If I’m Honest

If I’m honest
I’m just me.
I’m not impressive. I’m not
Too special. And you certainly shouldn’t
Take advice from me. My house
Of cards will fall over any minute.

If I’m honest,
I’m another sad, lonely girl,
Entitled, enraged, but I talk
Better than most and
It sounds good. But
It’s not always
True.

I’m honest enough
To tell you this.

 

Put Your Own Mask On First

Was talking to the amazing Lola Sharp* the past few days and she had some smart things to say. (Okay, pretty much everything she says is smart, but anyway.) Such as: The best gift you can give the world is to be your best self. You need to take care of yourself before you can take care of others – in case of emergency on a plane, you put your own oxygen mask on first. You have nothing to give if you’re empty.

This looks like a lot of things. It can look like being selfish. It can look like getting your sh*t together even if you have to hurt people to do it. You’re of no use to anybody when you’re a mess. When you’re unhappy. When you’re distracted, despairing, disinterested, divided.

The thing is, it’s not selfish. If you want to help others, you need to be able to help them. Being your best self has its own way of making the world better. Being a positive, happy person has its own way of making the world better. You don’t have to give and give and give – at your own expense – to make the world better. Positivity, confidence, happiness – each has a way of breeding itself. Don’t feel badly about that.

* Cruel yet brilliant taskmistress.

Winners

Thanks to everyone for entering my 1k follower contest. I broke out my magic hat* this morning and did a little random. The winners are:

Dragonbreath ….. MARY JO!

Willow ….. KRISTY COLLEY!

The Things We Cherished ….. LOLA SHARP!

Winners, if you could please email me a snail mail addy to corra.jessica @ gmail.com I will have your books out to you ASAP and thank you again!

*No, really, I honestly write everyone’s names on scraps of paper and fish them out of a bag. I am retro like that.

Lean Over the Abyss

First, let me say THANK YOU to everyone who read, replied to, tweeted, or emailed about Wednesday’s post. The response was quite humbling.

That’s one thing I hadn’t anticipated with the blog – the connection and the impact I could have with and on readers. I had hoped, eventually, to know I wasn’t squawking into the void, but had no real idea if or when that would happen. I don’t get many comments typically.

The thing I most lamented in my loss post – well, if there was one thing more than others – is the isolation we inflict upon ourselves, the lack of empathy and how we don’t reach out for whatever reason. I’m glad that my blog could be a force to counter that.

I wasn’t prepared to hear that it touched people, though. Sure, that they could relate and it resonated a bit, maybe. But all my cajoling to take charge of your life… I shouldn’t have been shocked when people started to tell me they had, and yet, I was. So, if you’re one of those people, I’m rooting for you. And if you could be one of those people – what are you waiting for? The logistics are at once complex and simple. We make everything harder than it has to be, and I don’t say that to trivialize but to give some perspective. You assume the worst but it may not be like that. Open you mind a little bit and allow yourself to hope things could be different than the worst, that there is another way. Life is huge. Life is a long frickin’ time. It’ll shake out.

You will be alright.

Whatever you need to do, you can do. You are strong enough, and you can use whatever trial you must go through. You don’t need to let it own you. You have that choice.

I apologize that today’s post is short, but I thought we might need a palate cleanser after Wednesday, and I’m busy being awesome in NYC today meeting Super Agent Suzie and Editor Kate in person, and hanging out with Nova Ren Suma – and you all know to read her book, Imaginary Girls, right? It’s my book of the month, so you should.

Loss

Don’t forget the 1k contest – enter through Sunday. Spread the word. ~

I’m struggling to write this post today, friends. I know what I want to talk about, but not what I want to say. Really, I want to express the wide sense of loss, how one feels loss – the disconnect between the feelings and the reality sometimes, why we feel loss … loss. It’s a big topic. So. We’ll start at the basics.

LOSS: 1 : destruction, ruin
- Merriam Webster

When I think of loss, the thing that overwhelms me is its immutability. Loss is a hope killer, and the one thing people – me, anyway – thrive on is hope. We have to believe things can change. Loss flattens it. There is no going back.

There is no going back. That is loss. Even in a less fraught scenario, say you lose your wallet but you get it back – there is still no going back, even if the item is returned, or the person found. You will always remember the panic, the hopelessness. Just because the net’s restrung beneath you, you can never forget what it’s like when it’s gone. That is loss.

As I move through the Official Divorce Proceedings, the loss has hit me again. I went through the entire grief process already; one of the luxuries of being the leaver is doing that in your own time, and more than likely before the marriage actually ends. But it’s more a cycle than a process, and every iteration is different. Yes, I chose to end my marriage. I have my reasons; I think they’re good ones. But it’s still a significant change, an ending.

