Do Tell

Most of what I thought I was keeping private I've really been keeping secret. The former is keeping confidence for the sake of others, not revealing something because it would be a burden for them. The latter is hiding. I'm speaking here of the secrets and privacy of the self, myself really. Secrets can be valuable when carried for a loved one. Secrets kept about myself seem less so. Also, privacy, like solitude, feels healthy and good while secrets, like loneliness, mostly do damage.

Don't worry though, I'm not about to reveal my deepest secrets here today. That's another kind of burdening that does damage. Instead I'm looking to consider the effects I'm feeling of having let go of a couple secrets.

Start easy with one I've talked about before: I'm quitting my job after this school year. That's the sort of thing I would usually kept to myself worrying What if my employer and colleagues find out? What if I change my mind? Fearing these things, I have the habit of making such decisions but keeping them secret. Privacy isn't motivated by fear, but secrets usually are. My habit says, don't tell anyone.

I bucked that habit and have announced the decision and then some. The effects help me see the value of going public. I have been surprised by the support, suggestions, and gratitude with which my announcement has been received. I expected it to be a burden to others, but it turns out to be a type of kindness.

It has been kind to me as well. There have been other times I've said I need to quit my job, but that was only my inner voice echoing inside the empty warehouse of my skull. I kept it secret because the idea felt shameful and made me seem weak. Transforming the secret through telling, I felt lighter and open to ideas. The secret had me thinking I had to go on until retirement. Telling others had me feeling the truth of it.

A second example. At my in-laws, talking about my job, I said it was making me sick. To show I wasn't just whining, I let go of a secret: I'm 219 pounds, technically obese. My mother-in-law was shocked and did not want to believe. No way, she said. That's not possible.

I never want to reveal that I'm fat. It's embarrassing and feels like failure, a lack of will, and weakness. Being fat is something I keep secret out of shame. This is what I've learned. That's my habit.

Saying it didn't change my weight but I felt lighter, less trapped in my weight or held down by it. Letting go of the secret I found that no one reproached me. There was no shame. There was understanding and I felt good.

My recent experience has been that sharing secrets is strengthening. Still, I resist the urge to share because shame, the heaviest of weights, feels so crushing. Shame drives my habit of hiding, of keeping secret while claiming privacy. The habit is so strong it overcomes most logic and experience.

Of course it matters how the secret is told. It's no surprise that telling honestly and in straight-forward fashion without hoping to elicit any response, least of all shock is best. I didn't want to shock my mother-in-law. Instead, I wanted to share something and help her understand how bad my job has become. I told her about my weight not to say, Look at me! but more to offer, This is me. Here I am. I was giving instead of asking for something. For me, that's a radical approach.

There are implications in this for writing. When I tell of my job and weight, I'm not looking for a result, effect, moral, or even an ending. There is no moral. I don't know how the story will end. It's a thing in process. I tell the story without drama or effect and go forward in the belief that someone, maybe me, might benefit. Secrets are hidden stories. Telling in the right amounts — and here there is a border to explore — is good for all.

Returning

I cannot quite conceive of how to write a book. I can imagine it but can't work out the nuts and bolts. My guess is that learning it requires doing it, like getting a mortgage to buy a house. I tried to read up on points and PMI, but didn't understand until my wife and I just bought a damn house and learned along the way. I'd like to think that just deciding to write a book I would learn how. Well, deciding and digging in.

It isn't like I haven't tried to write books. I wrote a pretty bad NaNoWriMo novel that has a few startlingly good moments. I drafted a hundred pages of a kind-of memoir. I planned out a book about writing Morning Pages and sketched another about good tools. I've made decisions and on occasion dug in. I've tried.

Except, I haven't really tried. Mostly I've come close to trying. I've thought about these books but haven't done the work over the long term. I'm not sure how to do that kind of work. Should I outline or let the book become what it needs to be? Is it too self-centered to write about myself? Fiction or non-fiction? Non-fiction for sure because I've seen how my "novel" turned out. Then again, I like some of that novel. Maybe fiction then? Under all this questioning, I stop.

