Cecilia Tan's web journal, entries from 1997
The leaves outside my office window have been bright red for two weeks already--an early autumn. For the first time in several years I feel a twinge of "back to school" anxiety, which is strange since I'm not in school and have no plans to be. There's that feeling though, of something new, having to adjust to a new schedule, plan things differently. The beginning of September has much more of a "new Year" feel to me than January 1st does and this year it is particularly pronounced. Maybe it's just the year itself--turned 30, finished novel, sold short story collection, a whole lot of significant events. Dunno. Well, I'd ruminate on it more but I've got laundry to do.
This month my mental, psychic and emotional challenge seems to be the essential question of what to do with stressed-out or depressed friends. There are several basic paradoxes that can't be solved easily. For example, how can I recommend something like psychotherapy or other therapy to someone when I make so much fun of it myself? The paradox for me is that although I will honestly say that my therapist never did anything but sit there looking like she was going to burst into tears at any moment, the truth is that it *worked.* I saw a therapist for short-term (i.e. six month) stress relief at a time when I was so stressed out that I was getting sick, having mysterious crying jags, etc... And the therpy worked in that I learned what I was doing wrong and I gained the conviction to change the things in my life that were making it suck. What I did *not* change, though, was me and my fundamental way of living. I had gone in there saying that I wanted to change and she had warned me that in all likelihood it was my life I was going to change, not myself. Short-term therapy, she said, isn't going to correct basic personality flaws nor unravel deep emotional problems stemming from say childhood trauma or what have you.
So, this raises the question, how much of any given person's current problems or suffering is the result of things in their life that they (and only they) can change, and how much of it is due to emotional trouble or fuck-up-edness they already have? And what can we, as adults, really do for one another? My friends tend to be a highly intelligent if not downright perspicacious lot. If what therapy does is give you a mirror in which to see yourself and figure out your solution for yourself, one may well think, well shit, I can save the money and talk to my bathroom mirror at home. I'm smart enough to figure it out. Right? I guess the danger in that is that we are blind to our own tangle of past traumas.
But this wasn't going to be a rant about the pros or cons of therapy, it's supposed to be me trying to figure out what *I* can do for messed up friends. The proverbial "be there for them" -- what does that mean? If I offer consolation, do I perpetuate the situation? If I offer advice, what if I'm wrong? Ultimately I think it is a question of trust. I hope my friends can trust me to be there, to remain their friend no matter what weirdness they are going through, and I h ave to trust that they are intelligent people who will eventually figure their problems out and who aren't going to be ruined by my advice or lack thereof.
Which brings me, in my mind, to the subject of prayer. But that will be an essay for another time.
Here it is June and it's still freezing in Boston. OK, not literally freezing, but pretty darn chilly. I'm not complaining so much as noting the phenomenon, in case later we should notice it as part of a trend toward the apocalypse, or global warming, or something. My back aches. It looks like it will be a busy summer. The novel is still not finished-- a few more hours to go. I keep forgetting to eat. This is the current state of the Cecilia.
The novel is creeping infinitely closer to finished. In the plot there is exactly one more day to write. I think it will take me three sessions of sitting down and writing to finish it. So close! So close! I can't wait to begin the work of revising now, and doing the fun part of titling all the chapter breaks, etc. I don't feel like I wrote this book so much as it's like I went out and got all the footage, and now the post-production editing, dubbing, scoring, etc... is what is left to be done. What on earth am I going to title this book?
I'm closing in on finishing the novel I've been writing for five years and man is it exciting to think that I might actually be finished in like a week. I know exactly what has to happen now, and about how many words it will take to tell it, and I'm tangibly annoyed that I have to spend time eating, sleeping, working, traveling, etc... when all I want to do is sit and write. It's tough. I had to go to Chicago on business this weekend and couldn't really write while I was there. No time. I've never written so much in so short a time--last week I was writing 5000 words a day, which is about equal to my writing a short story every day. If I could have been writing at that pace from the start, of course, without interruption, distraction, other deadlines, etc. I could have writt n it in forty days. That kind of calculation is useless though, because a novel is not a sprint. It's not even a marathon. It's more like a cross=-country journey where part of the time you're on crutches, part of the time you're on a bus, and part of the time you're skateboarding backwards with a blindfold on.
