For the last week my question I ask myself before bed is "Who am I?" It may sound like a silly question but I am interested in what my subconscious pulls up.
Last night I had a dream that I was going to New York to meet with my editor. I've only been to New York once before, when I went to teach at Chautauqua, and I didn't really see much of the New York I imagined (busy streets, brownstones, etc.)
In my dream I was on a bus with a bunch of people, not a normal bus but more like cable car sort of thing. The driver stopped. For some reason I got off. No suitcase. No purse. Nothing. Just me. I looked back at the driver who was standing on the steps of the bus, the only way to get on. He clutched his chest, his heart perhaps, in excruciating pain. Then he yelled something horribly scary. I don't know what but it scared me too much to move. I didn't move toward him and I didn't run away.
Then he turned around, got back on the bus, and drove away. Without me.
I freaked out.
I ran into the nearest building. The only thing I could think of was to find my agent and to find my hotel. I was staying at a hotel that started with the letter C. That's all I could remember about it. The building I walked into was a restaurant, a big old style diner with tons of open space, slow pace, and nothing I would have expected to see in New York. I explained the situation and the waitress brought me a phone book so I could look for the hotel. There were only 3 hotels that started with the letter C. That seemed insane for a place as big as New York. Then I looked at the cover of the phone book. It said Metairie, Louisiana. (Metairie is a town not far from where I lived in New Orleans.)
I ran to the next building. It was a room filled with people playing video games. Every room had a different game and different players. No one could see what my problem was. No one understood that there was anything wrong with being dumped in a strange place with only the clothes on my back.
I remembered I had my cell phone and I called my agent.
She didn't know what I was talking about. She had no idea why I was in New York.
I went back to the restaurant, no longer sure if I was in New York or Lousiana. But it wasn't a restaurant anymore. It was an office building and the manager came out to the reception area and said she would take me where I needed to go. We headed out to her car and I woke up.
This one I can't figure out, at least not just yet.
Things to Do
Quotes
"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little." Anne Lamott
"Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing...the rest will follow."Jane Yolen
"The whole thing is, you’ve got to make them care about somebody." Frank Capra
"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come back home." Nancy Slonim Aronie
"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours!" Richard Bach
"Yet somehow, we write; and most of the time, we like what we write. The dark place seems less dark when we get there. It was only the journey that was fearful." Susan Shaughnessy
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft -- then you can add all the genius you like." Phyllis A. Whitney
"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is." Anne Rice
"I write in terror. I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable." Cynthia Ozick
"There have been societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." Ursula K. LeGuin
"Your first job is to get your own story straight." Natalie Goldberg
"Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking." Naomi Wolf
"Few children learn to read books by themselves. Someone has to lure them into the wonderful world of the written word; someone has to show them the way." Orville Prescott
"A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults." Ursula K. LeGuin
"I'd always thought you had to be a special person to write. And then I realized you just have to start." Abigail Thomas
"You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need." Jerry Gillies
"But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer." Doris Lessing
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."Yevgeny Yentushenko
"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the
greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't
believe in magic will never find it." Roald Dahl
"I compose sometimes with a pen and notebook, sometimes on the computer; it makes no difference. If all I had was a chisel and a rock I would write on the rock." Ursula Le Guin
"If you want to write from a place of emotional integrity, it is important to learn everything you can about all kinds of emotions, including those that exist in you, that you wish didn't." Elizabeth Berg
"And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born." Jack Kerouac
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties." Bonnie Friedman
Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.
Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.
Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.
Who am I? A motivational speaker, writing instructor, workshop leader and full-time follower of dreams.
Who am I? Read and find out.
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