Tag: writing101

When you look in the mirror, who do you see?

June 18th, 2014

Artwork credit: Tareek on Etsy

I have a close friend, J, who has never met a mirror she didn’t like. When we were teens, and later in college, and her eye caught a reflective surface – a shop window, a car window, a mirror in a mall bathroom – she turned her head this way and that as she looked into it, smoothed an eyebrow, tucked a curl, and watched herself as she continued to talk, completely unselfconscious about her mirror-gazing as she carried on the conversation. We teased her about it then, and we tease her about it now, 25 years later. She laughs at herself when we tease her, then flits her eyes to a mirror and winks at the best friend she sees there.

This past March, at our annual Girls’ Weekend, we talked about mirrors and who among us looks into them. The conversation was spawned in part by J’s mirror-love, but also, at least for me, by a deeper wondering about our comfort with ourselves. J is one of the funniest people I know, and also one of the happiest. At several points in her life, whether on a precipice with a boyfriend or on the verge of a life-changing move, she has shrugged her shoulders and said, “I dunno. I think I could be happy with anyone” in the case of the boyfriend, or “anywhere” in the case of a move. And it’s true. She could.

As we went around the table at Girls’ Weekend, we found that we all have very different relationships with the mirror. J is friendly with them – she sees her favorite person when she looks into one. Others of us use them strictly for pragmatic reasons: check the teeth, blow dry the hair. One of us doesn’t use them at all – says she can’t remember the last time she looked into one. “Not even to brush your teeth?” I asked. “I brush my teeth in the shower,” she said.

And me? It used to be that when I looked in the mirror, the person who looked back at me was a mystery. The image I saw in that silver surface did not match up with the person I knew from the inside. All my life my reflection has caught me off guard. Recently I brushed our daughter’s hair and when my reflection moved in the mirror I did a double-take – Who’s that? Oh. That’s me. The same face that’s been looking back at me for 40 years. Why does she still surprise me? Why do I not connect with her?

I told my girlfriends about this weirdness, about the disconnect between me and my reflection, and after our mirror conversation, inspired by J, I said, “I’m going to start doing mirror work. I’m going to figure this out! I want to be best friends with my reflection too.”

I tried, but still, we were off, my reflection and me. And then, something changed. I got glasses.

Now, I look in the mirror and say Oh! There you are! And I smile. The Andrea that looks back at me – the bookworm, the word nerd – is the Andrea I know from the inside. I just never knew she had glasses.

I see this revelation frequently in fashion, especially on the the TLC makeover show What Not to Wear. Contributors to the show are brought to New York, instructed to dispose of their entire wardrobe, and then taught how to shop for new clothes that fit their personalities and figures. It is always difficult for the women to let go of their former clothing – even if the clothes did not serve them and did not even fit them, those clothes were familiar – but once they let go and start finding clothes that do serve them, that do fit them, the women are transformed. There are often tears when they see themselves in clothes that match their personalities. The women look in the mirror at their new hair, the skirt that flatters their hips, the fun shoes in their favorite color, and they point and they say, “That’s what I always felt like on the inside – now I look like that on the outside.”

That’s how I feel with my new glasses. Now, when my reflection catches me unaware, when I’m vacuuming and I see myself pushing the upright in the wall mirror, I wave or I wink. She and I, we’re on our way to becoming fast friends.

This is my interpretation of finding something, the day 13 assignment for Writing 101. *Edit: added next to last paragraph after initial publication.
Time travel to that perfect spot

June 3rd, 2014

Photograph courtesy of Paul and Jill on Flickr

My hair drifted around my head like it did when I was a little girl in the bathtub. I’d sink back underwater with my eyes open, tiny bubbles caught in my lashes, and the world would grow quiet but for the tinny gurgle of my escaped breath. My hair would swirl like a drop of food coloring in water. Now, without porcelain barriers, it drifted freely, like a mermaid’s would.

My breath rasped metallic through the regulator, an astronaut breathing underwater – ncuuuuhhh haaaaauuu. Breath and bubbles were the only sounds. The sea was cool on my tanned arms, salty on my sunburned lips, and turquoise blue in the Florida Keys sunshine. Rays of light streamed from the surface when I looked up, like sunbeams through a forest canopy, only instead of being inside an emerald, I was inside an aquamarine.

I was a young woman then – 20 years old I would guess – and after eight years of diving, of adjusting weight belts and vest bladders, I had tweaked my equipment to the point that I could control my buoyancy with my breath. If I sank towards the coral, I filled my lungs and I rose. If I floated toward the surface I exhaled until I sank. “You are cool as a cucumber,” the Jamaican had said on the dive in St. Ann’s Bay. It was the dive where I finally mastered buoyancy, and we had surfaced to the sight of a double rainbow over tropical mountains. A daytime moon hung in the top right of the scene where the sun would go on a child’s drawing.

Now, my future husband explored the reef – not unlike when we go to the beach and he walks while I sit – while I floated at a coral boulder and watched the industry of its community. Yellow gobies nipped at the coral, sand blennies popped their heads out of holes then backed back in, a ruffled lime green nudibranch like a tiny lettuce leaf fluttered over the brain coral’s ridges like a two-inch magic carpet. Lobster antennae waved below me like search lights and I sometimes waved my hand just above a feather duster worm to watch it retract into its hole. After a few seconds it would send the tip of a duster out to test for danger then unfold its full feathered fan when the coast was clear.

