Category: Books

Write To Live

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

I am feeling vulnerable.  The pitch for my memoir is about to be sent out to editors, and I have spent the last ten years pouring everything I have into this book.  It has evolved and grown with time, and thanks to rejections of past versions, it has become more refined, more complete, more honest.

Though I try my best to not take rejections personally (having worked in publishing has helped me a lot with this), it is still always a hard blow to the ego, with days spent feeling like a failure.  I know my book has enormous potential, now I just need people in the publishing industry to see that too.

In vulnerable writer moments, the best author to turn to is Erica Jong.  “Only if you have no other choice should you be a writer (Jong, 6).”

I have just finished reading her book, Seducing the Demon – Writing For My Life.  The stories from her life are all hilarious, and told in nonlinear fashion.  Most memorable would be how she broke up Martha Stewart’s marriage when it was already falling apart (picture Stewart’s husband as an emasculated chore boy).

Humorous stories aside, it seemed that Jong was speaking directly to me and everything that I am dealing with right now – death and the struggle of trying to capture life in words.

“Life is a dream, but the dream disintegrates unless you write it down (my father) reminds me (Jong, 253).”

I first began writing because I wanted to end my life.  It was a common theme throughout my adolescence, but escalated when I was twenty-one.  I always knew that I was not the person my family wanted me to be.  Within my core, I was not a Christian, but I was told by everyone around me that if I did not follow I would lose their acceptance.  I would be fallen, lost, going to hell.  I did everything to make God real to me.  But instead, I began to see that everything I’d been told was false.

In the process of all this, I was prone to deep depression and would fall into trance-like states where I left my body and began to ponder how I could destroy it.  Looking back, it was symbolic, since the Christianity I was raised with denies the body.

Eventually, when that mode became an everyday issue, I had to enter therapy.  The therapist didn’t sort my issues since I was still stuck within my Christian university and didn’t feel free to speak what I was really feeling.  What really changed my life was writing.

“Writing is tough, but it’s a lot less tough than depression.  Which basically leads to suicide.  Unless you make a joke (Jong, 232).”

At first the writing was not good.  It was melodramatic, sickeningly romantic, full of unnecessary flourishes and old-fashioned language.  Through hundreds of poems, I attempted to express what I was feeling.

I experienced a real breakthrough while reading Allen Ginsberg’s poetry.  Here was a man who bravely and beautifully wrote about gay sex in the 1950’s.  If he could do that then, than I could celebrate sensuality in my poetry, turn it in, and risk getting marked down or reprimanded.  Surprisingly, my teacher raved over the poem I wrote.

We normally looked at each other’s work anonymously.  But at the end of analyzing my poem the professor said, “And the girl who wrote this…” (Everyone looked around since there was only one other girl in the class) “Ope!  Sorry Lauren!”

The room full of boys twittered in embarrassment.  But then my professor continued, “This is the first poem I’ve seen all semester that is ready to be published.”  I sat there red in the cheeks, but brimming with pride that this professor who was such a tough nut to crack, who was known for yelling at people for using the word “deep” because it didn’t express anything, was now telling me I had potential.

“For the poet, the lover becomes the world.  The exploration of love becomes an exploration of life (Jong, 66).”

Before poetry, I painted portraits, then realized I had more to tell.  Poetry was vague enough to feel safe writing what I had to say.  But then I wanted to tell the whole truth and share the whole picture.

To write I have sacrificed money, jobs, relationships, and security.  But I have no choice, and wouldn’t be happy any other way.  My book sits there like the holy grail, full of promises that might not be met.  When I first tried to publish it, I was cocky, with no doubt that the first agent would snap it up and put it on auction, scoring a great book deal which would lead to it becoming a bestseller with a movie deal in the works.  I literally did not doubt this one iota.

In it’s earliest version (not nearly as fleshed out as it is now) it was rejected by over a hundred agents and editors.  Back then it was just a novel about a girl who parties too much.  Now it’s a memoir about a girl trying to forget an oppressive upbringing through an underground subculture that turns dark quickly.

“People who most crave ecstasy are probably least capable of moderation (Jong, 134).”

The people I write about in my book will be both horrified and gratified to see themselves frozen in time.  But the only reaction that really concerns me is that of my parents.  I hope they can forgive the fact that I need to lay them bare to understand my life.  Like many parents, it’s painful for them to allow their child to be their own person.  They will never fully accept who I am because it doesn’t fit into their worldview.  I am the reality that they find hard to face.

“If you want to be a nice person, don’t write.  There’s no way to do it without grinding up your loved ones and making them into raw hamburger (Jong, 239).”

Now when I actually see the living people who embody the other characters in the book, I hardly know how to look at them, without only seeing our past.  To me, they have become caricatures of themselves, mythology.

“Time and again I have found that once I have frozen a person in a book I can hardly remember what the real person was like (Jong, 268).”

At a memorial, I saw them all two days ago.  I realized, that they feel the same way about me.  They are completely unable to understand who I am now, unable to listen, and can only speak in jokes or insensitive diatribes.  They have frozen me in time.  I didn’t want to be there, but in coming together over the death of our beautiful friend, I came to the ending of my story.

“You are not doing it all alone.  You are standing on the shoulders of the dead.  You are writing love letters to the grave.  The word is a link in a human chain (Jong, 61).”

I’m in those last years where you can be considered young.  But I don’t feel young at all.  I feel like time is too short and I have too many stories to share to fit into that shortness of life.  Ideas keep popping into my head.  I want to write them all, to share this thing I cannot stop.  To live, I must write.

Life Is Never What You Expect

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

I once had a professor who said, “You live one life, but you have many lives within it.”  The same can be said for a book of short stories.  They are all unique, but each story is connected, and wouldn’t be complete without the others.

Aryn Kyle’s collection “Boys And Girls Like You And Me” is honest and full of humor over the sad circumstances of life.  Her characters all want to really live, but life is never what they expected it would be.

“That was the real bitch about time: Everything true would become false, if only you waited long enough (Kyle, 123).”

I am hard at work, putting the finishing touches on my memoir.  In the last week, three people who are a part of those stories have died.  Two of them were shot and killed in the Seattle shootings.  Drew Keriakedes and Joe ‘Vito’ Albanese.  I first saw them when the show, Circus Contraption, started about eleven years ago.  As the bandleader, Drew wrote all the whimsical music.  The show went on to New York City (where I was so homesick I went to see them three times in a row) and performed internationally as well.  When Contraption came to an end, the two were in a band called God’s Favorite Beefcake, and performed once at a friend’s wedding.  The day of the wedding I wanted to tell them how much they meant to me.  But I didn’t.  I got shy, even though I had spoken to them before in New York.  Their music was genius in that vaudevillian sense.  There was no one else like them.

The last thing I ever thought would happen was this.  The last thing that should ever happen to beautiful artists who spread joy and laughter and music throughout the world is violence.  And all because some mentally unstable guy got out of the house with a gun and decided to go on a shooting spree before he shot himself.

All moments and all people pass away, but art gives us the remnants of what once was.  I realize more than ever, the importance of capturing these moments in my history, and all the beautiful people I have known.  My generation has such a limited experience of death.  Death is a reminder that my introversion is a waste of love I could have given.

Life is short, life is intense, life is funny and sad and unpredictable.  We’ll only make it through if we hold each other up.  It just takes being vulnerable again, to learn how to try.

In memory of Arthur, who also passed away last week, I would like to share this poem I wrote about him ten years ago.  He was a beautiful man. 

Arthur’s Kiss

Smooth into me

like butter, you ooze

flicker glisten skin

glide cross fingers

no angles pointed joints

just round solid

foundations formed

through anticipations

refused content.

