Dorky, but it means something to me

I get knocked down,
but I get up again.
You're never gonna keep me down.

- Chumbawumba

I want to write

I want to tell the goddamned truth. About my weight, my childhood dog, the losses I've never detailed -- everything. Hell, I want to spill about my in-laws. I'm feeling very open, cracked open in fact. I owe it to Cheryl Strayed and to Albert Flynn DeSilver, who put on a hell of a workshop today in Petaluma.

There is something to being cracked open. Try it sometime.

Here's part of what I wrote today:

Write about something you used to know how to do.

As a kid, I used to know how to ice skate. I won’t say I was ever that great at it. I kind of bumbled along on my blades, ankles weaving and bobbing, my arms out to my sides in hopes of achieving balance. True balance was never achieved. I stumbled and I fell and I cut myself, and then somehow I wobbled back onto the blades and kept gliding.

Then adulthood descended. So did extra pounds. Now, I wasn’t a skinny kid. I always had chunky cheeks and a bulging tummy. Growing up just exacerbated the problem. Have you ever seen a fat professional ice-skater? There’s a reason for that.

Tossing the sport aside wasn’t exactly difficult. I wasn’t athletic as a child and grew even less so as the years went on. It was enough for me to walk up a steep street while pretending I wasn’t completely sweaty and short of breath. I couldn’t imagine running after a ball or jumping into a pool for the fun of it.

I used to know how to skate. I’m not sure if that knowledge was possessed by my body or brain. I picture myself as a seven-year-old, eight-year-old, an elementary schooler wearing a sweater and sturdy corduroy pants, making my way around the circle of an ice rink at University Towne Center. That’s what they do in San Diego – give malls fancy names, British-seeming monikers with extra e’s for good measure. Where I grew up, shopping is a sport. I’m not very good at that either.

The last time I skated I was 32 years old. My then-boyfriend, now-husband accompanied a few graduate-school friends of mine to Berkeley Iceland, which is now closed, gated, fenced off and duly graffitied. I was a good sport at first. I laced up my skates and wobbled over to the rink. Then I stepped on the ice and the panic descended.

How the fuck was I supposed to do this?

Every extra pound on my body made itself known. I’m not one to use my weight as an excuse – I would far rather people didn’t notice it was there then see it as a handicap – but damn it, it sure stifled my ability to gracefully do a damn thing. I held onto Adam with all I had, but soon I got to feeling that I was bringing him down, holding him back, the fat lady with the skinny guy, a circus act.

“You do it,” I said, and tromped off the rink. I sat on a bench and unlaced my skates. They seemed to be laughing at me, mocking. The street kids who populated the place seemed to be looking at me, analyzing. How much she weigh anyway? A ton! Were they actually saying that? Did it matter?

He followed me off the ice. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I just don’t like this.”

“You were all excited to come.”

“Was excited. Past tense. Not anymore.”

I looked down at my thighs. They seemed to spread across half the damn bench. What’s more unattractive, fat thighs or a fat ass? I didn’t think my ass was too fat, not compared to my gut, but who knew? There was a mirror across the room and I avoided it like a deer avoids an oncoming train. One hit and bye-bye Charlie.

His blue eyes sized me up, evaluated me. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or frustrated or none of the above. I knew better than to ask. “I’ll tell you when I’m angry,” he always said. Well, okay.

“So what are we going to do now?”

“There is no we. I’m going to sit this one out, maybe drown myself in some hot chocolate. You go back out there and skate.” I pointed to my skinny friends swirling around the ice. “Go hang out with them.”

“I want to be with you.”

I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t much want to be with myself.

Being fat is a particular brand of freakishness. You literally don’t fit. Booths, airplane seats, small racy cars meant for fun and frivolity. Adam had a Miata. I never told him how much I hated sitting in that tiny thing, what a howling moose beast I felt myself to be. We took my Corolla as much as possible. Corollas are good cars, forgiving. Toyota – it’s the fat person’s friend.

“I used to be able to do this.”

“Then you can do it again. Come on. It’s like riding a bike.”

“Another thing I can’t do any more.”

Ever see a fat person riding a bike? Come on, tell me it’s not funny, you lying fuck.

“You know that for a fact?”

“You want to test it out?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

We’d been together a year and a half and already I was thinking long-term. It was moments like this, though, that made me think again. Did I really want to be pushed to the wall like this on a regular basis?

To say no would be running away. To say yes could constitute some sort of emotional sentence. Either way, I wasn’t sure I could win. Maybe I already had, though. After all, this man loved me. He was religious about telling me so, reminding me how beautiful he found me, how sexy, how hot, how incredibly awesome.

Each compliment went down like a ton of bricks. It was far easier to swallow the Pop Chips I bought in secret every few days. You chewed them and they crunched. They become molecules in your mouth and then tacked themselves directly to your ass. They were easy to understand, simple to handle. No operating instructions required.

Cheryl Strayed

I'm at a workshop with Cheryl Strayed right now and it's pretty damn awesome. She's a really bright lady with a lot of things to say.

Here's a few of them:

"What I'm going to bank on is if I feel this way about myself, some of you will too. Trust that however weird you are, the rest of us are just as weird. That's the moment to write into. People who play it safe stay in the maybe pile."

"(Find the) core question that's universal to all of us. Once I knew what I was saying, everything could be of service to that."

"Often we have mistaken revelations. Allow yourself to write about those too."

"When you're stuck, write into a moment of revelation."

"I always want to add the unwritten last line: nothing was ever the same again. This thing shifted the world -- and the reader's world too."

Thank you, Adam Sandler

You are helping me to change in ways I never have imagined. I'm seeing that life doesn't have to be a struggle with clenched teeth and fists. Thank you, baby, thank you.

Lionel Shriver, "We Need to Talk About Kevin"

"The only way my head was truly going somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not to a different airport."

"You were ambitious -- for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart. I liked that about you. I liked it enormously."

Frances Ha and loneliness

Adam and I saw Noah Baumbach's latest, Frances Ha, yesterday. Neither one of us were particularly impressed. It was an aimless story with uninteresting (and, in fact, irritating) characters and the plot seemed plucked from a middle-school screenwriting course.

However, it did bring up memories of loneliness on many different levels, especially around that age. (Frances is in her mid-20s.) The loneliness of losing people as they move on. The loneliness of watching others' lives eclipse yours, while you feel like you're not going anywhere.

How do you think I wound up in the Czech Republic?

There are a few scenes where Frances is flitting around Paris and I could really relate to that loneliness, the wanting to share it with someone but having no one by your side to do so. Uncomfortable memories, but memories nonetheless.

First-world problems read by people who know better