About Me
An awkward childhood, a tendency toward melancholy, and an early love of reading? Yup, I was well on my way toward life as a writer…
We’re funny people, us writers. Weird, often intensely private, sometimes downright reclusive, and once in a while–party animals. Some of us have lofty ambitions of best-selling novels; others keep our words only in private journals. But I believe the mark of true writers isn’t in our pens, but in our minds. We see things differently: we’re anthropologists and historians, comedians and teachers. Here’s my story:
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I think I became a writer in the fourth grade. I’ve got only one basis on which to make this claim: fourth grade was the year I first became mired with the countless neuroses and fixations so typical of writers. It’s the year I started thinking – and not “thinking” in the way that allowed me to slog through long-division problems and subjective and objective noun forms, but “thinking’ in the way that allowed me to (1) make keenly sensitive—however incorrect—observations about the world around me, and (2) feel achingly separate from and misunderstood by my giggling, recess-loving, dodge-ball-playing peers.
While my classmates delighted in busying themselves with dodge-ball, I delighted in observing their youthful innocence, all the while feeling saddened by my own inability to join them. Sure, I could play—and I did, regularly. I just never felt excited or happy about playing. Instead I instinctively played my own game of SDI (Social Dynamics Investigation): why did all the kids gang up on Bobby Scheff? What did that mean? How did Bobby feel? Why did he continue playing with kids who were so mean to him?
It was during the fourth grade that I started finding stories in nearly every noun around me, whether subjective or objective. The pencil in my old wooden desk became a heart-crushing symbol of the toil and hard work my parents endured in order to purchase items from the ridiculously specific Fourth Grade School Supply List. Mr. Jensen’s every-morning walk to the post office became his very own Trail of Tears where, grief-stricken, he pondered his long-dead wife and wished for nothing more than to join her in heaven. Dad’s cornfields became a metaphor for the precariousness of life—a life where you worked hard and prayed for a good year, but made damn sure you had insurance.
This kind of thinking has never left me. On any given day, in any given circumstance, my thoughts take a course all their own. For instance, I walk through automatic doors to my office every day. A simple task, to be sure. Here’s what might happen in my mind during those 10-12 footsteps.
- Automatic doors are really convenient.
- Has our culture really become so lazy that doors must now be automated?
- Many people need automated doors because of their wheelchairs or crutches or other physical requirements.
- I’m really blessed to have two perfectly-functioning legs.
- People would be much happier if they just recognized how lucky and blessed they are.
- It’s sad that some people can’t walk freely through doors; it’s sad that nearly every facet of their lives must be made complicated.
- It’s sad that I’m so narrow-minded as to feel sadness and pity for handicapped people, who neither want nor deserve my pity.
- Is “handicapped” even the right word anymore? Or is it “disabled”? “Differently-abled”? “Special needs”? “Physically challenged”?
- I hate having to worry about using the right words.
- Well then I guess you picked the wrong profession, Rachel.
I was aware, even in the fourth grade, that this way of thinking wasn’t exactly “normal.” In fact, I was intensely aware that it was just plain weird. I felt like an outsider: abnormal at best, mentally ill at worst. I fought with and rejected my natural curiosity for years, longing and praying: please-please-please-just-let-me-be-normal. I wanted what everyone else seemed to have: a brain that didn’t seem to dwell on—didn’t seem to even notice!—all the random blurry edges around the slippery circle of life.
I spent the coming decades fighting a strange paradox: I was, at once, both horrifically repulsed by and lustfully jealous of the seemingly simple minds of strangers. How did they stop their minds from asking so many questions? Did they even have questions in the first place? How did they miss the depths, the nuances, the complexities of human relationships and psyches and experiences? Were they not aware of them? How was that possible? Was this why everyone else seemed so much more carefree than I was?
Writing became my only escape, the only way to make sense of my thoughts, get them out of me, and make more room in my brain. Writing limped into my life as a sanity-saving form of escape, but when I became good at it, writing became my passion. It’s what I love to do best, and what I need to do most.
In my third decade on this earth, I’ve come to accept that most people will never appreciate the way my brain works. Happily, though, I’ve discovered that some people do—and quite often, those people are other writers. Writers are natural thinkers, observers, and okay, fine, I’ll say it: weirdos. I spent too many years fighting to suppress my thoughts, until it finally occurred to me that I was fighting a war I didn’t truly want to win. I don’t want a “normal” brain, after all. What a boring story that would be to write.
