Innana88
It was one year ago this week that I began stalking brigits_flame . I had discovered LiveJournal the previous December and honestly had no clue what to do with it. I just knew that it was the first appealing site I'd found that encouraged self-exploration through writing. Sure, there are people that devote their journals to blogging about anything from politics to pet care, but what I saw most were those who journal about their daily routines.
I had come to a point in my life that was unsettling, to say the least. My 40th birthday was looming, and I was terribly disappointed that I hadn't ripened into a wise, stable, whatever-it-was-I-thought-I-would-be-by-then. Not only did I still have some of the life questions I'd dragged around since adolescence, new questions were popping up by the second.
I wasn't happy. It took a very long time for me to be able to type those words, much less say them. Once I could admit that to myself, I became a bit more decisive: I'm not happy. I want to write. I want to go back to school. I want to do something with my life that pleases me.
Notice that I didn't type: I want to be a successful ________.
I had a great deal of disappointments in career choices, but for once I wasn't thinking about a career. I was thinking about what would please me.
It's ridiculously easy to get caught up the mundane routine of what's expected. Of course, I'm not advocating we chuck responsibility, don't get me wrong. Personally, I got so caught up in the day-to-day stuff that I had forgotten how to seek out anything that brought me joy as an individual. No wonder I wasn't happy.
One year ago this week, I was introduced to a community full of people who had discovered a way to find their joy. Writing fulfills a need within me; it allows me to purge, to rejoice, to grieve, and it allows me to explore my own heart for all those questions that come to torture me. Taking the steps that led me to LiveJournal and eventually to the FLAME, led me to discovering the joy of meeting people from all over the world that share one of my passions, and eventually to learn that it's perfectly alright to look past what's expected for happiness. I am very grateful!
This week's featured FLAMER discusses her need to write in an eloquent fashion. For those of you who haven't met her yet, you're in for a treat! It's my pleasure to introduce to you all, innana88
Bio:
Hi everyone! I've been a bit of a stranger to the Flame lately because I'm writing almost constantly for a really big prompt called THE MASTERS THESIS. I'm continuously told that I shouldn't think of it as a Magnum Opus, but I can't help myself. It is an autoethnography, which is essentially a sociological narrative--let me back up a bit.
A lot of people go to graduate school to get a Masters Degree. I went to write my thesis. It has taken me six and-a-half years, and, by the time I actually defend the darn thing, it will have been seven. My original intention was to do a more typical form of research: interviews of women who had experienced sexual violence in intimate relationships without any other form of physical abuse, but one professor had a thought that I might try my hand at writing my own story instead, which is how I ended up finding my writing niche in creative nonfiction. I'd taken scads of creative writing and poetry writing classes and struggled. I signed up for a creative nonfiction course in the fall of 2005 to kick off writing this thesis and realized I was home.
This is an excerpt from a Why I Write assignment for my Memoir Writing course that I think sums up nicely what it is that drives me to write. I've journaled almost daily since April 2001. Sometimes creative pieces, sometimes just reflections.
I write because I crave nothing more than to be seen in my jumbled entirety. I write because maybe, just maybe, the collage of experiences and thoughts and emotions and hopes and terrors before you will move you to make sense of the jigsaw edges, to begin to see where they were severed from each other and how perhaps to fit them back together, to see the whole picture even though the scars ensure that this picture will never look like the image on the box top. I write because the world looks like this to me and this is how I crave to see it – whole, with some missing pieces begging for imagination and beautiful, ragged, jigsaw edges where the image, having been forced against its nature, peels back in places.
The Chosen Piece:
I stumbled into the Flame through a Community Spotlight back in June or July of 2008, watched for a few months to see what it was all about and then jumped in. The piece I've selected is my first entry ever. It is, as you might have expected, creative nonfiction.
A year of thesis-writing had become really intense and I knew I needed a break. My students in my SOC 101 class had been fascinated with the news coverage on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. When I discovered that I could apply to be a Team Leader for AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps and serve in the Gulf states doing hurricane recovery work, I jumped on it. I loved it so much I did it for two service years.
This particular piece was inspired by a gutting experience that my team took part in. Gutting involves stripping a building down to the studs after removing all of its contents. In many cases, people didn't have time take much with them because when the levees failed, the lower areas around the Mississippi River canals flooded almost immediately. We were gutting an apartment building in St. Bernard Parish over a year after the storms ripped through. I tried to craft this in such a way that the structure of the piece drives it forward. I hope you enjoy it.
The Link:
http://aine-marihugh.livejournal.com/3662.html
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