Writing As Therapy (Again)

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Maybe it’s just an annoying characteristic of the so-called Boomers, the way we are always talking about everything that happens to us, the way we act as though no one in generations past has ever had to deal with menopause, midlife crises, high cholesterol, decreased bone density, memory glitches, elderly parents, empty nests, insomnia, or finding the meaning of life, which is something I generally try to do in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.  Then again, maybe it’s also just my personality. The yearning! The turmoil! The complexity of it all!

Last night I dreamed that I went back to the old brick house on Long Island where I spent my adolescent years. My family moved to that house from Brooklyn in 1962, becoming part of a great migration of working class families from the city to the suburbs, vacating urban neighborhoods in favor of small private patches of green, and dooming the fathers to long-distance commutes. At the time it seemed that owning a little house with a yard was the natural course of events, the culmination of a dream our grandfathers carried in their pockets from the Old Country. (I could go on and on about this, but it isn’t the point of this post. Point? This post has a point?)

Back to the dream: the strange part is that instead of standing outside knocking on the door, I stood outside and heard knocking from within! It seemed frightening and dissonant. Was someone trapped in there? Then, in the strange desertion of chronological sense that often occurs in dreams, I had the thought that it might be my daughter, and I had to somehow enter and rescue her.

When I woke up it seemed to me that the dream was the usual fare: my past calling me back, no doubt so I could make amends. I’m a haunted woman, you see, and I do wonder if we are ever truly free of our childhoods. But the matter of my daughter being trapped in there was a new twist. Have I passed my pain (and nuttiness) along to her? I don’t think so.

But when I recounted this dream to Monte -- one of his jobs, I suddenly realize, is to listen to these boring narratives of my dreams before they fly away from memory, sort of like an interactive dream journal – he suggested that maybe in this dream Miranda represents me. (And heaven knows there is a blurring of the boundaries there sometimes. My problem, not hers.)

Somehow Monte’s theory resonated. My daughter is the me I could have been, traveling the world with a sense of home in her heart, not without her foibles and insecurities, but relatively unencumbered, off and running, God bless her.

If this blog carried an alarm wired to sound each time I was about to get very heavy, it would be blaring right now, so be forewarned. Here may be the key to my personality: I was one of six children; the brother just before me and the sister just after me were born with a terrible kidney disease that marked them early on for dialysis, frailty, and a great deal of misery. They both grew up to be extraordinary and loving people who never had a fair chance to fully enjoy life or fulfill their abundant dreams and possibilities.

I, on the other hand, was a lucky one; the disease skipped right over me. I always believed that because I somehow eluded a quirk of DNA that frequented my family, I had some special obligation to be more virtuous and wonderful than anyone could possibly be. There were simply no excuses to be less: To whom much has been given, much is expected. And I tried sometimes, I really tried, but I could not sustain it. I was too flawed in other ways – self-indulgent, erratic, and prone to depression -- in essence, quite human, a maker of mistakes.

Certain situations bring this to the surface. For example, I am currently trying to decide whether to take that trip to Turkey, and I need to commit real soon, but I seem to have become immobilized. Part of the problem is that guilt has reared its ugly head: it feels like so much money for a personal adventure, an optional and extravagant experience. I do want to go someplace; I have this travel fund saved up and I’m not getting any younger, and I’d like to see a bit more of the world before I am, as Yeats put it (in Sailing to Byzantium, of course) “a tattered coat upon a stick”.  

Why Turkey? It’s where East meets West, I'm told, and so much history, a different culture, a fascinating place. I found a walking tour that seems to meet my parameters, so although I'd be going there solo I would join up with a small group, traveling within a structure as opposed to roaming around entirely by myself. I could even combine it with a visit to my daughter in England. I would become henceforth a Woman Who Has Been to Istanbul. It feels a bit daring; maybe I'd like myself better if I did something daring.

All very appealing. And then I think about my siblings who never got to go anyplace, and people who are hungry, and the worrisome state of the environment, and all the things that float around my head in the middle of the night. Why should I be the one who gets to go on such a journey? And if I do decide it’s okay to go on a big trip, what if this is the wrong one? What about all the other places I have never seen and will wish I had? And so it goes.

It scares me how neurotic I am.The other day I put all of this on hold and met my dear friend Vickie in Santa Barbara. We wandered around laughing and talking, as friends do, and I bought a pretty blouse on sale in Anthropologie, and we had dinner in an Indian restaurant (the early bird buffet), and it was so much fun. Maybe I’m that simple: dinner, a new blouse, time with a girlfriend. When I got home, I found a handwritten letter in the mailbox, something I always wish for -- a real letter, from my friend Treacy.

The next morning I put my bicycle in the car and drove to the Valley, cutting over along Alisal, where I glimpsed a buck with full antler standing nobly amidst the tawny hills. When I arrived in Solvang, there had been a sudden infusion of summer and happiness. It truly was, as I believe its name means, a sunny place. People were wearing straw hats and eating ice cream and driving around in convertibles, smiling, and Mexican music drifted over from an open window somewhere.  The woman who works in the dry cleaner gave me an icy cold bottle of water to take on my bike ride, and I met my friend Kam as I was unloading my bicycle, and the ride along Ballard Canyon was spectacular. At one point, descending along smooth rolling hills, I even dared to stop squeezing the brakes, and I coasted along with the wind in my face, and it was blissful. (Note to self: never underestimate the healing powers of a bicycle ride.)

Then I heard an NPR podcast in which a reviewer described a new novel by David Mitchell and mentioned that the protagonist is compelled to make an outrageous declaration of love by “the inner whisperings of the ghost of future regret” – what a great phrase!

So I should probably be embarrassed, but here I am, once again, writing about myself: my own strivings and confusion, how much I want to enjoy life but also be a good person, the way time is rushing by my ears as I try to figure things out, and how death, meanwhile, seems to lurk at every corner, winking.

But this has helped me so much (writing as therapy again) and I suddenly realize that the ghost of my past is arm wrestling now with my ghost of future regret, and I am rooting for the latter.