on what I do and don’t know

November through early December is my least favorite time of year. The sky is dark by 4:30 in the afternoon, it’s cold and I am tired, suddenly, constantly. Mother Nature smiles down on us a little this year, with the unseasonably warm November weather we had and the near-end of this hellish presidential administration. I can’t help but think I should be happier. But adulthood has taught me that Seasonal Affective Disorder is real and I need an actual coping mechanism in place, one that won’t feed my self-loathing tendencies.

Meanwhile, my favorite hate-activity is imagining I’m someone else. How much easier it must be, to not carry Ola’s baggage about who she is and who she thinks she should be. I hate myself sometimes...which I can say openly because I love myself sometimes, too. I write to know myself better and to escape. Even if I feel most at-home within the essay, I’d attempt a short story collection before a personal narrative one. 

I used to write cowboys falling in love, blond girls from broken homes, and antagonists who, generally, were very unlike me. Fiction was my first obsession.  For most of my writing life I’ve not written what I know, as the adage goes. I am tired of what I know. I know to feel like misshapen puzzle piece, and I know to question the spaces I’m in, and I know to wonder how much luck or skill brought me this far. I’m usually not brave enough to bare my unadulterated nooks and crannies for the world to see, and the times I have been were followed by weeks of wondering why, Oh God why did I think it was a good idea to share this with the world?

Late great Toni Morrison told her students to write what they don’t know. This was decades ago, before the rise of #ownvoices and open criticism of white writers writing on things they know nothing about. 

I learn best about myself when I’m not thinking about her. Fiction lets me explore how I want to be loved and what I believe is worth sacrifice. I learn to judge my own bad decisions less harshly when I am making them on someone else’s behalf. All my fiction characters are me. That’s the rub with fiction, you thinly veil your realities - though I’ve never slept with any friend’s dad, I’m not quite that bold. 

As far as I’m concerned I don’t know much of anything. None of us do.  I just hope somewhere on the other side of a pen, or keyboard, I stumble upon a chunk of truth to tuck away for safekeeping. I always do, eventually.