I turned thirty this week. This is an exciting thing. And yet, like most birthdays after my 16th or so, it doesn't make me feel any different today than I did yesterday. It is kind of nifty to be checking off the 30-39 box on demographic forms now instead of 25-29 or what have you. But, hey, you know what this means? It means that the core of so-called Generation X are now "thirty-somethings." Yeah it may come as a shock to the stereotyping mass media that we, uh, slackers, are getting married and buying houses (and racking up huge credit card debts, but so are the boomers). But hey, we're still slackers--I mean, here I am writing this at midnight, with plans to still play a game of Scrabble and have sex tonight before I go to sleep, and no plans to be out of bed tomorrow before the crack of noon. There are good reasons why I left a corporate job and not having to get up in the morning is one of them. I work way more hours per day now than I did sitting around like a zombie and "taking lunch" from an office 9to5 and yet it seems decadent, doesn't it? That's the way I like it.
There are so many things I could write about this week/month, and yet I feel so run down with stress that I can't focus on any single one. So maybe stress should be my topic this month. I've been down this road before, where the more stress you have the harder it becomes to see what it is that is making you stressed. This is not as bad as it was years ago, when I decided to quit my job and write full time and basically redefine who I was so I could be happy. Well, I've done the redefining, I'm in control of my destiny, things are going well, and yet I'm starting to feel the physical effects. Last time it was constant colds and sinus infections so bad they thought I had mono. This time, now that I get plenty of sleep, it's things like 2-3 heart palpitations a day, a string of nagging tae kwon do injuries that won't go away, tingling in my back. Yeah, acupunture could treat the symptoms but I need to get at the source. Where is the problem? Is it "merely" anxiety about keeping Circlet Press alive? Is it overwork, too many deadlines and committments? Or is it I'm not writing enough? Is it a problem in the heart, where something is missing from my life? These last two have a ring of truth about them, and not only because they seem familiar from last time. The question of course becomes, how to fix it, what to change. I see the pieces of a puzzle that do not fit together yet.
I feel I ought to make some kind of a comment on the rerelease of Star Wars. But I'm really not sure what to say... I've seen it something like 50 times, six or seven in theaters and college showings and dozens of times on video. I'm one of those people whose worldview changed when I saw the film. My whole understanding of what was possible in both science fiction and in the presentation of fiction to a mass audience changed. I was what, ten years old at the time? I was a scared child, always staying up, unable to sleep because of some monsters I'd either seen on tv or imagined for myself. A sleep-with-the-lights-on type. I had been reluctant to see the movie when it came out, because I thought I'd be scared. So I didn't go to see it until it had been out for months and months. I went with a friend who had a whole slew of younger brothers and sisters. I figured, her father wouldn't take us to a *scary* film. I was right. I walked out of the theater in a daze, unable to remember a single detail of what we'd just seen other than the red and blue light on R2D2. I immediately dragged my mother, bother, and father out to see it, and this time the movie engraved itself permanently. I didn't have to see it 50 times to be able to quote almost any line of dialogue.
Over the years, my memory of the exact words has degraded, but so what. I remember being on a kung-fu movie kick when "Empire" came out, and loving the Yoda-as-sensei, Luke-as-student stuff. I remember skipping school (I was a real honor-roll type, top ten in the class, type of student) to see the release of "Jedi." I remember the name of the one kid in my fifth grade class who had never seen Star Wars: David Grimaldi. I wonder whatever happened to him? Did he ever see it? Does he have a wife and kids now, and are they at some megaplex in America this very minute, anxiously waiting in line? Waiting to experience what was, in 1976, THE FUTURE and which tells us twenty-somethings on the verge of thirty that, oh my god, we are the future.
We just finished a bitter cold snap here in New England and I am once more very happy that I work at home and am not a roof repairer or something. The writing life has been hectic lately, with so many things crowding in my brain it's hard to concentrate on simple things like getting places on time and eating/drinking enough. I never thought of myself as a spacey artiste type, but I guess it can happen to anyone.
Can you believe I am still sick, since Thanksgiving? Sinus infection they said, which has meant two runs of antibiotics, and much coughing, stuffiness, runny nose, sore face, chapped lips, and disturbed sleep. Other than that, Boulder Colorado was beautiful and the holidays overall very pleasant. Today I've got PMS and post-Holiday blues, so my mood is totally out of whack. I'm spending it browsing the Web and listening to CDs and generally not inflicting my vagaries upon others...