I didn’t want to talk about the divorce directly on the blog. I know, I write YA; this is un-relatable to teens and no one wants to hear it anyway. But it’s an incredible stressor and these are where my thoughts wander. I’m not looking for sympathy or anything like that, and note I’m not posting any actual details. I won’t. But I would like to ruminate on loss, and this is my context for doing so.

The problem with something like loss is there are no good ways to put the words (I believe I’ve said this before). There is no way to talk about loss that feels right. Loss is something for the dark; we don’t want to talk about it, to draw it out into the open and say, look. This is me, vulnerable, without. This is me in my fear, in my helplessness, sans hope. This is me.

A radio lives in the gym; it’s always tuned to the local hip hop/R&B station. And every time I’m there, this one song comes on. Beyonce. The Best Thing I Never Had. Here’s some of the lyrics:

I bet it sucks to be you right now
So sad, you’re hurt
Boo hoo, oh, did you expect me to care?
You don’t deserve my tears
I guess that’s why they ain’t there

I may have started crying on the cross-trainer finally. Because – no offense to Beyonce or her song-writers – how can you trivialize relationships like that? How can we ever experience loss ourselves and still be so hurtful? I get the anger; I’ve been in that stage. I get that some people really are asses. Oh, believe me. And yet – even then, they’re still people. They still hurt and hope and love and lose. I hate how we brush off these feelings, how we cocoon to protect ourselves. We don’t let anyone see our pain and we live with it ourselves. It’s sad that this is easier to do than share it. Or worse, how in protecting ourselves, we hurt others. We ignore them or shut them down, as though their experience is lesser or undeserving of the same depth. We dehumanize them, so that our own experience is amplified against the blankness of other people. We make their pain abstract, or non-existent, which makes our own that much more acute.

That’s why love is the scariest, absolutely hands-down, the scariest endeavor ever. The more we love, the more we have to lose, and haven’t we just been over how much that sucks? I once defined love as leaning over the abyss and hoping nobody pushes you. (I’m such a romantic.) But I find love and loss to be at opposite ends. Because love is an opening, a daring, a belief. It’s taking broken pieces and seeing beauty in them anyway. Love is the bravest thing we can do. I think it can transcend itself; that in taking that risk, if we do it right, love can be safe. That’s why I put it opposite loss. Because it can unite, calm, instill hope. Everything that loss shatters, love can restore.

I couldn’t leave you on such a down note, could I?

Thank You!

I put out a call on Twitter a couple weeks ago asking to get me to 1,000 followers by September 18, my birthday. I typically hate when people ask for followers, but it was for my birthday, and I promised to give away books, and I have this THING about NUMBERS, am somewhat obsessive given my particular synesthesia-like brainworks. (Numbers and most words are multifaceted to me; they’re hot or cold or nice or mean or light or heavy….anyway.)

All that to say, Twitter rose to the challenge and I sit at 1,016 today. I promise to tweet smart things. Or at least, to tweet. >.>

That means a giveaway! The first of the new blog! Yay!

I’m going to hazard a guess that my 1,000 twitter followers are a diverse bunch. As such, I’m not going to pigeonhole the prizes for this contest. That means I’m going to give away a kid’s book, a young adult book, AND a grown-up book!

They are:

Dragonbreath: Curse of the Were-Wiener by Ursula Vernon

Willow by Julia Hoban

The Things We Cherished by Pam Jenoff

Three very different  books, but something for everyone I hope. All you have to do is comment with which book you want. So, if everybody wants one book and you’re the only one who wants the other, you have more of a chance to win it. I like to keep these things simple.

(Yes, I know it’s a twitter-follower contest and not all my 1k twitter followers will click over to my blog for the contest, but it was a last minute idea and this is how I roll – if anyone can point me to how one chooses random winners from twitter, let me know. I’m sure there’s an app or something.)

ETA: The giveaway is international since I forgot to specify, and it will run through the week! Winners announced next Monday, so get your comments in before 9/25 11:59PM. (details, details, I’m in the revision cave, what, you want me to remember these things?!?! )

Be Nice

Another guest post this week! Click on over to Dear Teen Me for what I’d tell my 15-year-old self. It involves BOYS and THEATRE. On with today’s post. ~

Think how easily this guy could win the Triple Crown. He'd just take a step over the low horses.

I’m feeling mellow. It’s rare. I’m enmeshed in revisions, in my life, and my sister’ll be the first one to tell you I can be high drama. It’s not intentional, I swear; I just usually have a lot going on, and I have a lot of energy and I overthink and drama happens.

