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Lydia Erickson

Lydia Erickson

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Thinking Ahead

22 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by Lydia Erickson in Blog, Fear, Writing

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blog, depression, loneliness, worry, writing

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” – Oscar Wilde

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman

“Don’t talk to me about rules, dear. Wherever I stay I make the goddamn rules.” – Maria Callas

Since I’ve been unable to write stories recently, I’ve decided to write about a topic that’s been on my mind for the last few days… weeks… well, years, honestly. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the extent to which we should plan the future, and the extent to which we should be in the moment. I’ve usually tended towards the former, and only this last year have I really begun to think that I’ve been doing it wrong all along. I’ve talked about a lot of this before, but not recently, and it’s nice to remember where you’ve been once in a while, especially when you’re wondering where you’re going.

I don’t think I knew how terrified I was, before I came to college. I applied to fourteen universities, all within the top 50 or so, and waited. I worried constantly. I had decided to pursue Political Science, because perhaps in politics I would be able to make a significant difference in the world, and to minor in English or Creative Writing, because it was what I loved. I had a path, and I would stick to it, and hopefully, things would be alright.

They were not, not really – I went to university when I was already reeling from a variety of recent hits to my self-esteem. My high school friend group had self-destructed; I was still in denial that I was in love with one of my best friends back home; the lectures I attended left me cold. I was terrified of being alone and terrified that people would notice, and while I did ask for help from my sister, I wasn’t willing to admit how awful I felt while everyone around me seemed to be doing so well. My anxiety worsened when I returned home for spring break, and for the first time that year my guilt at being miserable solidified into hopelessness. I was homesick, depressed, and anxious. I hadn’t found my people (well, I’d found a few of them, but I hadn’t figured that out yet), and I had no idea if I ever would – if there were people like me at all. I want to say now that that seems silly, looking back, but I can’t. In the absence of evidence, it’s easy to imagine things won’t ever get better, and I wouldn’t laugh at anyone who feels that way now.

At the end of the year, I switched my major to English. I identified myself, first and foremost, as a writer – although I’m sure those of you who write know that the major is hardly a necessary part of the package. This new identity gave me somewhere authentic to branch out from, and the next year, instead of trying to do everything, I tried to do everything I could to Become a Writer. I interned as a staff writer at Clarion, started taking English courses, and submitted pieces to literary magazines. (I created this website, too!) I took the more challenging professors whenever I could, and spent hours sitting with the very kind and very clever writing fellow, Lauren. I made friends with the people in my specialty housing not quickly, precisely, but deeply, and for the first time in a long time, I was very happy. From that base of confidence, I was able to build even further, and plan my summer interning with Locus and my year abroad. Even now that I’m more secure, I encounter small failures. London let me down in many ways – my specific program wasn’t large enough for me to find a satisfying group of friends, my pocket money was stretched very thin, and I didn’t do well in the constant rain. But now I know what to look for and what to avoid for next time.

Where, then, did I go wrong, and where did I go right? I think I should’ve listened better to the people who told me to relax and see how it went, although in the area I come from relaxing is tacitly considered wasteful and unusual. I think I should’ve pursued what made me happy, rather than what I thought was important. Mostly, I think I didn’t realize that I could recover from failure, and that failure could be much more useful that success. My unhappiness served its purpose by guiding me away from things that didn’t suit me, and while I regret not having taken as many English classes as I would have liked, at least now I won’t regret not having tried politics. I know where I’m happy because I have been unhappy elsewhere, and that is a gift.

I still plan, but I’m trying to live more in the moment. I’ve been practicing mindfulness – a minimum of 10 minutes a day – and while I have a Google Calendar that would frighten you and Google Document full of plans, each section has a multitude of options. I know I want two years off before graduate school, ideally teaching English abroad, but I will have to wait to see which of the various programs I am interested in accepts me. I think I will need to go to graduate school, most likely for Psych or English, but I don’t know which programs I will apply to yet, and I realize that it is futile to look now, if only because ratings, accreditation, and even funding will change in the 3-4 years I have until then. More importantly, I might change, and why waste that time when I could spend it being here, doing the changing?

(At the moment, being here would involve doing my homework. I suppose there is that.)

