Becoming the Story (5 page)

She stared at the bird for a long time and
listened to its little cheeps. After a point the tears stopped
coming, and she became painfully sober. She stood, took a deep
breath, and went back into the house and into her bedroom where her
desk was.

She had planned to write the whole exchange
with a new ending. She wanted to replace reality with a happy
ending, but she found that she could not. The notebook paper
blurred as she took up her pen. She had to write something, so
instead, she wrote about the baby bird.

She pretended she was the baby bird and it
told its story of how it had come to be in a darkened carport with
a crying girl.

She knew that one day she would have to
write the story about the exchange with her father but she could
not do it now. The pain of rejection was too fresh. And she did not
know how to make the story end.

Her story endings simply could not always
match reality. They could not predict it. They existed in their own
bubble. And sometimes, that had to be enough.

She entered high school and noticed that
boys did not glower at her anymore, and even if they never asked
her out, she thought she had made progress.

In high school, though, a boy did ask her
out. It was shocking. What was he thinking? The boy was
good-looking, and she did not think she was in his league. The
ordeal caused her so much anxiety, she said no to him. He was taken
aback, as if no one had ever said that word to him before.

He continued to stare at her in the classes
she shared with him, with a look of longing that baffled her. A
week later, the bullying began. A former girlfriend of his began to
taunt her and say things like, “Do you think you are too good for
him? What are you, some kind of tease?”

She did not know what to say to that, so she
said nothing. Soon afterward, rumors began to spread that she was
having sex with him and that she was a tease and a slut. Books were
knocked from her hand as she walked down the hall. Fake blood was
smeared on her locker.

And even the boy who had asked her out
participated in the taunting. Afterward she went to her locker to
get her books for the next class. The words “ugly bitch” were
scrawled on her locker. She got through her classes the best she
could, and luckily no one ever assaulted her.

But real damage had been done. She had
endured a lifetime of rejections. She did not think she could take
one more. She even felt guilty for rejecting the boy who had liked
her. Who
was
she to say no to him?

For the first time, she wished she had never
been born. She wanted to die. Instead, she went to her room and
wrote a story.

She wrote a story about an unattractive girl
who had “come along” and gotten bullied and was called an ugly
bitch, so the girl swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and died
and had a small funeral. Not even her father was there. She reread
the story. Once. Twice. Three times.

She did not like the story. She tore it up
and wrote another. Like the first, it was about a girl who had been
bullied. The girl was hurt and considered overdosing, but she
changed her mind. She remembered legions of bullied kids she had
grown up with, others like her who had been teased and
ridiculed.

She had always been afraid to talk to them
for fear the more popular kids would like her even less. But her
alter ego “Margie” in the story decided that the fear had been
silly, so Margie befriended others who were bullied and tried to
make them feel better.

The story character Margie made it through
the persecution to graduate from high school and became an
acclaimed writer and everyone who had ever hurt her was ashamed
because of her glowing success. And after the graduation, she and
her bullied friends all went to dinner to celebrate and they all
ate ice cream for dessert.

Maggie liked that story. So left her pen and
paper on the desk. In the following months she reached out to
everyone she saw who was bullied and compared experiences. They
were all unhappy and she tried to encourage them and told them it
was not their fault. Sometimes they listened.

She was able to endure the bullying better
because she felt obligated to take the advice she had given them.
She told herself the encouraging words she said to them: It is not
your fault.

That was hard for even her to remember
sometimes:
It is not my fault.
At school she put on a brave
face. She thought she had to because the bullied kids were now
looking to her for morale and guidance.

But as soon as she got home, she would drop
her book bag on the kitchen floor and head to her room. There she
would lean against the wall while taking short quick breaths and
let herself slide to the floor where she muffled sobs into her
palms until her fit of emotion had run its course. Then she would
rise, make herself a sandwich, and write.

Maggie decided to apply her insights to
writing. Her fictional character Margie weathered her abuse
although, when alone, sometimes she cried. At school she bore the
abuse with as much dignity as she could. She graduated and
afterward, she turned all of her attention to becoming a
writer.

Maggie liked that idea, about becoming a
writer.

After Maggie graduated, she wrote story
after story and sent them off to publishers. She would wait with
happy anticipation, until one by one, her stories came back to her
with form rejection slips that said, “Not what we are looking for,”
or “It is not right for us,” or “it does not fit our editorial
style.”

All her life she had heard that writers got
rejected. But experiencing rejections from faceless industry
experts was a different matter entirely. They hurt. She had always
gotten effusive praise for her writing in school.

But the guardians of the publishing world
were playing a different game than the one she was used to. Some of
the rejections were caustic: “self-indulgent” or “trite” or
“tedious.”

She read magazines with titles like “Current
Marketing Trends” or “What Publishers Like,” or “Ten Ways to
Impress an Agent.” She followed their advice and looked at the
magazines to discover the editorial styles of the publications in
order to mimic them as much as she could.

She tried writing about topics from a list
of “What Publishers are Looking For” or “What is Trending This
Year.” Many of the suggested topics bored her, but she tried
writing about them anyway, because writing what she wanted to write
was considered “self-indulgent.”

She became blocked. She could not write
anything anymore without thinking “self-indulgent,” “trite” or
“dull.” The power that she had used to understand and change her
life had abandoned her.

Writing was no longer a way to cope;
instead, it was painful. She had never in her life felt so
helpless. Being unable to write was worse than being bullied; worse
that being accused of having come along, worse than being glowered
at, because she had no defense against them now.

