Unsung Heroes

You ever have one of those moments when the curtain of fog lifts? I stop just short of calling it an epiphany, but something struck me this morning. I was watching a trailer…yes, those things most people fast forward past, or used to. (In my day… hahaha, just kidding). I love movie trailers because I love film and I love seeing artfully made mini-stories. Today, after a lot of buzz, I decided to check out the trailer for the new Christopher Nolan war film “Dunkirk.”

Now, just a little background, I haven’t written in a long time. I haven’t felt able to. My life, and the world at large has seemed to be nothing but an avalanche of misfortune and loss and I’ve been unable to articulate, or even understand exactly how I feel about it. I’ve not been handling life so well. At best, I’ve been angry and overwhelmed and at worst, I’ve felt a general loss of connection to humanity. I just don’t feel like this is my world anymore. Paradoxically, I don’t feel like I’m alone in that.

A little while ago, in said trailer, I was shown what I didn’t even realize I was mourning.

Humanity.

Of course, humanity is still alive in the world. By humanity, I mean empathy, kindness, and the heroism that happens every day. What has been different, at least to me, is that we don’t see it anymore. We’re overwhelmed by conflict. Politics is conflict, news is conflict. Most of the media we’re hit with is either vapid or profoundly mean-spirited. Conflict and violence has taken the lead and I don’t know about you, but it’s begun to make me feel burned out and more than a little bit hopeless.

It occurred to me that maybe my new-found affinity for Superman and Captain America (and my very old but newly ignited affinity for Wonder Woman) has more than a little bit to do with needing that shining example of people doing the right thing, especially when it doesn’t benefit them. They are beacons in a world that grows more muddy and pessimistic by the day.

“Dunkirk” did the same thing for me, but more profoundly. As it unfolded I found myself transfixed. Before I realized what was happening, the tears welled up. The world has perhaps always been in conflict, but people, good people, have always been there, even if they’re not on the news. It reminded me of that. It also reminded me of why I have such a deep respect for Britain in WWII and why film is so powerful.

“Dunkirk” reminded me that regular people, like me, like you can be extraordinary. We can follow those examples even if art is the only place to see them right now. Film, and art at large remind us of who we are and who we can be, and thank goodness for it.

Be human. Be a hero, even if no one can see it.

R

Day 20: Expression

How do you usually express yourself?

Let’s see, there’s this, lurking creepily at the cemetery, lurking creepily downtown, lurking…well, I do a lot of creepy lurking. Actually, no, I don’t, not anymore. Ah, the old days. I could also make a bad joke regarding my kid under the heading of breeding monsters, but he’s being a little too sweet today for that. I try to get him in on the self-expression, but so far he’s got his own thing.

Most of my expression now comes with me writing in one form or another, be it here or in my journal (very sporadically) or writing stories that I wish were Gothic. I do create monsters in my stories and actually, in my one finished manuscript I think I came up with some good ones. Oddly enough, most of the things I end up writing are sci-fi or fantasy and God knows I love a good battle scene. I have no idea where any of those things came from. All I want to do is wander the English countryside in a corset writing stories of unquiet souls tormented and longing with some frightening things running through the center of it all. Somewhere some wires got crossed but isn’t that why I’m writing this blog? A lot of my wires have shorts in them, or at least lost their insulation.

Over the years my expression has changed. I began with drawing and painting and then moved on to writing when I  hit the double digits. Later I moved on to music, photography, and graphic art and then came back around to writing. I do a little of all of these depending on where my head is and how much patience I have. I haven’t really painted in years since with my son, it’s a hard thing to get time to do. The same with the self-portrait photography though there’s nothing quite like getting a character out in that cathartic sort of way, by becoming them.

Writing is similar in that way. I can pace and say what they’re saying aloud, figure out how they’re feeling and why they do what they do and in the meantime I get to both become someone else and explore a side of myself and give it voice.  It’s an interesting process.

Today, I was making a piece of art for a friend as a gift. That’s also a nice thing to do. Crafting is a new form of expression for me. I was going to take up knitting to make something hilarious and wonderful for DG, but I really didn’t have the patience for it. I may, if I calm down, give that another try.

For now, I get a wild hair and go with it in whatever form that takes. Maybe I want to do Queen of Hearts makeup and take pictures in that character, maybe I write a story about my dad. It’s all very random but that’s what expression is about to me. You have something that you need to get out and you do, whatever it takes. Sometimes you make something beautiful and sometimes it’s something frightening.

It’s probably the one thing I’d go mad without, creating. Whether it’s lasting or transitory. whatever you make is a reminder to the world that you were here and tells a small bit of your story, your point of view. Everyone deserves to have a piece of themselves seen and understood. There are a million ways to do it, to make your mark. Every one of them is worth your time and energy and who knows, maybe it might even be appreciated by someone who never knew they could do the same thing or how to say something you were able to. It’s all beautiful…the most beautiful thing in the world.

Day 12 – Victory!

I wanted to say that my proudest accomplishment was my son, but I can’t really take credit for that, at least not all the way. I steer a little here and there but he’s his own driver. It’s also a cop out answer.

