extraordinary faculty in the MFA Department. And by majoring in Creative Nonfiction I hope to learn how best to interest, and possibly educate, readers in the little understood concept of small-t-trauma, PtSD, if you will – as when a life that is humming along gets interrupted, rerouted to an entirely new landscape, by an experience that might otherwise be viewed as minor.

Am I doing this for the attention? So my voice can be heard, without interruption, until a complete thought is expressed? Perhaps. My family forgave my dramatic trip to the front step, which was as far as I ventured. I returned to be folded among them like a sheet still warm from the dryer. But maybe it’s time I let go, finally, of my mother’s left leg. To venture beyond my own back yard. To harvest from my own life the time and focus I need to tell the story of an imperfect life and follow through with my passion to write, and, if the stars line up just right, publish, my memoir...

(Hey, Mom, watch this!)

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Memoir.
My goal over the next few months is to write a memoir. I already have thirty pages in rough draft. This morning, after reading "Writing True" by S. Perl and M. Schwartz, I decided to do this prompt: "Finish the line "I want to tell you that ..."" Here is my response:

I want to tell you that something bad happened to me. To which I hear, “So?”

I want to tell you that I reacted to it in a way that would have been unfathomable to me prior to the fact of my reacting in that way. And that it is unfathomable to most people when they hear how I reacted, especially people whose job it is to sit in judgment of others.

The reaction felt as if it had an infinite number of layers, like mirroring a mirror, like stop sign ahead signs (stop sign ahead sign ahead…). There was, of course, the initial reaction, or lack of reaction, in the moment of the incident, then the reaction to that lack of reaction, then the reaction to the reaction to the lack of reaction, and so on.

I want to tell you that it is not at all uncommon for humans (especially, I suspect, women) to react in the same way. And this is what needs the light of day shown upon it.

And, for me, this ‘something bad’ was major enough to completely knock me off course… but minor enough for me to remain mindful of, and, in fact, record through daily writings, the mental decline and subsequent (complete?) recovery.

So, I believe that if the emotional/spiritual/physical reactions to this type of life-changing event are played well, are allowed to exist in full, with reasonable support, then human growth - incredible, unforeseen, deliciously rich, I-wouldn’t-trade-this-part-for-the-world, growth can happen as a result.

And that’s the story I’d like to tell.


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