In-between Reflection: The Phone

I don't do it on purpose. Sometimes the phone doesn't work right, and I can't hear anyone on the other end. These incidents seem more likely to happen soon after the phone has been off the hook for a while. I'll wiggle at the ports, and I may end up connecting or I may not, but usually I won't hang up unless there's a hang up on the other end. Today I did. They were on for so very long. I kept saying, "This isn't working right... Hey you can all back." I replaced the phone on the receiver and an uneasy feeling came over me, born perhaps of dreams. I didn't do that on purpose, you know.

Reflection: A Matter of Trust

Something I wrote in my most recent post could, I suppose, be construed as bragging, and something I write at the bottom of this one could as well. Ah, that's not the intent, though! Before I resume my account of current events, I want to dip way, way into the past...

I was bullied a lot when I was little. The situation began to change when I moved from rural Virginia to the Phoenix suburbs. Some people say that peer issues are at their worst in junior high, but it was during those years that I began to find a niche. With each transition (into high school, into adulthood) I met with more acceptance and more friendship. By the early years of high school, I had already learned that I could build bridges with words -- by telling stories that were personal indeed. Sure there are people in this world who will look down on me, but my tendency is to believe there are people worth trusting ever single place I go -- not everyone is, no, but lots of people, and they're everywhere. They're in Florida, and the Phillipines, and Scotland -- and I'm speaking now from experience, not conjecture.

Making Sense of Monotropism won Lens of the Day at Squidoo a couple days ago. There are now more than 40 comments, written by Squidoo-ers, on that lens. I had to press "load more comments" several times to read them. (I had been aware before the LOTD thing that the lens had been tweeted; one person had commented she encountered the piece when a fellow 'lensmaster' tweeted it.)

If people are surprised at what I've written on Squidoo, it's because they are looking at my behavior through the lens of their own experience -- something we all of course to some degree do. Know: when I tell tales of long-ago childhood, I write in the present tense, but that doesn't mean the transcient concerns of a long-ago little girl are my concerns. I share those stories with particular people because I want to share them, not because I think they are the only person in the world who will accept 'poor broken little me'. I suppose to some extent, I've had myself, and my writing, to blame when people have held that belief -- but I think that people are actually more likely to hold the belief if they themselves see people as untrustworthy.

My favorite book of the middle school years -- my brother's as well -- was The Young Unicorns. A favorite line: "When our trust is broken, as it always is, the only response that is not destructive is to trust again, not blindly, you understand, but fully aware..."

PS I just realized that in my previous post I linked to Placefy Geography Game when I meant to link to "Promising Lensmaster of 2010". Whoops. Well, I've corrected it now.

Memory: Struggling to Pass Brain Chemistry

I was fixing to publish this piece when I wrote in "Evening Nigh's Year in Reflection" that I would continue to be 'the author of people's lives' (aren't we all?) and that I would strive, in the words of The Moody Blues, to "Say it With Love".

I actually wrote this particularly piece a few years back; at the time, I made several unsuccessful attempts to publish it in lit journals.

I went over Struggling to Pass Brain Chemistry again and again with a fine tooth comb before I added media and resources and posted it to Squidoo. I waited until the piece had received a few comments (also a couple Squid Angel blessings) before posting it here. I wanted to do right by the piece. The piece, in its new incarnation has 10 illustrated text sections; I used stock photos, of course, running most of them through photoeffect programs. Only one text section is new -- it's a short one that discusses the limitations of labels and of medication... and it's accompanied by the same picture you see here in this blog entry.

It's good, from a pragmatic standpoint, that I've got some real publishing credits (lit journal and anthology) but I'm happy to have "Struggling to Pass Brain Chemistry" under the Squidoo domain, dressed up, like various other lenses, in resources and media and one of those little Amazon MP3 modules.

PS Picked up another one from someone -- down in the Philipines, I believe -- who has commented on other lenses, and is part of the new "Angels crew". She not only read, but listened to the whole thing, and what she wrote was really kind. (The volunteer Angels are of course a part of how the site maintains its integrity, too.)

Reflection: Sometimes You Picture Me...

Verse 2 of "Time After Time" begins "Sometimes you picture me..." I imagine a lot of people do picture me sitting in more or less the pose captured in that old photograph. People remarked upon the posture often during the days of co-op (group) living; I think it was just once that someone actually snapped a Polaroid and gave it to me. Body language... it's gotten better in the years since childhood. I watched a little girl in a video, trying to make the gesture, long distance, of embracing someone. That child folded and unfolded her arms several times because she genuinely couldn't figure out which way the arms were supposed to fit together. How well I remember. I remember, too, at twelve or thirteen, puzzling over something. I knew that people generally turned toward a person to smile at them, but I sometimes turned away. I couldn't figure out why I would pivot in the wrong direction. I knew the difference between turning toward a stimulus and turning away -- but that didn't mean my body could differentiate, in a split second, between the two. There were years of my life people were certain I'd been molested. Sure, I came from a family where there was little physical contact, but I was also a child whose body couldn't distinguish 'toward' from 'away', much less how and when to fold itself. There were things that didn't help: the constant apologies that well-meaning others would make for frightening me (when I wasn't even frightened) or the way, when I turned away, the world seemed to, as well.

I'm studying this post much as the man in the photo is studying the picture before him. Will I upload this to the internet? I reckon so. The internet is handy for the likes of me. See, no one can upload their whole body to the internet, and when it comes to those media that can actually be uploaded, I think I express myself.

PS The picture was created by scanning that old Polaroid and uploading it into a frame on the 'Image Chef' site. You gotta kind of hand it to 'em on that one.