Even if I do get going, I let other things interrupt (maybe to save myself from the risk of going forward) and I go down some sidetrack. The memoir went like that. I worked on it for a summer, but when school started I left it lying on the shelf for someday when I had time to get back to it. A year later I went back for a few pages, but had lost the feel. It seemed foreign to me or dead. I couldn't quite return.

I bet writing a book is all about returning. I've read that every book is a failure, but failures aren't full stops. They yield chances to return. I know a book comes from sitting down and writing, but it also springs from returning each time I wander away.

Return. Return. Return.

It reminds me of the carriage return on my old manual typewriter. The bell sounds near the end of the line and I throw the lever from left to right. New line. Return to typing. Return to writing. Return until the end of the line and return again until there is a book. It's so simple. Then why haven't I done it?

Returning often feels too difficult to attempt and so I put it off until later. Returning requires understanding, acceptance, a gentle touch with myself, and faith both in the process and my abilities.

I return to writing daily for Morning Pages, a blog entry, and other writing, but almost everything I write is done in a handful of sittings over the course of a day or two. A book requires returning to the same big idea daily for weeks, months, seasons, and years. Stephen King says he can write a book in a season. Good God. Dani Shapiro stays with a book for two to three years. Oh my. And George Saunders talked about the two years of revisions for his book. What? That kind of returning sounds otherworldly, superhuman, the works of the gods.

I'm easily distracted and interested in everything. I've been asked what my blog is about. It's about anything in which I have some interest. Last week it was writing about writing. Today it's how returning might make a book. Tomorrow it may be physical/emotional health. I want to write about it all. How could I stick to one thing and return to it again and again? Someone on the internet said the key is to have multiple projects going at once, but I can't get anything big done. Sigh. I just don't know.

When I first learned to cook I had trouble getting all the foods to the table at the same time. The rice would get dry or cold waiting for the chicken and the sauce would need ten minutes after the chicken was done. How do I time it all to come out together? Whoever was in the kitchen with me said, you'll figure it out in time. I was ten. I'm fifty now and, though there are the occasional screwups, I almost always get a full meal to the table, warm, ready to eat, and without much thought of how. It just works. I just make it happen.

I learn it by doing — making individual dishes into a meal, taking out a mortgage and buying a house, writing a book. I probably just need to try, return the next day, try, and return the day after that. Repeat as necessary. Faith and belief in the process and in myself will come along the way, right?

I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you. Speak up will you. Or just give me a push.

Truly Good Tools

In a few weeks we will lose Inbox by Gmail, a service providing an enhanced front end to Gmail. Google has decided that Gmail is good enough and is killing Inbox like a bull in the ring, spears sticking out of it and some fool in a ridiculous costume showing off like he's done something. I could complain about this all day, but that would be less interesting than comparing cat food.

Inbox has been a good tool. It looks and feels good, is efficient, and automates email some. I'm no fan of email — I'd rather write letters — but it's a necessity and so I sought out a good tool for it. That was Inbox.

Good tools are tough to come by and often require lots of experimentation. It took two semi-disposable fountain pens, and three really good ones to arrive at the pen I currently use which is just right for me in every way. Similarly, I've crafted a sheet of lined paper through trial and error over the course of years. (I don't make the paper but have designed a page I print on the back of used copy paper.) Online, I've found a fantastic minimalist writing tool. Six years ago my wife bought me the Chromebook Pixel on which I'm typing. It was the finest of tools when she gave it to me and remains fantastic no matter what Google says.

The best tools need to be owned outright. The fountain pen is mine and will be for another twenty years, maybe longer. The only way I'll lose it is if I, well, lose it, have it stolen, or break it somehow. It's the same with the paper. These things are mine.

The minimalist writing tool is great, but the guy who runs it can shut it down tomorrow. Google stopped updating the Chromebook. In those cases, I'm out of luck just as I am with Inbox. Much of why I prefer analog tools has to do with ownership which makes them much more dependable, as any good tool must be. Google can't end-of-life my fountain pen (though they might want to).

