Tag: ordinary

I used to have a mystique. Honestly. Back in college, I hung out with a rather fanciful group of people who were into alternative spiritual paths and science fiction, and they painted me in equally fanciful terms. Now, mind you, I was about as overweight then as I am now, so my persona wasn’t beautiful. But being a little older than most of them, they regarded me as a wise woman. (I was not that wise either.) I definitely had a mystique: Where did all that knowledge come from?

Now that I’m about 30 years older and finally wiser, I no longer have this persona, a self that conceals as well as reveals. A cloak of otherness is not something I possess. Instead, I am a rather plain, overweight college professor who doesn’t even have the mystique of a college professor. I appear as a woman in her late 50s who either smiles too much or not enough depending on where you encountered me. Often, I say “wow” and get excited about what people are talking about. It’s the anti-mystique: This is who I am.

I mention this because this would be a great time to have a persona, especially one with a certain mystique. I’m a writer, and I think people expect this from their writers. Writers are not like the rest of us, the reasoning goes. They are creative. They are Something Else. A fantasy writer like myself should have one foot firmly in the fantasy realm, teasingly inscrutable. Instead, I’m like a seven-year-old in a candy shop.

Ok, maybe that’s a persona, but a writer’s persona? A fantasy writer’s persona? The seven-year-old in the candy shop is probably closer to how I see my writing as anything. Look at the miracle that just happened! See the storms on the horizon! How are they going to get out of this?

But it’s not … mystical enough.

Oh well.

Day 7 Reflection Part 2: Looking Inward at Resilience

I manifest resilience in my life, and I find it’s one of my most enduring characteristics. 

There are many ways in which my life has been privileged — I was born into a white middle class family, I have been gifted with a good deal of analytical and verbal intelligence — but I have had to overcome a childhood of bullying, unstable parenting, sexual abuse, and the beginnings of what was later diagnosed as Bipolar 2. I have made it to 55 years old with a reasonably well-balanced life. 

As I wrote that, I realized that I (as I suspect many do) began to conflate resilience with accomplishment and judging my resilience by the degree of my accomplishment. This transmogrifies an ordinary, developable skill into an attribute of the rarefied few. This is the script of what I referred to yesterday as inspiration porn: ” … overcame a difficult childhood/debilitating disease/life-shattering accident to become a lawyer/doctor/marathon runner/fill in the blank with an accomplishment most of us reading the story couldn’t manage. If I look at what I’ve accomplished (a modest career at a small Masters I university where I’ve made few waves, six novels that I can’t get an agent for/published) I don’t feel very resilient. But if I look at what I’ve survived, and the current quality of my life, I feel very resilient indeed.

If we want people to be resilient, we have to believe that resilience is ordinary, is learnable, is measurable by one’s quality of life and not their level of achievement.