I Shock Myself

I’ve spent a great deal of time alone during the last month, recovering from a surgical procedure that really kicked my ass. I was getting extremely antsy last week (reminder of the quarantine), when I dug into my computer archives and retrieved a novel that I wrote a long time ago. At the time, I rewrote it and changed the name so often, I can’t remember when I finished it, but I was curious to see how it sounded this many years later.

Although I love to read them, writing novels are not my thing. I’m not great at making up stories with intriguing plot lines and pretend characters and surprise endings, but when I was in a traffic jam years ago, the idea for this novel came to me. Because I almost exclusively write about real life experiences that play out in real time, I was excited to start jotting down ideas that spun out from my original concept.

As the days and months went by, I became so attached to the characters I was creating, I started hearing them speak to me. “I would never say that,” the protagonist scolded me one day. In fact, they all became so real, they all had such different voices and attitudes, when I went to dinner with friends, no one knew that a group of invisible people were following me around and taking a seat at the table.

I started my novel by fashioning a timid girl-child who liked to hide from the world, lounging in her bed, reading books and crying a lot. She was the part of me that was scared of a lot of the time: of speaking up for myself, wanting people to like me, telling the truth when it embarrassed me and making changes that would alter the life that I was used to.

Then there was the wild, courageous daredevil who was up for anything. While she happened to be a helicopter pilot in my story, she represented the part of me that left home as a young teenager, grew up too fast, joined a ballet company, traveled the world, attracted unhealthy relationships and experimented with alternate realities during the sixties.

When you’re building a character, nothing is more boring than making him or her all good or all bad. No one is only one thing. A serial killer who might walk a little old lady across the street. A healer may not wish her client well. As I read the details of the lives of my two main characters, the question of “Who the hell am I?” showed up. There was no definitive answer. I realized that I was a lot of things and each character represented a different part of me that intersected with each other in a complicated way.

The obvious characteristics of both of my women were easy to see, but it got complex when the pilot wanted to go to ground and stop testing her mettle and the scared girl-child wanted to get out of bed and do something that would change the world. The more I  wrote, the more I came to understand that fiction or non-fiction, the characters in our stories are different parts of ourselves, even if we think they aren’t or wish they weren’t.

In 1996, I drove to Ojai with a friend to visit various artist’s studios that opened their doors for the day to people who wanted to view what they were doing. Along the way, I was most impressed to meet Beatrice Wood who lived to be 105 and wrote a book called “I Shock Myself.” When she was young, she veered away from what her socialite family wanted for her and began to follow her own path. She became an actress, a sculptor, a painter, a writer and a participant in a love triangle, all of which she had never expected or imagined. She was shocked at all the different parts of herself that emerged during her lifetime and when she was asked the secret to her longevity, she said, “I owe it all to art books, chocolates, and young men.”

In the spirit of Beatrice Wood, we have no idea what lives inside of us, ready to come out if we stop judging or trying to please someone else and become curious about who we are and what we are able to do and what motivates us. When I was interviewing basketball champion, Magic Johnson, for a book he wanted to write about business, I said, “Ever since you were young, you knew you wanted to be a successful basketball player. Now you know that you want to be a successful businessman. Everybody doesn't know what they want to be. What would you tell them to do?”

He spoke without hesitation. “I’d tell them to try everything. You just never know what you might like and how good you can be.”

As I continue to read the novel that I’m resurrecting, I have no desire to publish it. All I want is to remember the different parts of me and learn what I can from my own ideas and conversations. As I read, I’m laughing and cringing at some of the dialog. I feel compassion for my character’s foibles and I’ve learned so much about writing since I originally wrote it, I’m deleting extraneous comments and repetitions of ideas that keep showing up. The beauty is that so much time has passed since I finished it, I’m able to withhold judgments and enjoy reconnecting with the complex characters that make up who I am today. 

Writing without limits or judgments is an effective way of uncovering all of you. You don’t have to be a good writer. You don’t have to be a writer at all. You don't have to make getting published your goal. Just get started and be prepared to shock yourself. I can't tell you how many times one of my students said, “I had no idea I was going to write about this.”

Keep in mind that the various parts of you will not be mutually exclusive. They all exist at the same time. You may like what you discover: a courageous person who leads with love and compassion. At the same time, you may dislike the “you” that emerges: the one who always seems to do the wrong thing at the wrong time. They’ll both be there whether you like it or not, because the combination of all that we are and all that we feel and think is what makes up a whole human being.