Go. Run with it. Make trouble.

I graduated from therapy in my last session, mostly because I told my shrink that I am more okay with who I am and my place in the world right now than I’ve probably ever been in my life.

Even as she told me that she didn’t think I need to come back, my therapist reasserted her belief that I need to write about my grieving process and all the wacky things I’ve been doing the last couple of years (from the Lovely gatherings to the misadventures with the Box o’Ma to the Smash-a-thons to the Pink Letter Project to Operation Mailing Chocolate). She told me more than a year ago that she thought these things were beautiful and life-affirming and inspiring, that it was all of those things in part because I am not a super model or super athlete -- I'm just an ordinary girl with a somewhat unique perspective and a desire to share the things that inspire me with the people around me.

Somewhere at the beginning of this calendar year, I decided to start keeping track of all the books I read. I wanted to read 50 books in 2011 (and, if I finish The Schwa was Here by Saturday, I will have accomplished this.) Book #46 was Daughter of Smoke and Bone, which I loved partly because it's beautifully written (really, there were so many lines and images I wished I'd written as I was reading it) but mostly because it's all about hope. Even the main character's name means hope. I'm not sure when I became this ridiculously hopeful optimist - Eeyore was always my favorite Pooh character, because I used to relate so much to him. Now, I dunno. I hope. I hope a lot. And it makes me a better/happier person. As Laini Taylor writes in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, "Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic."

Book #47 was The Night Circus, which I also loved because it was fantastical and fun and there were really interesting characters. I seem to love any well-written story that involves a circus, and especially magic. Plus, I really liked the epigraph at the beginning of the book and when I went to the writer's website, I liked the other information and brief tales she'd posted -- she made me think she's somebody I could sit with for hours, drinking tea and talking about books.

It was mostly coincidence that I read these two books back-to-back. But, I see magic in that. I see magic in hope and in inspiration and in coincidence and in strange and beautiful moments. I see magic in plans that go awry but become spectacular anyway. It's basically WHY I've been doing all these wacky things that my shrink thinks are so awesome: For me, it's all about the magic -- not the Harry Potter kind or the kind Celia and Marco practice in The Night Circus, but the kind I have a hard time explaining and quantifying, I just know it when I feel it.

And I felt it when I read the 49th book of the year: Dash and Lily's Book of Dares. It's about two teenagers who pass a red moleskine notebook back and forth, daring each other to do brave or uncomfortable things.

Yesterday was the second anniversary of my getting the letters DFTBA tattooed to my right wrist, to remind me to always at least TRY to be awesome. And so, I went and bought myself a red moleskine notebook. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it, just that I wanted one of my own and that I wanted to do magic with it.

(Oddly, I carried what I called "the magic red lunchbox" in high school. I named it that because it had fun stuff in it, like pink bubbles in a bottle shaped like a bear and a deck of tarot cards I never got good at reading and other fun stuff I can't remember now. In The Night Circus, the biggest fans of the circus -- the people who were drawn into the magic -- all wore red scarves to identify themselves. All just coincidence, of course. But also? Magic. At least, my kind of magic.)

After spending seven hours driving home from visiting my family yesterday, I should have unpacked. I should have done the cleaning I didn't get to do in my rush to leave on Friday. I should have gone to bed early, because I was exhausted and had to get up early. I should have read more of The Schwa was Here to make sure I finish it before Saturday. Instead, I spent more than an hour writing an email to an insanely large group of people. (I kept adding people to the list, because I was worried no one would want to play -- in the first 12 hours post-email, I've already gotten eight people responding that they want to.) I proposed an adventure where the red notebook gets passed from person to person, each one filling it with something fun that somehow makes the world suck a little less. My hope is that the notebook will make its way back to me -- filled -- by my birthday at the beginning of March (seemed like a good arbitrary deadline -- not to mention the most awesome birthday present EVER).

A friend wrote back that she was willing to participate, but she wasn't sure what I wanted. I replied, "Really, it's all about creating magic. Do something fun and inspiring -- how ever you choose to interpret that."

It's like Patrick Ness wrote in the introduction to A Monster Calls: Go. Run with it. Make trouble. (Only, I'm hoping for a little more hope/inspiration/magic than trouble....)

I have no idea how this is going to turn out -- I never do when I set these things in motion, but they always turn out so much more beautiful and amazing (and, yes, magical) than I dared to dream.

"Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth."

- Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls


There was this time my mom was driving and she looked over at me and she said, "You look like you're having an entire conversation in your head right now." Then she paused and said, "You do that a lot." I was maybe still in high school, maybe just started college.

Never before or since have I felt so completely exposed and vulnerable.

I like being mostly invisible -- just barely sparkling in some people's periphery every once in a while. Those sparkly moments are nice, too, but only because of the part where I'm mostly invisible. Sometimes, being seen -- really seen -- hurts. It's scary and uncomfortable and makes you feel too real. Too breakable. Like maybe you're breaking already.

And that's how I felt when my mother so accurately summed up what I was doing, what I do all the time. Because I'm constantly having conversations in my head -- I'm replaying conversations the way I'd wished they'd happened, or I'm making up conversations that will never happen, or I'm scripting out what I'll say to someone the next time I see them (even though it NEVER goes according to script).

It was especially weird, because it was such an off-hand remark. She said it as if it barely registered as something she'd observed. And it was so exactly true of me -- this was during the period of my life where my mom was trying desperately to convince me that she knew who I was (better than she supposed I did) but she was stuck on the me I was when I was about 14 and although I'd grown and changed, she couldn't see any of that. So, here she was, barely even trying, and she'd just nailed it completely on the head.

And I think maybe that's why I tend to be really open about things -- not everything, but most things. (I don't have a single secret to mail into PostSecret anymore. Everything -- even the deepest, darkest, most hidden things -- has been told to at least one other person.) I put things out there, like a way to protect myself: Here, it's right on the surface, you don't need to dig so deep, get so close. It's misdirection at its finest. It keeps me safe from those observations that slice so close I can feel myself bleed with them. But every so often, it still happens.

Last night, as I was struggling to sleep, I wrenched myself out of bed and stumbled to the computer to write the paragraphs above, because I knew once I got the words out of my head, I would stop playing with them enough to quiet my mind and sleep. Otherwise, I would be reconstructing thoughts and sentences until they sounded MORE right, THE MOST right, until I had it the way I wanted (and then when I was sure it was how I wanted, I would try to take a snapshot in my brain, so I could remember it in the morning -- most times, if it works at all, I only hold on to fragments).

And I don't know if this is about me (because it is) or if it's for the story I'm writing now (because it really could be). Or maybe it's me continuing to argue with the friend who said that writing was basically talking to yourself; maybe I so violently disagreed with that sentiment because it cuts a little too close.

Rant, Rant, Rant

A friend of mine sent me a very innocuous email yesterday that happened to be about writing, expressing an opinion very contrary to most of my own. And even though I don't think the intent was to say, "Writing is not a worthwhile way to spend your time" that was kind of how I took it. To say I overreacted would be a bit of an understatement. I kind of lost it. (And by kind of, I mean I did.)

Today, I apologized.

But then I got an email from another friend who was having a severe crisis of confidence related to writing, and I embarked on another epic rant.

(I am not normally this ranty. Do I get a little dramatic and flaily when I talk sometimes? Yes. But, I'm also Italian. We talk with our hands and make big gestures. Everyone knows that. I think I am ranty because my hormones are all out of whack thanks to me finally being a grown up and treating my PCOS and also because I have been EXHAUSTED all week due to said treatment. Ugh.)

Anyway. I railed at this second friend because we've been in this place before. Months ago I said something to the effect of, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I swear it's like there are a thousand negative Jiminy Crickets sitting on your shoulders." (This made my friend laugh, and now we just talk about "the crickets" whenever this friend is crippled by self-doubt. Unfounded self-doubt, I might add.)

And then I remembered this:


And that reminded me of this:

And you don't stop yourself for fear of being imperfect or being judged. You just do it, and it's as good as it can possibly be with all of your energy and soul and brains and guts and hands and eyes, and then you go on to the next one.
- Damian Volpe

And then this, too:

And it was then that it came, though I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first. I knew there would be no other way to do it. No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But, if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way.

- Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev

But the thing that best describes why I want to share my writing with others comes from my favorite book:

"What I mean is, the world is an awful place, isn't it? Magic makes it less awful for a moment or two." He felt like he'd torn away a bandage, and confirmed that an old wound was indeed still there. "If I can shake the world off a man's shoulders, I feel better."
- Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil