When There's Too Much Real Life In My Fiction

One of the hardest parts of working on a novel is not the actual writing, but the words that come out in the writing. In the post-apocalyptic Utopia I'm trying to describe there's a character who brings out things in me I prefer not to have to deal with because I tell myself there really isn't anything I can do about them. She's a woman who's part of a cult of religious fanatics who have broken away from the rest of the survivors. And like many breakaway cults in current times, her voice is pretty much duct taped shut because she's a woman.

The hardest part about trying to describe her life is that I'm okay as long as I can keep her in the general population of "the cult." She's fiction. I try to keep her fiction. But she keeps emerging as the women who blow themselves up because the men told them to do so. She's the women who stay with abusive men because their religion is based on men having power over them.

In a post-apocalyptic world I have no problem describing her. But at some point my descriptions have to draw on real life. Nothing I imagine comes solely from me. It comes from life experiences I put together, people I knew, women I still know. So it should not have come as a surprise to me that the woman I was describing was one I knew in real life, and her friend, the one who tries to get her to escape with her was also someone I know in real life.

That's the point where it becomes difficult to write the story. I'm not one of those writers who write to get revenge or punish people. I write because I have a story I want to tell. I can't write if my personal emotions get in the way instead of helping to clarify. I can't write if the characters I'm writing about are still alive and living in an emotional prison.

And yet these two women are in a hell as awful as the one I describe in the book. One of them is a complete emotional prisoner of her mate. He decides who she's allowed to have as a friend, and if he gets in any kind of spat with anyone associated with that friend, then she is expected to drop that friend and anyone who has the slightest connection with that friend. Over and over again, throughout the years she just drops out of sight because she's "not allowed" to communicate with people anymore she once communicated with. She can't even explain. The communication just ends. That's how much power he has over her.

Many of you are asking why and how this can happen in the 21st century? It's so freaking easy if you have a substance abuse problem, are an alcoholic, or are simply too insecure to believe in yourself. There are men who are emotional predators who seek the weak to exert their control over. The man who has done this to her has always been a control freak. He lives in a world that refuses to bend to his will, and he found over the years that for many women, love is the only chain he'll need to have total control over her.

The other man is just like him but for different reasons. He finds the weakest of the weak, the desperate drug addicts, the homeless, the socially inept. He takes them in and he enables whatever their addictions. He does this because it's the only way he can have a woman in his life. And they stay with him because as long as they do he will provide them with the drugs they need, the alcohol they crave, and he will feed their insecurity by convincing them no one else wants them.

Both these men disgust me and my heart goes out to the women. But I can't do anything. I can't get them off the drugs and alcohol they need to get by each day without jumping off a bridge somewhere. The men are doing nothing that can be proven enough to arrest them. And then for what? For preying on the weak, the desperate, the hopeless? If  that was illegal, most of the planet would be in jail.

Often, dysfunctional relationships take out the ending on each other with the children. They make them weapons, little missiles of hate and misinformation. They use them to control and coerce. Do as I say of you'll never see your children again. But both these women have no children. But pets are often a handy substitute if you want to control someone. Or a bottle of wine. Or a bag of pills. Or simply a warm place to sleep.

As I write this I'm sure I'm not the only one who knows women like this. Let's face it, we all do. One of the reasons I decided to write this today was because I had a conversation with a friend who was trying to figure out how to get her sister away from an abusive relationship that she refuses to acknowledge is abusive. There really isn't anything anyone can do as long as the cover story is in place and stuck to. I told her this and I tell myself this. It doesn't help the sadness either of us feel.

Meanwhile I have to go back and try to write the woman's story in the book because she is not the people I know. She is more than that. She is every woman stuck in a religious cult that considers her worthless. She is every war victim struggling to keep herself and her children alive when every corner she dares to look around is filled with those who want to kill her. She is every refugee woman facing hate and prejudice as she wanders the world looking for a safe place to sleep.

 In the end, we are all these women, no matter how much we say or believe we are not. They are the canaries in our coal mine of indifference. My heart breaks for them because there isn't a damn thing I can do for them.

When There's Too Much Real Life In My Fiction

Me, Sports, and an email from a friend

First of all, let me make it clear that I do not hate sports. I'm a competitive person and I see  sports as a way to compete without dropping nukes on each other. I also occasionally enjoy watching a game or two with friends. I've yelled and hollered with the best of them. I don't like the violence that comes out on the screen. I don't like the break his arm break his leg kill him that passes as cheering. But again, it's better than nuking your rival.