There is more than sentimental value to ownership. Ask any renter who has been told by the landlord it's time to move. It's possible to have a good tool that is rented or borrowed, but to truly good tools must be owned. I know everyone thinks Google Docs will be around forever, but I can't guarantee that, so it is only a good tool so long as Google allows me to use it. That's hardly dependable.

I thought Inbox was a good tool, but in a few weeks it will wink out of existence and there's absolutely nothing I can do about that. I just borrow it.

It's said that if you are not paying for a service, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. I add that if you don't own the product even a little bit, you are owned a little bit by it. I got owned by Inbox just as I've been owned by Gmail for years. Sometimes that's okay, but the more I think about it, especially as I have to let go of Inbox, I'm certain that it isn't very good.

Compromise is part of life and my addiction to online word processing, email, and the rest come with a price. Every morning, and often through the day, I pick up the fountain pen, uncap it, and let it glide across the page. The words are all mine, the paper too, and the pen is completely my possession which kind of sets me free as a truly good tool should.

From Two In The Morning (Maybe Earlier)

Two in the morning. That's when I've been waking. I go to bed at nine, read for half an hour, shut out the light, fall asleep around ten, and need at least six but more like eight or nine hours of sleep. Instead I get four and a half, my body coming awake right around two, something wrong. Anxious dreams of school, my dead father, being lost and having no home, pull me out of sleep right around two in the morning. I'm still tired but my body says that it will not rest. It cramps, aches, moves, shifts, turns, flops, wrestles, clenches, and sends out signals via a tightening of my calf, an alarm from my bladder, a flexing of my shoulders and neck. Two in the morning I'm so tired and so awake.

I get up, use the bathroom, then come back to bed, quietly, trying not to disturb my wife who has her own troubles with sleep. Some nights she is simply up until two, three, four in the morning because her brain won't let her sleep. An inherited trait, there's nothing much to do about it other than medicate herself into slumber, something about which she's anxious and so am I. This morning she is deep in sleep as I return to bed, lie down, and pull the blanket up around me. I shouldn't bother even trying to go back to sleep. I can tell my night is over. It's nearly two-thirty. I give it a shot but know I'm just going to keep moving the bed and that my mind will keep moving me from sleep. I doze and wake, doze and wake. By half past three I've had enough. I push back the blankets and get out of bed.

Downstairs I make a cup of decaf then head down to the basement nook and write three pages. I check email and skim past the bad news in The New York Times and Washington Post, then give up the internet as bad business. Up in the kitchen I eat a small bowl of cereal then build a nest on the couch in the den where I sit under blankets to read Diane Ackerman's One Hundred Names For Love her story of her husband's stroke and, I hope, recovery. It reminds me over and over that we live perilously close to disaster. I read about them leaving the hospital, arriving home, practicing how to get up after a fall, enduring a speech-therapist's visit, swimming in the pool, starting at their yard in Ithaca, but then wake up with the book open on my lap and time having passed me by. Not much time. A brief snooze. A kind of nap. A snatch of rest. It is six-thirty in the morning and the room is still dark.

My wife wakes and comes down the steps. I am dozing again and wake enough to hear her but not enough to open my eyes. She pads through the living room opening blinds, shutting off the front lights. I hear her footsteps in the hall and then softly on the den carpet. I say a drowsy hello as I open my eyes and she startles, inhaling deeply, gasping really. Did she think I was dead? A bundle of blankets left on the couch? No, she hadn't even seen me and had come in merely to shut the light. She laughs in relief. I thought you were in the basement writing. I shake my head and smile. She encourages me to go up to bed. No. I'd sleep until noon up there and be up again at two the next day.

Instead I go up to shower. In the bedroom I see the full laundry basket. Take that down and wash it next, I tell myself, tossing my socks in and setting it by the bedroom door. I go into the bathroom, turn the shower to hot, strip down, hang my towel from the hook near the shower stall, set out the bathmat. When I open the door the stall is filled with steam. Ah, I whisper, and step into the warm flow of water.

There are few things so comforting as warm water all over my body. I have been known to sit in a hot tub longer than warning signs suggest. I can sit, float, swim, wade, and stand in a warm Florida pool until the exposed skin on me burns red and hot. I would bathe in our tub but it would need a heating coil to keep it from becoming a tepid pool of my own filth. I can easily imagine myself as the frog in a pot of water coming slowly to a boil. What a way to go.