The salt water puckered my skin, and my fingertips wrinkled like the brain coral. The canned air was cold and dry on the back of my throat and I took the regulator out to push my tongue against my palate, stimulating spit. A Queen angelfish with cobalt-rimmed scales and lemon yellow fins glided by, and later, a boat wake rolled overhead. The wave effect pulled us up and pushed us down, as if the fish and me and my billowing hair bobbed on the surface above instead of swimming 15 feet below.

Then the water calmed again. I saw my future husband hanging upside down, peeking under a ledge where lobsters or maybe a green moray eel peered back. I hovered in the blue liquid world, quiet but for the bubbling of my breath.

This was my work for Writing 101, Day two: “We’re all drawn to certain places. If you had the power to get somewhere — anywhere — where would you go right now? For your twist, focus on building a setting description.”
Streaming: Dispatch from a WordPress.commer

June 2nd, 2014

My chisel and stone tablet

This is my 20-minute stream-of-consciousness free write for Writing 101, Day 1: Unlock Your Mind. It is also an homage to writing longhand, which was how I wrote this: with pen and notepad, a tactile, heart-to-paper art form I hope will never die.

WordCamp. It wasn’t a camp for writers, or even for word nerds. It was a camp for WordPress wonks, and I loved every second. I must have said ten times, “I feel like I’m on this level,” as I swished my hand parallel to the ground, back and forth at my waist, “And all of you are up here,” and I swished my other hand above my head. “But that’s okay,” I’d say, and I’d smile, and I’d mean it.

I was one of only a handful of writers there, one of a handful of bloggers, and instead of intimidating me, being among all those web designers actually made me feel special. At a writers’ retreat there would be so much opportunity for comparison, for reading someone else’s work and thinking I’ll never be that good, that the thought of a writers’ retreat kind of frightens me. But at WordCamp I didn’t compare myself to these people who write, but in a different language: they write in code.

The rooms, full of creatives, hipster beards and mustaches, fun colorful fingernails and patterned blouses, glasses, web designers, plugin writers, theme developers, who all make beautiful, elegant things only with a different medium from mine, they energized me instead of making me feel less than. I never felt stupid despite how much I did not know. Instead I felt awe, an emotion I predict will appear on the list of core values I plan to construct as soon as I finish this free write.

One of the speakers, Alicia Murray, when she spoke about work life blog balance she posted a slide with a quote from Albert Einstein: a fish is going to feel stupid if it tries to climb a tree (or something like that – find quote) –

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

– and I could totally relate. She was advising us not to compare, which is a very, very difficult thing to do when I’m surrounded by talented writers. But in a room full of talented code poets, I don’t compare myself. I just thank the internet gods that these poets exist so that they can make us beautiful websites on which we can write our words.

The conference, I should say for all the bloggers who follow me, was not a writing event, and it wasn’t a blogging event either. In fact, it was not a WordPress.com event. It was geared more to the nuts and bolts of designing, developing, and using websites powered by WordPress using WordPress.org (there’s a difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, in case you didn’t know). As @Ashevillean tweeted

Wordcamp: NOT a writing event. WordPress-friendly conference for tech professionals: developers, designers, content creators, & more #wcavl

— Jennifer Saylor (@Indolic) June 1, 2014

I knew that going in, and I loved that aspect of it, but I just wanted to let all of you know that in case you are considering attending a WordCamp. There were content and beginner tracks, but you need to know ahead of time that the language you hear might be unfamiliar. I used to have a self-hosted website for my soap company, a site that was powered by WordPress.org, and so I was familiar with the language many of the speakers used: plugins, FTP, PHP.

And, with your everyday WordPress.com blogger, very little of that applies.

When we had the self-hosted site I felt like half my time was consumed with managing the website: which plugins to use, which ones had glitches, how to resize my images to fit the theme, who to host the site, how to alter colors, fonts, headers. All by hand. All with very little knowledge. And while we had complete control over the look and functionality of our site, it ate a lot of time I could have spent making soap, or better yet, writing. It was a powerful, robust platform for our e-commerce site, but for blogging, I’m thrilled to use the streamlined WordPress.com and know all that is taken care of. I don’t have to sift through 500 “follow” plugins to find the one that works. If something goes wrong with my site I don’t have to disassemble it and reconstruct, piece by piece to find where the problem was. It’s all there for me and all I have to do is pop in my words.

That being said, I like to know how things work, and I learned a ton this weekend about things I can do within my WordPress.com site to tweak and improve if I so choose, and I understand the back end of a website much better now. I feel empowered by that. On top of sitting in on some great content sessions, I took a refresher on basic CSS so if I want to customize colors or fonts, I can. I learned some SEO tips so I can become more findable when folks are searching for creative nonfiction or literature resources. I learned the basic anatomy of a blog-perfect-story, and how to find balance in my life when I add a job to the mix of blog and family.

And the takeaway I am perhaps most excited about: a link to how to determine my personal core values. Those values will provide guidance as I try to navigate my career path, my blog posts, my writing. Because it’s when you’re writing about what you care about that your voice will come through, and when you have a niche-less (i.e. everything) blog like I do, the thing that holds it all together is not a topic or a product or a theme, it’s the author’s voice. The continuity, the It thing in a flitting, butterfly-minded blog, is the voice. And the way to find and use that voice is to write about your passion, the things you value most. Like family; like words; like nature. Like awe.

Tag: writing101

When you look in the mirror, who do you see?

Time travel to that perfect spot

Streaming: Dispatch from a WordPress.commer