But in saying that I also have to tell you about my relationship to sports as a young adult still living at home. It involved cringing and hiding somewhere until it was over, and by over I don't mean the game itself. I mean the aftereffects of a father who used it as an excuse to inflict verbal and physical abuse on his family. If his team lost, the endless beer and cigarettes kicked in and if by some miracle the physical abuse was saved for later when he could inflict it on my mother in private, the verbal abuse didn't.

It was an endless stream of unrelated to the game itself blaming and accusations. It was having all your imaginary faults dragged up and flung in your face, even if there were no faults and nothing of any validity to drag up. It was being made to feel like a failure just because his team lost, even though you didn't fail and in fact were succeeding in school and in just about everything non-home related.

I managed to survive that and while the spousal unit loves his sports and loves to yell at the TV in encouragement and wrath, not once has he directed his disappointment at me. He knows it's just a game and I am much more than that to him. He's also not an abusive man or we would not be together. I had enough of that crap in my childhood. If he even sounds like he might be disrespectful to me, he hears about it, and most importantly he hears it. It's how the men in my community of friends treat each other.

Or I thought so until this morning when I received an email from a friend who recently moved in with  a sports fanatic. She hates sports but following my example, figured she could find ways to live with it. As she said, she has lots of things to catch up on while sweetie is yelling at the TV.

But today I received an email that started out with "Is this normal?" She went on to describe how her sweetie's team lost and that for about half an hour he sulked in silence. And then to her bewilderment he started criticizing her over meaningless things. He didn't like the color of shirt she was wearing. The neighbor next door was too nosy, they might have to move. It soon turned into a full-blown argument with him accusing her of things she didn't do, attacking her for personality traits he made seem like fatal flaws. I could see the tears in her words.

I immediately wrote her back and told her that no this was not normal but it was not uncommon. I suggested therapy for both of them because my own issues with this topic were too painful to do either of them much good. She asked if I was sure and was slightly offended that I didn't have the heart to hear her out on it much. So I told her my personal story that happened pretty much a year ago this December.

I remember that Seattle won. In fact they knocked San Francisco out of the play-offs. To me it was okay,  it's just a game. Our side won. It was an incredibly busy time of my life, probably the busiest of the year. I went back to work. I also picked up a small writing gig that would bring in some much needed holiday cash. In other words, I was busy and not in the mood to be bothered.

But I was bothered. I received this awful email from a fan of the other team. Yes, it was someone I knew well, a little too well. Ordinarily I would recognize the opening salvo for what it was, the disappointment of someone whose team lost. I would ignore it, let them vent and delete it and go on.

But maybe because it was "my" team who knocked his out of the play-offs, he was not going to let it go. He needed a victim much as my father needed a victim to blame. It got strange really quickly and awful. The writing gig I was working on was about the crazy teabaggers and Obama Derangement Syndrome. Someone writing a larger piece hired me to put together some words based on one of my blog entries. I was in a fantastic mood. I was thrilled to get some extra money. And I was writing about my favorite subject, crazy people whose prejudices are played like a perfect racist fiddle matching their biases.

Then I got the email that set me off. It was about how "my boy" Obama was keeping marijuana from being legal. Keep in mind this was from someone that hasn't gone a day in his adult life without getting high. He kept going on that now that Republicans were in charge, weed was going to be legal nationwide and Obama wouldn't be able to stop it.

Setting aside the fact that this person's grasp of how government actually works was pretty much on a third grade level, and that his comments were revealing his inner racist in a way that was making me extremely unwilling to continue the conversation. He was one of those people who care for nothing but sports and their lack of the basics in a lot of fields is pathetic. Being me, I tried to give him a brief primer on how it wasn't Obama's call. I sent him a short civics class in two paragraphs.

Trust me that it did not go over well. If I was less tired I would have let it drop, but I just finished reading a whole bunch of conservative sites where the comments were deranged conspiracy theories by people suffering from advanced Obama Derangement Syndrome. I got the feeling this person had finally developed another interest besides sports, but unfortunately it was listening to and embracing the most lunatic of conspiracy theories. I wondered how much he spent on tinfoil that year? It must have been considerable.

He then proceeded to attack people on my facebook page, making bizarre accusations of me enabling and featuring welfare queens. I realized I was not dealing with a sane person. I blocked him from my page and email. I deleted his phone number. I cringed in fear that he would call me and be verbally abusive. In other words, it was my childhood all over again for one of the same reasons.