Yet I’ve noticed myself chilling out in a lot of ways lately. I still stress and fret and overthink, but the way I do it and the how and why has been shifting, slowly. I used to be really critical and that’s where a lot of it came from; I’m not perfect, must hate on self! … now, not so much. Now it’s, shoot, rent’s due and I don’t have any money, I should find some!

Note the difference. One is abstract and self-directed angst. The other is circumstantial. I don’t have to let the latter bother me. It still does, and I still freak out, because, seriously, rent is super important. But I don’t have to let it control me, and I can step back from it and feel at peace in my center. With myself. My inability to pay my rent at this exact moment does not make me a horrible person. Sometimes I have to actually say that out loud to myself, that circumstances do not equal worth. That other people do not determine worth.

I’m learning to be nicer to myself. You should try it; it’s a good idea. My self-worth was conflated with my circumstances for a long time. I didn’t meet expectations, so I was without value. This is deadly thinking. My sister’s fond of the phrase, “I don’t know your life,” and I love that. We don’t know the details or the motives; the only head we can inhabit is ours (yes, even writers).

We are all of us people. I find that in the past six months, my compassion has gone UP. Because I don’t have the moral high ground anymore, it’s allowed me to get off my high horse (oh, matching metaphors, whee). The view from up there wasn’t so great anyway.

While I was talking through the divorce stuff with my former pastor, he said all the Right Things Christians Say about this sort of thing, and then appealed to my own Christianity* – had a friend going through a similar situation a while ago, and wouldn’t I say the same things to her that he was saying to me.

No, I would not.

I would say, “I don’t know your life. I don’t know what you’re going through, and I don’t know if I even can understand it. I am sorry you have to go through these things, regardless of your own culpability in the matter, and I am here.”

*My own Christianity is a debatable topic, but I prefer it to be a dead one. Like the topic itself.

Thinking this way keeps me on the ground. I can’t judge you. There’s nothing to judge. I’ve been thinking a lot of the Frost quote from Hyla Brook, “We love the things we love for what they are.” Being more compassionate lets me see things *for what they are,* not for how I wish they were or how I wish I was. It allows me to accept myself and others with their flaws, to acknowledge their flaws and still love. It’s why I don’t have to freak out over the rent or whatever’s the crisis du jour. There’s always a crisis du jour, and who wants to live in a perpetual state of anxiety? Having done that, I can vouch it’s not a good time.

Letting go of that mentality, the it must be me, is f’ing hard. The mentality is easy to fall into. It’s comfortable. It’s a lie. Our interiors fill up with nasty things and then it comes back out. Subtly. Painfully. Self-righteousness, judgment, fear… we use these as crutches, or as weapons as we try to find peace and meaning. Ironically, they cause it. They eat us up from the inside.

So I propose we release those feelings. Be nicer to yourself today. It boomerangs. Then you’re nicer to other people, who are nicer to you, and suddenly you have no idea why you were ever on the horse to begin with. There’s no rush in this life, so walking is worth it.

Guest Bloggery

Just a drive-by post to point everyone to my friend Kait Nolan’s fabulous blog, where I am doing my usual live-your-life schtick. This one’s called Confronting the Could Be and explains why I write YA! I hope you’ll pop over and check it out. And stick around, because Kait’s fabulous in her own right.

What Are We Saying?

I wanted to be a pastry chef. Now I just want to eat all the pastry.

The greatest danger is not to aim too high and miss the mark, but to aim too low and reach it. —Michelangelo Buonarroti

I’ve encountered many friends in hopeless situations lately. It’s been frustrating to me personally because in my concern for them, I want to help. And I can’t. There’s nothing to even say, oftentimes, and that hurts the most. It’s not that I want to fix things, it’s that I don’t want people I care about to hurt, and if I can do something to change that, I will. Or to speak words of comfort, and there are none. I remember this lesson distinctly when my mother died because everyone had words and I had no use for words.

Their situations raise questions for me, globally, that are part of the discussion I’ve been having here. I won’t go in to anyone’s situation here; that’s not my place and it’s beside the point. All you need to know is that there is a disconnect between where they are and where they should be. I find most people are somewhere on that continuum anyway.

When I said you have to go for it, it felt kind of self-explanatory. But it spawned this whole series of posts articulating goal-getting. And my friends reminded me of yet another part of life – when you go for something, don’t go halfway.  In some cases my friends have done things for themselves, a step in the right direction maybe. But then they are caught in this shadowy in-between, still not happy but now living in the tension of faltering movement – in many cases now feeling the guilt of doing something for themselves.

Aside – I have a motto. Go big or go home. It is not a motto for everyone, but perhaps if you rephrase it to don’t do anything half-assed, it might work for you.

