11-15-00 Eastern Echo

Finding the courage to grunt for a living

I'm a liar. Everything I say is most likely untrue, or at least partially fictitious, because my life is boring. Who would want to listen to the boring truth? I wouldn't. So I embellish a tad. I twist the facts just slightly. I take creative liberties with real life to get a laugh. Is that such a sin? Will I burn in hell for this? (Well, I can't imagine that hell is any worse than trying to make a living as a writer.) What has molded my psyche in such a way that telling stories, lies, has become an obsession no ten-step program could ever hope to eradicate? Simple. From a young age I found that by adding a few details to a mostly true tale I could make people laugh. Or at least get attention. That was my real objective. As the youngest of five children, it was my job to entertain and amuse everyone at the dinner table. It's been said the youngest, the baby, is favored with more attention than the other children of the family. Not true. I had to fight to make myself heard over the voices of my four siblings. The best way I found to focus all attention on me was to make pig noises. Yes, that's what I said. Pig noises. Seems simplistic now but at the time it was a revelation to find grunting in porcine glee at the peas on my plate could procure much mayhem and spouting of milk from noses. I thought I was Lucille Ball. My father thought I needed therapy. (And applied it liberally to my butt on numerous occasions.) But that didn't stop my grunting. Oh no. It would take much more than a spanking to eliminate the memory of crazed laughter and an audience captivated, anticipating my next oink. Suddenly the world had become my stage. People thought I was funny. They laughed when I told silly made-up stories about blue elephants breaking my toys while whistling Yankee Doodle through their trunks. I found that telling little lies was good, or at least not the mortal sin preached about in catechism. And so a storyteller was born. (Or should I say spawned like a red-bellied devil?) In a way I have been training to be a writer for most of my life. When I was thirteen I kept a journal of the trauma I was experiencing amidst the horrific disintegration of my parent's marriage. The words are so poignant with grief and despair that reading them twenty years later I can still feel the pain and mourn for the little girl that was me. When I was fifteen, my English teacher praised a story I had written in class. He encouraged me to finish it and send it somewhere to have it published. His words of approval are written on the cover of that notebook, still in a box in my basement. I take it out now and then to remember how it feels to have someone believe in me, especially when I forget how to believe in myself. In contrast, a college professor once told me I'd never be a good writer. Actually she said I had no talent. These harsh words shattered my world and for many years I didn't attempt to write anything more than a grocery list. I abandoned my dream. But I still told my stories, making my life seem just a little more interesting, amusing, and dramatic than it actually was. The dream had gone to sleep, but the stories were still there. One day, during a particularly stressful time in my life, I started another journal. The words flowed from me, a sinuous stream of consciousness filled with whimsical and witty thoughts on everything from my roommate's sex lives, and my lack of one, to world politics. It was a release I needed to sort through the garbage in my life and make it understandable. Or at least a little funnier. When I could make a bad situation appear comical on paper, it didn't seem quite so unbearable. Writing as a career wasn't what I intended to accomplish in my life. I wrote to express the feelings inside me. Things I could never say out loud filled my journals, and I giggled when I read them. My only critic, my only fan. It was all for me. I realized that writing is part of me, as much as the freckles on my nose and the way I talk with my hands. Soon it will be time to lay it all on the line. Graduation looms, and everything I've trained for, dreamed of, will be put to the test. Can I write for a living? Am I being unrealistic in my convictions to take this little bit of talent and try to make it a career? Sure, I write weekly for this little school newspaper and so I am a published writer. I've had a little piece published by the Ann Arbor News, and had an Echo column picked up by the Christian tabloid the Credo. The sticking point is that I haven't tried, really tried, to use this gift/obsession for something other than to entertain my close friends and family. I'm still a wanna-be. I haven't submitted much of anything, anywhere, since I started college three years ago. I haven't tried, and therefore I haven't failed. (Fear of failure is a big issue for me.) In some strange way that not-trying has kept this dream inside me, burning like a Texas summer, for all these years. If I don't try very hard then I haven't failed. And if I haven't failed then the time I've spent tap tapping on my keyboard hasn't been wasted, and I haven't been languishing in some hopeful, smoky, pipe dream. For today I have chosen to write. To not write would be like trying to stop using my legs to walk. Impossible. Who can say if one aspiration is more reasonable or achievable than another? Only time, and effort, will tell if my lifelong dream will come true.  Like everything in life I have to take it as it comes. Most people never realize their dreams. Some fear to dream at all. So I'll have to set out after graduation and begin the process of making my dreams come true. After all, my entire life has been spent telling stories. To quit now would be unthinkable. What has always driven me to fabricate, fib, and flavor my life with bits of untruth is the desire to entertain. It's what I've wanted; the stage set and me in the spotlight with an audience anticipating my every word. This is how I envision my life. I want to do what comes naturally--I want to be the one who grunts for a living. Oink.