For many months she went through life in a
daze. She had experienced so much rejection in her life, but she
could not get over being rejected by
writing
, her one power
and the thing she loved most in the world.

For the first time since she had discovered
the power of writing, she had no story. She could taste her meals
and do her chores and read. But her activities had no context. It
was like the world had broken into tiny pieces that had no
association with each other anymore.

She had wanted so much to make a living
writing, to be an “official writer,” but the stories she had to
tell were not the stories the publishers wanted to hear. She felt
silenced.

She saw herself as living in a fragmented
world with skewed lines and disorder and uncertainty. It was
intolerable.

She picked up a pen again and wrote. They
were scrawls at first, nothing special, just marks. She looked at
them, and they seemed as broken, as fragmented as her life had
become. Where had the power gone?

She wrote every day, even though it hurt her
to read what she had written. The effort to record her breakfast or
the temperature seemed hardly worthwhile, but she did it
anyway.

Those broken attempts to put together the
scattered pieces of her life somehow mattered. They mirrored a
problem inside her that she wanted more than anything to fix,
although looking at that reflection hurt more than anything, and
she left each writing session feeling so drained, she could barely
lift her feet to walk.

She tried to remember what she had once
loved about stories. She remembered the fairy tales with their
beautiful princesses and dashing suitors and the epic poems full of
dauntless heroes. She remembered the tales of personal struggle and
triumph, and she remembered Rita, and the day Maggie realized she
could create her own stories rather than accept the ones she was
given.

Her mind got hung up on that thought. Create
her own stories. Although she was indoors, she felt a kind of wind
blow through her. It chilled her spine and warmed her heart. She
grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen.

She wrote. She wrote about an unattractive
girl who had come along and got glowered at and loved to write
stories; a girl who had been bullied and befriended bullied kids
and made cookies for her dad. She wrote about a girl who wanted to
write for a living and show everyone they had been wrong to glower
at her.

She wrote about a girl who sent her stories
to publishers who ignored her or said they were not drawn in or
that her stories were self-indulgent.

She wrote about a girl who was so
discouraged she gave up forever and lost the thing she most loved
and lived out an unhappy, fragmented life where nothing she did,
touched, or felt had any clear relationship to her.

She reread what she had written. She did not
like the story. She did not like it, and she never would. She tore
it up and began to write a new ending. It was harder this time.

She wondered if the girl in the story Margie
was the right character to solve her problem, too passive, too
prone to the stabs of rejection. Maggy thought maybe she needed to
make some changes. Who was the right heroine for her story? What
traits did the ideal and successful heroine possess?

She thought her character had to be
dauntless like the heroes of the epic tales but still sensitive
like the characters in stories about personal triumph. Maggie did
not think she was dauntless; rather, she was easily hurt.

How could she become dauntless? What did
dauntless girls eat for breakfast? What did they do with their
time? She got out her notebook and wrote down all the questions,
but she could not be sure about the answers. That girl did not
exist yet.

So she went to her books about writing and
read about what made a hero a hero. Usually, it was that they loved
something beyond just themselves and were willing to go through
hell to obtain or preserve it.

What did she love? She loved stories. What
did she fear? She feared rejection.

She tried to imagine rejection as a monster,
something with glassy eyes, drooling pea-green poison, a behemoth
of an epic poem to be slaughtered. In her imagination it was prone
to glowering.

She wished fear of rejection was not so
intangible.i It would be much easier to deal with a real monster.
You could go at it with a sword and when it was dead, it would be
dead forever. She did not think that was true of fear.

She went back to love. That was easier. She
had loved writing before writing had become about pleasing others
and matching her work to fit editorial styles and tweaking her work
based on what the “experts” were expecting.

All of that had hurt her
love
of
writing, so that when the rejections came along, her love was not
strong enough to counter the all the hurt and fear. The power of
her writing was less her verbal skills than her love for it.

She returned to her notebook and found she
could not write this story the way she did the others. This one was
different. She was baffled.

She wrote plot outlines and character
sketches. She tried to imagine what it looked like on the other
side of fear. What did being a hero feel like? Were heroes really
not afraid?

Or were they afraid but went ahead and did
what they wanted anyway? She tried to imagine feeling fear and
going ahead and doing what she wanted, but just imagining the fear
was painful.

She remembered Rita, Rita who spent her life
in a wheelchair, yet had met her face with grace and patience. Rita
smiled a lot, but what must it have felt like underneath? Did she
feel fear, inside? She must have, sometimes.

Maggie still did not know how to defeat an
antagonist inside herself, but she wrote anyway, story after story,
simulations of what it must feel like to win the battle with her
fear of rejection.

However, there was an interruption. She
received a call from the local hospital. Her father had been
admitted after drinking himself into a coma. The nurse said he
might not make it through the night. Suddenly, it no longer
mattered that her father had hurt her.

She went to the hospital and sat by his side
through the night, sitting in a hard, straight back chair that
wobbled. Still comatose, he did not know she was there. In movies,
she had seen scenes like this. In movies, the dying person would
always wake to say good-bye. Meaningful words would be exchanged,
and even if the person died the viewer would smile through her
tears.

She sat and sat and waited for him to wake
so they could have a magical moment of resolution, but he never
stirred, and not an eyelid fluttered. Her mind was flooded with
memories. He had not hated her always, she remembered. Once, when
she was five, some music had begun to play on the stereo.