I’ve been thinking a lot about writing recently. Partially because I’ve been reading Lilibet’s book, and partially because I’ve been reading a lot of everything recently. I know I’ve said it before, but I love to read, and I like to write. I got the new Kindle recently, just the regular paperwhite, without the 3G. This replaced the nook I have had forever. My nook was the most basic and original nook, and we had a good run. She still turns on, but the battery dies randomly, and when it dies, it reverts back to the factory settings and demands to have a software update before it will do anything useful like download a book, which is frankly unacceptable. I obtained my first ipad, ever, this past Christmas, and I did a lot of reading on the ipad, however, the ipad is absolutely not summertime activity friendly, plus, reading on lit screens at night is suppose to cause insomnia.
This is where I was going to sit and eat my lunch.
I have been on an intense reading kick*, and I’ve been checking books out from the library on my kindle. Checking library books out on my kindle makes me happier than I can adequately express. The tricky part though, is that you have to wait in line for certain books, and then you only have 14 days to read them before you have to give them back. This is excellent justification for why I might have to stay home and finish a book instead of going out and interacting with real people. Anne Helen Peterson (who I have a serious crush on) has an excellent article on the subject of obsessive reading. It never occurs to me to stay home and write, and it is much more difficult for me to get lost in writing than in reading.
My desire to write has more to do with this deep seated belief that we all need a creative outlet, a strange fear of being exclusively a consumer, and because it feels like something that I should be doing. My fear of being a consumer is not rational and does not apply to any other area of my life. If it did, I would be compelled to be a member of the church choir and have a vegetable garden and take an art class and cook a lot more than I do. It’s not like I’ve never done these things, I have, and I enjoyed them.
I am not under any delusions that I will ever write a novel or that my writing is adding significantly to the world. My love of reading is deeply ingrained, it is my primary mental escape, and I sincerely appreciate writers. I guess it is similar to the intense desire of a foodie to learn how to cook, or the little kid that is obsessed with the Braves who goes out for little league, or the kid obsessed with whatever broadway musical is currently cool trying out for the school play.
I also think of it as an exercise in self reflection, and that the exercise in and of itself improves me as a person. Sort of like jogging, or yoga, or any athletic endeavor makes your body feel stronger and better, writing improves my mentality. My real job is almost exclusively writing, but it’s a different sort of writing. It’s easy to blame my lack of writing to the fact that I write all day at work, but work doesn’t prevent me from writing insanely long emails on a daily basis and texting and gchatting for hours at a time, so this is pretty flimsy excuse.
I recently obtained a childhood psychological evaluation of 11 year old Charlsie. I can not tell you how entertaining it is to read psych evaluations of your childhood self. The test results document that at some point in my education I mastered the ability to read, while failing to learn how to write, and that by the fifth grade, I was reading at a 12th grade level, and I was writing at a 2nd grade level. Apparently this is a significant discrepancy in ability. I was noted to have something called a “performance deficit” as opposed to a learning disability, attributable to my attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, that inhibited my ability to attend to details and to organize my thoughts for effective transfer to paper.
From what I can tell, this means I couldn’t write worth a damn. It’s almost hilarious that I now essentially write papers for a living. Eventually, I learned how to write (I think). I passed two bar exams, and they let me graduate from law school, so that’s encouraging. I remember fifth grade being a particularly difficult grade, but I remember most grades being difficult until I got to high school.
Sometimes I wonder how difficult my life would be if I was unable to use a computer and I was dependent on my handwriting for written communication. I see a good bit of childhood disability applications, and I read a lot of school records and psych evaluations and achievement testing results. I think people get confused about how difficult it is to learn how to read and write, and don’t appreciate that everyone learns differently and at a different pace. Most of us learned how to read and write at an age where it felt effortless, and we can’t remember the actual struggle required to master the skills. (I’m not going to talk about math, because, ugh, let’s just not talk about it. Unless you want to talk about Geometry, which I loved, because it involved words.)
It’s like driving a car, or riding a bike. I recently brought my bike back to Charleston from Augusta, where my bike had been living. I haven’t ridden a bike in a long time, and I’m deathly afraid of getting hit by a car. But, growing up, I rode my bike everywhere for years, and I felt great satisfaction in my ability to navigate intersections and balance and take on curbs and gnarly sidewalks, and it did not frighten me. I stopped riding my bike when I learned how to drive. Learning how to drive was a skill I put off as long as possible. I made excuses for why I didn’t want to drive, I was scared of my mom’s car, I was tired, I would start driving tomorrow. But the truth was driving scared the everliving daylights out of me, and I didn’t want to learn how to drive. I wanted to be the DJ in the front seat. I remember having a particularly hard time with right turns, which is real stupid. I thought left turns were easier. I also had a complete inability to back out of a driveway.
I’m still not clear how I passed my driver’s test, but I did, and then I had a pretty terrific wreck six months later involving, of course, a right turn. Now, I consider myself an excellent driver, I haven’t had a significant wreck since that ill fated right turn in the spring of 1997, and I’m having to re-teach myself my biking skills and re-gain that confidence. Learning how to read, write, ride a bike, and drive a car tend to be pretty mandatory life skills. But if they weren’t mandatory, I might have turned out to be an excellent reader who couldn’t write and had to walk everywhere. I wonder what other skills I might possess if they were mandatory.
*My recent literary consumption includes: The Abominable, The Secret History, Into Thin Air (I’ve been super obsessed with Everest as of late), The Bone Season, Play Dead, Box Girl, The Handmaid’s Tale, We Were Liars, Me Before You, and I just started The Vacationers. I tried to read The 5th Wave, but I found it too depressing. I think I may be over dystopia for the foreseeable future.