I’ve learned that it’s important to be comfortable with uncertainty, and that the easiest way to do so is to try something new, especially when that involves failing, and especially when it involves failing with other people. I think that the adults who raise us sometimes give us the impression that if we fail, we’ll shatter, and won’t be able to pick ourselves up again, when the most valuable asset we could have is knowing we can recover from shattering. Once you’ve repaired yourself the first time, you develop a fantastic tool-kit, too – I know that if I wake up feeling awful, I should have a glass of water or four, eat, shower, throw on some makeup, meditate, and go for a walk, and that this or any one of these things will make me feel better. I know that when I write, I always feel less lonely, and that my friends – at least the friends worth keeping – won’t mind being asked for help once in a while. I know now that bravery has many faces, and that the most important of these is curiosity, because it makes us focus on who the people we meet are, rather than how they may see us. I know these things now, and I know that when I fail again, I will fail better than before. If I do not, I will have to change my strategy, and this is fine too.

Planning calms me. I think of the Gotham writing course I plan to take as soon as I have sufficient funds, the possibility of Clarion in a summer of graduate school, perhaps a Stonecoast MFA when I hit thirty. I plan to apply to these things, but not because I should, or because the world needs my writing, or because I think that they’re important. They excite and delight me, and since nobody really knows how to live, my passion will have to be enough to guide me. I will allow myself greater flexibility now, greater forgiveness. I cannot foresee everything, and life wouldn’t be worth living if I could. I will weave what I can of my dreams into my life, and be thankful for the surprises – whether pleasant or educational. 

Earlier today, on the train to school, I was reading Trickster Makes the World, by Lewis Hyde. He described how Picasso would make each new student who came to him draw a circle. I immediately imagined myself in the same situation, as I usually do when reading, and winced, thinking of how abnormal and awful my circle would be compared to those of the real artists. I continued, only to find that Picasso made them draw the circle to see how they were unique – to see what made their style theirs. This evening, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, and read a post that said something along these lines:

“When you look in the mirror,

all you see are imperfections.

But how can they be imperfections?

There is no one else with your face.”

I guess what it really comes down to is that it’s alright, perhaps better, to make yourself along the way. To make the way, too. You never know what you’re going to discover, and it’s much harder to find the really important things – love, a good idea, your missing glasses – when you’re afraid.

bridge

A bridge I saw in Cordoba. I hadn’t planned on coming here, and I got to see the most lovely things because I did.

Words, Words, Words

11 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by Lydia Erickson in Blog

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blog

There are many great tragedies in history. The human ones are overwhelming and ongoing. Those are the ones we pay attention to, as we most certainly should, but there are tragedies of other kinds, equally human if not nearly as tangible.

The first of these great tragedies to come to mind is the burning of the library of Alexandria. It makes me feel impotent to learn about a play read by some great philosopher, quoted even, and to know that I have missed out. There is something soulless about burning a book, whether in that century or in the great book burnings of the Nazis.

Another of history’s tragedies is the loss of languages and the perspectives that come with them. Untranslatable words like the Brazilian saudade or Korean han go unknown, unreachable for those who need them, who might be able to understand or even fix themselves if they did. Even more telling is when certain words don’t exist–“artist” in Balinesian, for example, because it is assumed that everyone already is one. Perhaps the way that we feel so sad sometimes is because the thing we are looking for is unnameable, and so we think that is does not exist. I think I would be much happier if we had different words for different kinds of love, and better ways of expressing it than a few commercialized gift-giving ceremonies every year.

People love to hate Confucius, and understandably, considering how his work has been used, but he was right about ritual. He believed in ritual as a unifying force–a set of universal conventions that allow people to communicate. Among those conventions, he considered language the most important to society. When asked what he would do if given control of a country, he even said his very first act would be to “rectify the names,” to correct the country’s language.

Flaws in language can certainly hurt people or paint them in an ugly light. The “hyst” in hysteria means uterus in Latin, because as we know, all women are crazy. The lack of a gender neutral third person singular pronoun in English leads people to use “he” as a replacement, which sends the message that people are, by default, male, not to mention the fact that ships, the sea, cars, and just about anything else described with gendered pronouns that is a thing rather than a person is called she. Spanish does the same thing with its plurals, making una amiga y un amigo into los amigos rather than something neutral or all-inclusive. Languages are often as flawed as they are beautiful, but I think in the quest for truth, more perspectives are better. I know some anthropologists like to say that we study other cultures so that we can learn more about ourselves, and I think the same is true of languages. How can we know our flaws if we don’t even have words for them?

