(iPhone photo #45 in my 2012 365+1 project)
In poetry school, people always want you to confront some aspect of human existence that is deep and dark and complex and emotionally difficult. They want to see the individual struggle that somehow represents the common struggle of our kind. I spent a lot of time in poetry school. This is why I remember best and appreciate most lines from prose like Anne Lamott’s in Bird by Bird that we are all just bugs swimming on the surface in clear view of the trout beneath.
I thought when I started blogging that people wanted emotional honesty from a blog in the same way that poetry workshops wanted to slice you open and spill the worst parts of your childhood (real or imagined) for everyone to peck apart like self-appointed intellectual buzzards.
Turns out there’s a reason not that many people read poetry, and not that many people read blogs by people who are sad or sick or frustrated or disheartened. For the most part we are simple creatures — once we find the courage to walk away from the seminar tables of our graduate schools — and we just want to feel better from reading what someone else has to say. That’s not to say we are shallow. If we have an interest in a topic, we’ll take a little pain with it to get to the information we want. We just aren’t much interested in inviting ourselves to any pity party we could possibly miss, and there’s no reason we should be.
Hence, I have to wonder how to navigate the thin line between whining and being refreshingly honest.
I read The Happiness Project recently, and I did not enjoy it because I thought everything was too easy for this person. I thought she came across as self-important simply because she didn’t have enough bad days. She didn’t have enough failures. I thought the story didn’t ring true and didn’t come across as emotionally worthwhile because she didn’t admit to enough genuine human struggles.
That’s the problem with memoir. If you are writing fiction, making your character suffer is called creating tension. If you are writing life, admitting to suffering is called complaining. The only thing worse than writing a memoir about happiness and coming across as unrealistically happy would be writing a memoir about happiness and coming across as disgruntled. You can hardly fault the book for turning out to be about a happy person after all. It’s just that I went to poetry school, and I needed there to be some dark irony somewhere right around the corner. It’s no one’s fault but mine I didn’t find it.
Still I ask myself how much I should say about my day.
Should I tell you it was pretty dismal and that I took a sick day, most of which was spent at the car dealership attempting to find a problem that may or may not exist? Should I tell you that I came home with a headache and a fever and aches in my bones that made me wonder if I was dealing with a potentially serious flareup of a chronic condition? Should I tell you that I am not sure I can keep up my fitness challenge, that I actually think I’m kind kind of crazy for starting it?
I don’t want to say any of those things. Maybe I won’t even think they are true by tomorrow. Maybe I’ll be posting that I walked seven miles, caught up all my emails and felt terrific, not that I started out to walk and quit, then looked at my emails and cried at the number.
I should probably just not say anything and hope tomorrow is a better day.
Instead, I’ll tell you that the flower in the picture above really was found in the Walmart parking lot (where I stopped to get cold medicine and ended up with $150 worth of stuff I can’t afford and don’t need). While I was there I decided that maybe I should stop trying to be a vegan because I might need extra protein and extra B vitamins if I’m going to do a fitness challenge. I bought eggs and cheese. I brought them home and put them in the refrigerator. I’ve looked at them a few times today, but I have talked myself into eating them yet. Maybe tomorrow I will know how that is going as well.
And now my sister has called to remind me that there is somewhere I am supposed to be, which is in fact a funeral home. The very fact that I was thinking about how overwhelming life was because I had a cold and had to get my car worked on and was sore from the past few days of walking seems nothing more than silly.
Perspective is everything. There’s our lesson of the day.