I said in my original post, the only people stopping us is ourselves. No matter what the obstacles are between you and wherever you want to be, this will always be true. Obstacles can only be overcome if you’re willing to climb them. We allow things to be our obstacles. All of the hopeless situations my friends are in are technically not impossible – it depends on where they’re going and how they’re trying to get there. I talked about risk and compromise and those are the tools for dealing with obstacles. Yesterday on twitter I said boredom is not having nothing to do but being unable to do what you want and ennui toward anything else. We have to shift our thinking from the hopeless set of circumstances – our ideal – to the best of what is possible: this is where risk and compromise come in.

What are we afraid of? Why do we stop short of our goals? More often than not, the answer to this one is hurting others. Most people don’t want to do things they know are going to cause pain to people they love. Of course. But we have, are, and will continue to hurt them, usually on a daily basis. We’re all human. We want to minimize the damage, though. It’s the forethought; I know this. Recognizing upfront that doing something will have fallout, that prevents us from doing the something. But inaction is still a decision that will have its own fallout, and this is where most of my friends are. Where most people are. They take a couple steps and freeze like a deer in headlights, and they’re going to get ripped in half if they stand there for too long with their needs and their fears pulling at them.

This is where I’ve been musing. The global questions that have been raised all revolve around this part of it. Not that I have answers; I don’t. But here are some things to think about if you find yourself inching down the spectrum of where you want to be versus where you are. Standing where you are right now, what are you saying to the people around you? Your action or inaction speaks for itself. You’re trying to minimize the damage you could cause – but are you fully sure what that damage will be? and at what cost to yourself? What is too selfish? Why are your needs of lesser value than anyone else’s? What are the presumptions you’re making about and for the people in your life if you were to really reach for your goals? People are more adaptive and resilient than we give ourselves credit for since nobody tends to like change.

And people know. People can tell when those around them are going through motions. Are distracted, uninvested. Want to be somewhere else. Probably because they’re the same way. We live on that spectrum; no one is ever always where they want to be. We read the comics about working stiffs and watch the sitcoms about everyday families. We get it.

It takes a certain mindset to admit you can do something about where you are. It takes another to actually do it and it takes a whole frigging lot more to go all the way through with it. (Can you tell I got some Important Paperwork in the mail this week? Yes, finally.)

I don’t say this stuff to scare or patronize or convince. I’ve had a lot of crazy in my life; a lot of times I don’t tell people about things because they have no idea how to respond to it. It’s easier for someone like me to take risks; I’ve lived in the uncertain places more often. But people know. When we are unsatisfied and do nothing, we unconsciously say that it’s okay to be unsatisfied. That we aren’t worth investing in ourselves and our own fulfillment isn’t a priority. (Obviously there are times and places for putting our wants and needs on hold; I speak generally here.) If your life is nothing but delaying your wants or shoving down yourself, what kind of life is that? You are who you are in all the beauty and mess that only you can be. Embrace that. Like I said in Just Do It, go ahead look at job listings or real estate listings or dance lessons or creative writing workshops or whatever it is you need for a first step. But keep walking.

“Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.” Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (Act 1, Scene 4)

Book of the Month: Imaginary Girls

Book of the Month is a new feature I’m implementing mid-month. I’m going to talk about a book I’ve loved and want to share with my readers.

The inaugural book of the month is Nova Ren Suma’s IMAGINARY GIRLS.

From Goodreads:

Chloe’s older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can’t be captured or caged. When a night with Ruby’s friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers the dead body of her classmate London Hayes left floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away from town and away from Ruby.

But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns to town two years later, deadly surprises await. As Chloe flirts with the truth that Ruby has hidden deeply away, the fragile line between life and death is redrawn by the complex bonds of sisterhood.

With palpable drama and delicious craft, Nova Ren Suma bursts onto the YA scene with the story that everyone will be talking about.

WHY I PICKED THIS BOOK: It’s beautiful from the first word to the last. The narrator, Chloe, is my favorite thing about the book. Nova Ren Suma is subtle in her portrayal of Chloe; even as she idolizes her sister Chloe becomes her own person. It’s amazing to watch. Interestingly, I found Ruby the weak link. I couldn’t understand her magnetism, I found her kind of immature and petty. And yet that is a facade of sorts; we see especially at the end how very seriously Ruby takes everything. Which just highlights the craft of the book, I think. Also this gives us a sense of Chloe as perhaps not entirely reliable, which is wonderful when things get a little weird – the book is squarely magical realism. The setting is important and it’s almost like its own character; this book is so well-rounded.

YOU SHOULD READ IT IF: You like BEFORE I FALL or WINTERGIRLS, if you think you’ll like AFTER YOU; you care about the prose as much as the plot; you aren’t in the mood for another romance – this book’s solely about sisters; you just want to stare at the gorgeous cover – that red pops in person.