In the shower I get to thinking of Aaron Sorkin. I've read that he has a spectacular shower in his office so when the writing stops, as it often does for him, he can stand in the warmth until the words come loose. I imagine him at his desk the words slowly freezing, coming to a halt in a jumble suspended in crystal lattice. Then, as the hot water and steam envelop him, all the words come unstuck and begin again to flow down the stream. Do they then go down the drain? There are parts of this I haven't worked out fully.

Next I recall the first place in which the shower was a haven. My first year at Clarkson where, in Ross Hall, the showers in the common bathroom were not confined to individual stalls or separated by partitions but consisted simply of four shower heads mounted on one tiled wall. I would go down there in the morning or at night after basketball, set my shave kit and clean clothes on the sill, hang my towel on a hook, and drop my dirty clothes on the floor. If someone was already in the showers, I would step gratefully into the steam, say hello, and go about my business. Sometimes the other guy was a talker and that was okay, but most guys were quiet and it was easier to enjoy the shower. If I was alone, I would crank the shower up, the water was immediately warm, and put my head under it to feel the warmth rain down.

Clarkson wasn't a good place for me, but I didn't know it all the way through. I had the feeling it was wrong and I was wrong too, but these things take a while to sink in. I want to believe that whatever is wrong is something I can fix. Sometimes it is. At Clarkson and in my current situation, it is not. I often stood under the shower, letting hot water wash over and seep into my system, feeling mysteriously better, comforted maybe, but when I shut off the water, I was back in that tiled bathroom, off of the narrow hallway, living with fifty other boys who all seemed to have figured out things which remained mysterious to me. I remember one time turning back around and going back under the shower marveling that it never ran out of hot water.

Back in our shower at home I wash my hair and rinse. I rub soap between my hands, wash my body, and rinse. The heat rises in the shower as I turn the lever farther left. I let the water run, put my head back under, stretch out my hands in the stream, turn my back to the flow, and close my eyes. If only I could sleep in here. I imagine floating in a warm pool, rocked into a deep, dreamless sleep. Shaking my head at the idea, I turn the water off, feel an immediate chill made worse by opening the shower door, and press the thick towel against my chest. I pull it up over my head, then press it with both fists against my eyes until I see stars. Drops of water fall from me and splatter against hard tile.

I dry myself and dress, bring laundry to the basement and start the washer, shave my face, address a letter to my sister-in-law and put it at the mailbox. My wife and older daughter have left for an eye appointment. My younger daughter is having breakfast. I've written whatever this might be. The house is cold. Heavy hooded sweatshirt, wool socks, and still I'm cold. I think of the shower. I dream of a hot tub. I blink slowly and feel sleepy in the back of my throat. How does that happen? How does fatigue lodge itself there. My shoulders are loose and drooping. I hold my back straight. My body is tired. My mind too. My heart and soul? I don't know about that.

Upstairs, just before coming down with the laundry, I saw that the bed was unmade, the blankets, three of them, twisted together. My pillow stuck out of the flannel case. I pulled the blankets straight on my wife's side, walked around and fixed the pillowcase, pulled the blankets from one another. I folded and tucked, smoothed with the palm of my hand. Outside I listened to the sound of a jet moving up and away, knowing it was already gone before I heard it.

I didn't give even a moment's thought to lying down, going back toward sleep. I had things to do and words on my mind. Which of the two woke me at two? I thought of Diane Ackerman's husband and how a blood clot or some other microscopic event can crash the fragile lives in which we travel through time. Whatever is waking me so early in the morning is beyond my ken, a mystery that will either continue to dog me or be washed away. It's nearly noon. I am tired, weary even, and cold.

Rest is necessary for the body and mind. I've heard of a cruel experiment in which dogs were awakened just as they were about to sleep drove them insane. As if we needed proof of something so obvious. As if such things weren't clear to everyone awake at two in the morning or standing under the warm shower waiting for answers to how to sleep through the night and live through the day.