In George Orwell’s 1984, the government decides to limit what people are capable of thinking by limiting language itself. Without the words for the ideas, the ideas themselves will disappear, the language simplifying to the point where humans lose all resemblance, or at least awareness, of themselves.

Perhaps this is why I am upset when I learn that the English language is dwindling, that we have many less words than we did before, that people are speaking less and more simply. (And yes, I do know we have quite a few more words than most languages. The richness of our language reassures me, but only a little.) It makes me wish I could go back in time, if only to listen to people speak, to see if knowing the words would help me to understand. It is easy to look back at the people who came before us and say that they were less sophisticated, that they died earlier, that they treated women poorly and left the poor to rot. But they knew words we do not anymore, and stories that have been burned. I think every person who has ever lived has probably known something I didn’t, whether it’s how to kindle fire without a whetstone (how? seriously, how?), how to convey sympathy for someone in a way that is both sincere, warm, and not vaguely pitying (there’s not a lot of options between “I’m sorry” and “You have my condolences”, is there?), a better name for a second cousin twice removed. You must admit it is an awful way to relate a relation. It makes you wonder what she was removed for, and why twice. How awful can the woman be?

Words, words, words. What to do with them? Use them, I suppose, and listen when you can. Perhaps I’ll start a collection, or some kind of charity service. “Words for Ravaged Souls,” that sort of thing. I wonder if there is a word for a feeling like waiting, as though stuck between two homes, hoping and itching for a change that may or may not come and unsure which way you’ll go when it does. Like liminality, but with more teenage angst. College? Should we just call it “getting older”?

Coming of age musings aside, I love words. From now on, I’ll try to put a new one at the beginning of each of my blog posts, whether from this language or another. The word today will be saudade, which has been described as a deep emotion somewhere between nostalgia and sorrow. My favorite description of it is “the love that remains when the loved thing leaves,” but I think it’s also important that it can be felt in the presence of the loved who is soon to leave, or who has left in the past. I understand missing someone while still being in their presence, and I am grateful that there is a word for it.

Goodnight, folks.

Two in Three

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by Lydia Erickson in Blog

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“Knowledge forbidden?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be a sin to know?
Can it be death?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost. Thank you, Goodreads.

Like many people, I find the Bible problematic. As a lover of a good story and myth in all its forms, I can appreciate the detail and meaning within the cosmology. I love when the burning bush tells Moses to call it “I am,” as though God were everything that existed, burning through out the universe and speaking out of the bones within us. I love the premise of Job, where God engages in a sadistic torturefest to try to test an innocent man’s loyalty. God is flawed–insanely jealous, passionate, lonely and at times childish. As the story continues, he grows further and further from mankind, perhaps trying to protect himself as well as trying to teach his children to stand on their own. Even God needs perspective in order to act compassionately, and he gets it in the New Testament–a human perspective, if you buy into that Holy Trinity bit.

The main message of much of the Bible and of Paradise Lost, however–that obedience is the final and ultimate good–strikes me as at best convenient. I don’t understand it. The devil and I are on the same page on that one. Maybe God was trying to create someone who wouldn’t betray him, the way the devil did, who would value love and trust beyond ambition? Maybe he was insecure, to create beings designed to love him and then quality test them? Maybe it was an allegory of some kind of human loss of innocence, but painted puberty as the ultimate sin? Maybe it is a story, one of many made sacred over the millenia, but kept around because a religion that taught people to be obedient and turn their cheeks at violence was the most helpful to subdue the masses.

I found an odd coincidence while reading Paradise Lost. It said that a third of the angels joined the devil’s party. To me, that suggests bad ruling on God’s part, or perhaps the need of a better system of incentives.

But back to the issue of thirds. In case you haven’t heard of the Milgram experiment–I keep accidentally calling it the “Milton Experiment”–it was a study conducted about obedience to authority figures in an attempt to explain how something like the Holocaust could have happened. Volunteers were told to administer an electric shock to a subject, actually an actor, whenever they answered a memory test incorrectly, and believed that they were testing the connection between learning and pain. They were told to continue to up the voltage until it reached a fatal amount. Part of the way through, the subject would start begging to be released, and the volunteer would have to choose whether to continue or not, all the while being urged to by someone in a position of social authority. A man in a lab coat, that sort of a thing. Those involved initially believed that very few people, maybe only sociopaths would continue to the fatal voltage. The results were quite different.