An accomplishment should be something that you plan and work toward and complete from beginning to end without quitting. That’s what makes my answer hard. I’m not really great at celebrating victories or taking note of small steps, which really is a lousy habit. I tend to notice the things I didn’t do. I never learned to swim. I can’t ride a bike (no, really), I never got that degree out of indecision…

An accomplishment is something that should have you falling asleep in your corn flakes, buying extra concealer for the dark circles, and drowning in coffee. Thinking back, I do this every year in a contest called NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month, It’s really more of a challenge than a contest because you don’t really win anything other than a little winners badge and the satisfaction of knowing you’ve written 50,000 words. I’ve finished every year for the past few. I have a bunch of almost-books in the wings just sitting there waiting to become something. 

One of them, however, I actually went back to, revised, revised again, and revised again until I had a 300 page piece of…work. I stayed up day and night for weeks. I drank tons of coffee. My eyes went blurry. I did laps. I procrastinated. I tore out hair, I yelled out loud and sat alone at my desk in the middle of a world of my own making. It was mostly a filthy world because I was too tired and engrossed to do much cleaning, or actually anything else, but hey, I was dedicated. I wrote when I hated writing. I had fantastic moments of sudden inspiration. I came up with things that were amazing that I can’t believe I wrote and then I came up with things that were horrid that I can’t believe I wrote. The experience was both wonderful and so much more difficult than I can ever describe.

The book is still nowhere near perfect. It’s still not agent ready let alone sitting on a book store shelf, but I did see the story to the end. I fleshed it out and I intend to keep working on it until it is something that people will read. Now those people may be the population of my office and my family home, but hey, it’s people!

The point really is that I finally did have that experience of seeing something through. I know now that I can do it. The next time it will be a little easier and hopefully a lot better. I hope to have book signings and maybe a graphic novel (and maybe people arguing on a forum about what some nit picky thing in one of my chapters really was supposed to mean) one day. Why not dream big? There’s nothing to lose by dreaming. Anything can happen. Make it big and then a little bigger! I just want fan boys! Not too much to ask…

Day 7- Where to, Lady?

Day 7. I’ll give you yet another topic. Where you are in your life vs. where you thought you would be at this point. Discuss…(That only worked if you read it in Mike Myers’ Linda Richman, Coffee Talk voice but that’s how I keep reading them now!) So…the Where Are They Now special of the 30 day challenge…

It’s kind of hard to say where I thought I’d be but I know I’m way far off course. I named this blog Tangent Off the Lifeline for a reason…My mind has changed so many times over the years I mean, I couldn’t even pick a major in college. For a while I wanted to make films, for a while I wanted to paint, and I loved photography like nothing else…I still do. I have a passion for creating the weirdness I see in my head and making it tangible so that other people can experience it, therefore I also love to write and saw that as a possible future (preferably on the moors of England in a corset, but that’s another, very long, story). I wanted to study marine biology and then had a real serious push towards meteorology for a while and pictured myself in Washington state studying another passion, lightning. I love storms. I more than love storms which is ironic for someone who lives in a spot where there are hardly any. There’s a real feeling that I’m not where I’m supposed to be…

Most of the time when I was younger, I pictured myself at this age, living in a house or a little cottage with a dog, a fireplace, a mantle and a big library, maybe a roommate, and doing one or a few of those things listed above living sort of carefree. I thought by now I would be in on the joke and have my life in order. I would understand the talk about escrow, trading, and finances and it would somehow hold my interest now. I would be nodding with the best of them. I would be secure and set up. I would have complicated taxes. I would own property and be at least a moderate success in my occupation of choice. But then a guy came along. I didn’t see that coming. I never did.

I was a fat kid… or I was told I was. Looking back, it wasn’t true, but it became my identity and became true so I just always expected that I’d be alone. I certainly never expected to get married and never in a million years would I expect to be a mother. I never wanted to be. The thought of children made my face curl into an expression you’d expect to see on someone who’d just walked past last night’s dorm party bathroom. I wasn’t into it.

On top of that, I never thought I’d ever be divorced. A single mother? What? Never.For the past several years I’ve been swimming in uncharted waters, shark infested, without a life-jacket. It’s not bad, it’s just…different and a little scary. (Now, no worries, I really do like my kid, actually I like him more than anything ever in the universe  that was or will be *sniff*  getting a tissue *sniff* ok…) As hard as it all was and is, I can see it now as necessary change that I wouldn’t have undertaken otherwise. I sort of see my marriage as a brief hiatus from myself. I stopped my studies, I stopped my interests. I stopped everything for so long, even after it ended out of grief and shock that I lost myself all over again.

I ended up in a town I don’t particularly like. My family moved here from the city a while ago. I came to live with them after the fallout. I stayed not knowing what to do with myself. I made roots. I have a job, an apartment, the kid has his school and his friends. It’s…ok.

Ok isn’t really cutting it though. Ok isn’t living. OK has been slowly making me fall apart.

It’s taken a long time for me to get here but I really feel like now is another one of those crossroads moments; a moment to choose my beach instead of letting life dump me on whatever heap it decides on. It’s that movement that really affects change, like Frances Mays buying her Tuscan villa and finding the rest of her life…

So I’ve decided to not give up on my dreams. I wrote my book. I’ve decided to take pictures again. I’ve applied for my passport so that I can finally make it to Britain to write my next book (I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I’m getting there!). I’m doing the things that bring me back to life. I want to see where it takes me one small step at a time. You never do know what can happen. One day you look up and you’ve come so much farther than the amount of steps you’ve counted and you find yourself in a whole new place.That’s what I’m hoping for. I’m not quite sure where we’ll end up, but it’s an exciting idea. It’s the sunrise of a new day and so far it’s looking like butter…sorry…like butta!