That day ended my relationship with this person. I left open the possibility that it may resume if he got therapy, something he desperately needs for this and other things. I was able to separate his reaction from the normal behavior of the men I know because he was not normal. He was sick. You see, this person was like my father, and the poor women in his life no doubt got a heaping helping of his verbal abuse whenever his team lost. I say "women" because with such an abusive personality, maintaining a relationship is impossible. Every time his team loses, he will find a fault in his current partner. It's the way men like him behave. It was my father all over again.

But the difference was that I am not my mother nor am I this man's wives/girlfriends. I don't allow anyone to abuse me for any reason, especially over something like their sports team losing. He needs therapy to deal with what his own father left him as a legacy if he ever wants a genuine relationship based on respect and love. I feel sorry for him but I can't let him back in my life until he fixes what ails him.

And that's precisely what I told my friend. I told her she can't fix him. He has to fix himself and until he realizes he's broken, nothing will change. I told her if he won't go to therapy, then she needs to go alone. She needs to hear from someone other than me that although there are men like this, many of them, and also women to be fair, there is never an excuse to take out something as ridiculous as a team's loss on your partner, even if there's no violence, no hands laid. It is still abuse and unacceptable and over a period of years, it affects you as much as if he had beat you daily. The majority of men yell at the TV, drink a few beers, mourn their losses, celebrate their victories and don't have to top it off by abusing those in their space.

I hope she listens to what I said and what I wrote in this blog. I hope many women, with the beginning of the football season, listen to what I say because there is never an acceptable reason for abuse. Never.

Me, Sports, and an email from a friend

She Who Must Be Respected

A couple weeks ago I received a phone call from a woman I worked on a project with last year. There were several of us on that job and it took me a few minutes to remember the quiet, withdrawn but very talented artist who took the images in our head and made them come alive for our client. She never joined any of our after-work coffee meetings, the working lunches, or the wrap party. I always made a special point of inviting her but she always declined without saying why. It left a feeling in my stomach that was vaguely familiar but until I received her phone call I didn't put it together. She was in an abusive relationship and wanted help getting out of it without losing her kids or her life in the process.

I've had friends in situations like that most of my life. I grew up in a home where domestic violence was considered normal. We even grew up making jokes about women getting beat. We even convinced ourselves they were funny. That was also a time when we believed if a woman got beat it was because she deserved it. We continued to believe it even when my mother was beaten so badly that she couldn't even fight back. We continued to believe it when it was our turn for the abuse. We must have done something, gotten in the way when we should have quietly gone outside to stay out of it.

I wore long-sleeved shirts to school in the heat of desert Spring and early Summer to hide the bruises. My classmates joked I was cold-blooded to not feel the heat. I felt the heat. It was the embarrassment I didn't want to feel. It was the questions I didn't want to answer. It was the pity I didn't want to experience if anyone saw the horrible bruises my long-sleeved shirts covered.

I turned down party invitations. I went straight home right after school because I was afraid not to. What if something happened while I was gone? What if my mother died because I wasn't there to scream stop! Enough! She won't do it again! Even if it meant that the beating then turned toward me. Even if it meant that my classmates thought I was anti-social, a snob, too good to hang out with them. They quit talking to me and started to make fun of me. I started to hate myself, started to believe I had their nasty comments coming because I wouldn't hang out with them. I had three suicide attempts in my early teens. Like the bruises, these attempts were hidden, disguised, called "accidents" and forgotten.

I had so few friends in school and even though I was close to some, I was never close enough to explain to any of them what was happening in my home. And truthfully, it was probably happening in their homes as well. They would have considered me an even bigger freak if I started talking about something so personal, so hidden, so uncool to dwell upon. They'd want to know why did I think my situation was any more special than theirs? I grew up in a time of great silence around many things. Domestic abuse was just one more thing on a very long list. I was not special or different. In so many ways I was sadly normal.

But something in me knew it was wrong and I didn't find the courage to admit it until I was long gone from my home. My years of abuse had helped me develop an innate sense of scoping out abusers before I became involved with them. No one I dated ever hit me. No one I had any kind of relationship at all with ever came close to the kind of abuse I grew up thinking was normal. No one I loved ever made pain the price of that love.

It took a friend to violate that trust, a man who always talked about other men who abused women as the scum of the earth. I believed he was sincere. I based my friendship with him on that perceived sincerity. I dismissed the gut feeling that his anger was right on the edge of always exploding as just paranoia from childhood. I told myself we weren't in love with each other, we didn't have a real relationship, we were "just friends" so there was no reason for him to get violent with me. I believed this until the day he got drunk and almost killed me.

It was the one and only time in my adult life that a man ever laid a hand on me other than with love. And it will never happen again for several reasons. One is that he destroyed my blind trust in people, especially men. Now men have to prove to me they are not abusers before I accept them into my life. You can argue with me until the end of time that this is unfair to men but until you've had your jaw broken, until you've had to walk around with casts on any part of your body from a man's fists, until you've lost teeth you couldn't afford to replace right away, you will never understand my caution. I have a bad knee. I wasn't born with it. My father gave it to me in a fit of rage when he kicked me. Until you can understand why it took me most of my life to admit this, you won't understand my fear of men. It is not something that goes away. It is a seed lying dormant waiting for a fist to break through.

Another reason I won't set myself up again to be abused is that inside of me lives an amazingly strong woman who believes no one has the right to hurt me intentionally. No one has the right to abuse me. No one has the right to cause physical damage to me for any reason. No one has the right to call me names that are meant to weaken me, make me less than I am, demean me enough to make me think less of myself so I won't fight back. No man will call me a "Ho" or a "Bitch" or any other demeaning term and remain in my life for longer than it takes for me to turn my back on him and walk away for good.

As I've matured, my relationships, no matter how close or how distant, have continued to grow and thrive without sinking into ugliness because I refuse to allow that to happen. I love the men in my life. I respect them. I cherish them. I value them because they are real men who are strong and powerful and confident. They do not need to beat up on women or men or animals or walls to make themselves bigger than they already are in my eyes.

But I didn't get to this place overnight. I knew the fear my work acquaintance was going through. I knew the courage it took for her to call me. I knew how afraid she was at that moment and how much she needed me to set everything aside and help her, which I did without hesitation. I've lived her life in the last couple weeks because I had to immerse myself in it to help her get out of it. Without going into details that would give away how she got away or naming the long chain of women and men who helped, let's just say she is safe now and on her way to beginning what will be a life-long process to recover from an abusive relationship. And in the end, it was less about us and more about her. She was the brave one, the strong one, the one who was finally able to say Enough and get away. We were there to help her with a decision she already made--that she was worthy of respect.

In honor of her courage and in recognition of how many others are suffering her fate, I made a design to plant a tiny little seed that I hope will grow to make all women believe we are worthy of respect. Please spread the word and keep your eyes, hearts and minds open to sisters who are afraid to ask for help openly. You don't have to storm into their homes and drag them out. Leave that to the professionals who devote their lives to it. What you can do is let someone know you are there for them when they need you. Become a door they can one day find the courage to walk through holding your hand.

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She Who Must Be Respected

The Value Of Friendship

In the last couple weeks filled with holidays that focused on family gatherings, there's always this small bit of sorrow in me that I didn't have those joyful memories. I come from the original dysfunctional family. It was dysfunctional in so many ways that I can't even begin to describe it here. I tried to write a book about it once. I even finished it. It's in a drawer along with other memories that are worth hanging on to for the educational value: love letters from old and dead relationships, long expired student identifications and driver's licenses and other bits and pieces of officialdom that have been replaced by the digital age, photographs of a youthful me that I'm always surprised looked kind of cute. I always saw myself as painfully ugly then. How perception changes!

What isn't there are many family pictures. We never took many. Most of the time we were too poor to afford a camera for more than a few weeks at a time. It lived mostly in the local pawn shops of whatever town we were in at the time. And film cost money to buy and develop. And who wants a record of domestic violence, alcoholism and poverty as mementos anyway?

Yes, my childhood sucked and I've had to spend a lifetime climbing out of it. But then as now there was something that kept me from taking one of my father's weapons and blowing my head off with it or one of my mom's happy pills that would let me sleep forever without waking up to them screaming at each other, and that was my friends.

There is an old saying that you can't buy friendship. This is probably because you can't put a price on it. Friendship is truly priceless. When I think of my childhood, it is filled with memories of friends who sheltered me, helped me talk through my anger, fear, and tears, who held me instead of hit me, who accepted me no matter how bad a person I thought I was and who saw me as beautiful no matter how ugly I thought I was. They kept me alive.

As I grew older I moved a lot and finally found a place to stop. I chose the place because of the people who came into my life in this place. They were the people of my childhood, the open and accepting arms, hearts, and minds. From the beginning they sheltered me from the other elements in the community who saw my vulnerable neediness and looked for ways to exploit it.

Some did and they live in the memory drawer with my family pictures. But the ones who are outside that drawer taught me that love is stronger than hate, tolerance is more powerful than bigotry, and love means being there when you are needed. That is why for this holiday like many of the others, I spent it with my friends. It's going on a couple decades now and it's because of them that the wounds are finally starting to heal.

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The Value Of Friendship