Two thirds of people were willing to administer the fatal shock. Two thirds of people will go through with a genocide. None of those who did not administer the shocks asked about shutting down the experiment–a question asked of Milgram by Philip Zimbardo, the man who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment and wrote this. Perhaps a different title would be more appropriate?

I enjoyed the coincidence of thirds. A third willing to question, if not to rebel on their own.

But then comes the issue of evil, and what it is if not disobedience from the Big Guy in the Sky. I agree that within the context of the story, the devil did do evil. Eve had a great thing going in that garden, and the devil whispering in her ear did nothing to help her. He acted disingenuously and maliciously, for no other reason than to get even with God, something he knew was impossible. God asked him to bow to “The Son,” our buddy Jesus, and he didn’t want to, which seems fair to me. Satan had been God’s favorite up until that point, and I understand where he was coming from on that one. Amassing an army and then trying to overthrow God, though? That’s overkill. I think the right thing to do would have been to leave and ask God for a realm of his own, but maybe that wasn’t really an option. The cosmology isn’t incredibly well explained, but where disobedience equals sin and a betrayal of God’s love, it doesn’t seem like the devil would have a hell of a lot of options. I really hate that obedience is required for God’s love and how self-satisfied God seems in his omniscience. Why would someone “good” set up such terrible things to happen? Why would someone good shackle the demons so weakly that they immediately broke free, and put Sin and Death as their guards? Is this a cosmos-scale two-man con, and if so, what is the endgame? Is the second man Jesus, or the devil? Why did Jesus show up so late in the game in Paradise Lost, if “The Word”/Logos was apparently in it with God from the beginning? And why this rule of three? One in three will rebel, Paradise Lost and actual science seem to say. If I were religious, would I relate that somehow to the Holy Trinity? My money’s on Jesus, choosing from the three. He may have told the Romans to give unto Caesar what was due Caesar, but he probably thought Caesar needed a good asskicking on top of all those taxes. Metaphorically speaking. Jesus was very peaceful, table-flipping incidents aside, and that’s one of the reasons I like the man.

I was speaking with my sister the other day, and she gave something to think about on the evil front. I said that I was disappointed in the devil. He was as strong and beautiful and smart as any of the other angels. He was strategic, persuasive, and he had an incredible imagination. Why decide to spend his life being a thorn in God’s side? He had almost unlimited potential. He could have created anything, but he decided to spend his every waking moment destroying and undermining what someone else had created, and all because he was too proud to ask forgiveness and too proud to forgive and move on. I asked my sister why on earth he would choose to be that way and waste so much potential, and she said, “Well, isn’t wasted potential the definition of evil?”

Food for thought. Maybe that’s where the devil really sinned. Not in disobeying God, but in failing to transcend him. Especially considering that God knew he would disobey him in advance and probably intentionally set that into motion. Again, why? Did God need a smear campaign? Did the devil actually know too much? He guessed that God was lying to them about creating them, considering the fact that they were all made of the same substance, so perhaps he was getting too close to something? God can see the future in Paradise Lost, but there’s no sense or reason to his plan and his introduction of evil into the world but to make him look better by comparison, as far as I can tell. I can see why people need to understand evil in this world in order to understand good, but if I could remake the world I would take it out of the equation and just make people more naturally grateful, and that would solve the whole problem.

So many plot holes, so little time. A Catholic boy told me to read Saint Augustine the other day, and that it would make these things clear. He seemed creepily certain, but if I’ve considered reading Tolkien’s companion works to understand his cosmology, I can certainly investigate the companion books to the Bible. Apocryphies, anyone?

And why knowledge? I started this post with that, and I think that might be where I’ll leave it. What is God hiding? Is he just lonely, and he didn’t want to feel guilty for bringing someone aware of sin into the world so he made us choose it? Is he acting out a struggle in the material world which embodies his own inner struggle, hoping that good really will win out? Did he just create evil for the sake of a good story, or did it show in his work because it was inside of him? Did he make us out of boredom? Curiosity?

What does God want?

Why I Write: Part Two

20 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by Lydia Erickson in Blog

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blog, orwell, writing

To add on to today’s earlier blog post, I just discovered George Orwell’s “Why I Write,” an essay he wrote on motivations regarding the craft. Thank you Brain Pickings.

“Orwell begins with some details about his less than idyllic childhood — complete with absentee father, school mockery and bullying, and a profound sense of loneliness — and traces how those experiences steered him towards writing, proposing that such early micro-traumas are essential for any writer’s drive.” We have more than I expected in common, Orwell.

I think many people turn to writing out of loneliness, and I know Isabel Allende said that the writer writes because they start as an outcast. Orwell goes on to describe how the writer holds onto this mood but must move past it without getting stuck in it. Lose it completely and you lose writing, though. He lists four causes for writing–A) sheer egoism (note that Orwell does not consider this an altogether bad trait), B) aesthetic enthusiasm (what I’m learning more about), C) historical impulse (pursuit of truth and desire to share it), and D) political purpose. I completely agree with that last one, and Orwell emphasizes it as well.

“Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

I think that fantasy and science fiction are inherently political genres, and all writing is, really. The act of writing is to simply say, “I deserve to speak and be heard,” which depending on the speaker can be pretty damn revolutionary. Fairy tales represent archetypes and reflect paradigms–subvert the dominant paradigm by changing the story, and what you create is inherently radical, if in a coded sort of a way. (See: Magical Realism). The best science fiction is full of political warnings and cultural critiques. Heinlein asks us if we should get to vote in a country without being willing to fight for it. Bujold makes us ask what is really important in a society by contrasting Beta Colony with Barrayar. I’ve just started working on my winter break children’s book (I’m optimistic, alright?), and hopefully I can include that aspect of the revolutionary in my writing. First of all, though, I need to work on understanding the story I’m playing with–Little Red Riding Hood, here I come.

Why I Write

20 Saturday Dec 2014

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blog, writing

There are many reasons to write, I think. Some of them I find pretentious–DeLillo’s assertion that we write to shake up the norm seems egotistical. I have nothing against weirdness for the sake of weirdness, but I feel that a work of art should affect a person. It should either help them escape from the world, if only for a moment, or teach them how to better live in it. Ideally, it should do both. DeLillo’s “White Noise” did neither of those things, and I didn’t enjoy it, either. That’s the third one, I think–a good book should transport you, teach you, and entertain you.

I’ve thought a lot in the past few months about why people write. I know I started after my dad’s death. I roleplayed online and imagined being and becoming someone else, and that gave me comfort and a sense of community after the tragedy, which happened to coincide with my first year of middle school. I remember an old English teacher, Ms. Lohse, telling me that people shouldn’t use writing as therapy. She told me she wrote poem after poem about the moon, until one of her friends took her by the shoulders and said “enough already!” Writing is about the story. It is not about you.

Perhaps it is the difference between writing about yourself, and for yourself. No one wants to read therapy transcripts, I don’t think. Well, I might, but not my own. Patrick Jane’s, maybe. Sherlock Holmes’, or Artemis Fowl, or someone interesting and deadly and mysterious. But no one wants to listen to someone whine. At the Boston Book Festival, I remember one of the editors saying that when someone had written a note on their manuscript, something like “this was very helpful for me to write,” or “very therapeutic for me to write,” he took it as a warning sign. He concluded that this was because in cathartic writing, a person does not tend to be in control of their material.

I think there is value in writing for oneself, and if writing gave me nothing at all I simply wouldn’t do it… In the past, putting things into the form of poetry has made them easier to deal with for me, especially when they are read and understood. A good poem is like a punch to the gut, I like to think. But now I want to write something new. If I am going to write, and that is what I have decided, (however prematurely), to do with my life, I want to write in a way that helps people. I want to do what a good book does–transport, teach, and entertain. I want to make people laugh and cry, and to be sent little handwritten notes saying, “This is me. You wrote about me,” when I thought I’d been writing for myself all along.

The Color of the Wooden Sky

19 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by Lydia Erickson in Blog, Poems in Progress

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anxiety, fear, poems, poetry, writing

Going on my first date in a few months later today, and I started writing (not that the poem is just about that, of course). I don’t know how much of the poem is salvageable, but I do like a line or two. I may even keep them!

Everything you want is on the
other side of fear.
but what is that?
Acid or aphrodisiac
adrenaline, a heart attack
the color of the wooden sky,
the knowledge that you live
to die.
Is fear what gets you out of bed in the morning,
or what keeps you in?
Fear, fear, fear
a helpful sin
(in small doses.)

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