The Fat Is On The Fire

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment


Two months ago, I bought a necklace with a black metal pendant cut in the image of Hunter S. Thompson. Ever since then, his spirit has been following me around, reminding me to “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” More even, than his words on the paper, he has a lot to tell me.
Away at a Writer’s Refuge, working on research for my memoir, I found a note I made twelve years ago that read, “Read Hunter S. Thompson.” I turned around from the table where I was sitting and looked at the five books I brought along with me. One was Thompson’s Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ‘80’s, a collection of articles he wrote in the mid-eighties for the San Francisco Examiner.
My favorite bits are Thompson’s personal tales of car explosions, raising peacocks, owning a strip joint, bad gambling deals, people out to slit his throat, incognito travels, and random chats with people like Nixon’s secret Chinese mistress who lived on a Houseboat near the Sacramento River where a humpback whale was causing a ruckus.
As Thompson floats through good ol’ boy territory and rebel remnants of the west, it’s hard to decide which is more loony – his crazy life or the Republican Party. His articles cover batty political figures and power-hungry televangelists trying to make their play for the White House. He manages to make them all look like corpses in an article entitled, “The Other George Bush” where his friend Skinner recounts a bender:
“… he’d spent the last two nights arguing with George Bush about the true meaning of Plato’s Republic and the Parable of the Caves, smoking Djarum cigarettes and weeping distractedly while they kept playing and replaying old Leonard Cohen tunes on his old Nakamachi tape machine (Thompson, 298).”
Skinner was convinced, here was a man “smarter than Thomas Jefferson,” who could “stand taller than the two Roosevelt’s put together.” Thompson doesn’t resolve the mystery for us, but he has plenty of dirt on “Big George.” As for Reagan, “Old actors never feel guilty for crimes they committed at work – because all they ever really did was play roles, and that was all Reagan did as President (Thompson, 215).”
The religious right permeated culture throughout the eighties. Even beyond the church, the mentality of doom and destruction and punishment were prevalent. Ronald Reagan told People magazine in 1986, “This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon.”
“That is the hallmark of the Reagan administration – a Punishment Ethic that permeates the whole infrastructure of American life and eventually gets down to George Orwell’s notion, in Animal Farm, that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others (Thompson, 206).””
The pendulum swung, as it always does throughout history, into an era of fear and a backlash from the orgiastic drug spree of the 1960’s. Aid’s hit, though it took the mainstream a long time to really admit that it existed. Instead, there were reminders that sex could kill you, and living means dying. “… “safe sex,” the meanest oxymoron of our time (Thompson, 206).”
Thompson’s stories collide with recollections of my childhood. I was born in 1979. My first experiences of the world were in a decade that I now look back on with words like – fear, greed, power, money, poltergeist, apocalypse, punishment. It’s no wonder that my generation flipped out and went grunge.
“The President’s wife, in her role as main spokeswoman for the administration’s War on Drugs… has created so much pressure on a whole generation of confused pimply teenagers who may or may not “Say No to Drugs” that the last of the ‘80’s seems destined to produce another generation of criminals like the one that got caught on the cusp of the ‘60’s, when Jell-O conformity of the Eisenhower Era finally created so many socioeconomic rejects that it eventually became fashionable to be one (Thompson, 207).”
My mother was highly susceptible to all of this fear. I wasn’t allowed to own a Cabbage Patch Kid. She had heard a story that one became possessed by a demon and talked to a kid. Dolls with creepy faces were suspect in general, especially ones with eyes that blinked. Our house was at constant risk of becoming a poltergeist. As long as you clung to Jesus and said his name over and over, you could avoid spiritual catastrophe.
Alcohol and drugs, it seemed, were the ultimate invitation to demons – just try it and they could infest your house like fleas, hiding in the carpet and the crevices of the couch just waiting to claim another soul for the dark side. All it took was a moment of weakness. Life had the horror and magnificence of a Sci-Fi film. Any mistake could cause you a lifetime of punishment. Perhaps the extremes were what made me want to screw up in the first place, just to test it out. All that striving for perfection and bullshit can really weigh you down.
It was a strange era to spend the first ten years of my life. Stranger still, that the current Republican nominees resemble something more akin to the ‘80’s than 2012 – slippery slicksters who might just bite us in the ass because we’re too anesthetized to do anything about it.
When I talk to people just ten years younger than I am, I get the feeling I’m actually talking to the Internet. They spit out facts and ask me, “Have you heard of this band?” “Have you seen this video?” “Do you know who this guy is?” and pop out their iphones at me with the source of their never-ending information that they want to spew in my direction.
What happened to the human beings? Are we all just extensions of machines now? Showing off our prowess through information rather than active imagination?
I’m grateful that I was born before the era of the Internet and the cell phone. While I enjoy the ease that they provide, I appreciate being unplugged and fully committed to the moment. Thompson reminds us, that if you’re not living you’re really dying.
Nature is tough. To survive, you have to be a warrior, but to thrive you have to remain open, even when struggles make you want to go into seclusion. For those with courage, life is full of thrills, ups and downs that bring you closer to your own true nature – honest and pure.
The smoke from Hunter’s cigarette is drifting in tendrils around his face as he gives me that devious half-smile. He’s still wearing his Aviators even though we’re in some dark seedy restaurant with holes in the booths. I watch him sling a few back, and have a feeling he has more chaos to share before the night is through.

The Tree of Life

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

The minute I heard that Andras Jones had his book Accidental Initiations published, I was magnetized and couldn’t resist the pull.  It arrived in the mail, and I dropped what I was reading to dive right in.  It is strange and kind of wonderful to read a book written by an acquaintance.

“… we are sent to schools where we learn the agreed upon truths our CULTure calls reality.  These institutions ultimately release us into the wild, civilized world, to parse the varied sub-cults available to us and find our way toward a truth we determine best serves our nature (Jones, 22).”

When I first met Andras he unnerved me.  That feeling never went away.  He is quiet and introspective.  It bothered me that I never knew what he was thinking.  This was heightened by the fact that it is obvious he is a mischievous visionary, spiritually heightened but always on his guard.

In the book, Andras writes of his life experiences through various cults and relationships while guiding us through his own personal Kabalistic Tree of Life in the city of Olympia, Washington.  He finds ritual and symbolism in the map that represents different aspects of being.

The symbol of the Tree of Life has appeared to me several times, and each time it did, my life changed dramatically.  I found it again the night that I met Andras.  It was my last year living in New York.  That December, people from Seattle kept appearing, drawing me back west.  Their spirituality overwhelmed me in a place that tends to be so matter of fact.

A massage healer who was also a confessed energy vampire was staying with me off and on.  I had met him at a party in Seattle the summer before.  He was extremely pale and had a disease that aged him in the sun.  The more time he spent with me, the darker his skin got, and the lighter mine became.  Things were very trippy with him around.  I liked that he made me uncomfortable.

“Yes, many of my new friends and teachers were well-meaning charlatans or self-deluding shamans, but at least they were trying for the big consciousness shift (Jones, 52).”

He took me to midtown to an apartment where traveling tantric practitioner’s stay while working in the city.  Andras was staying there with his girlfriend at the time – an escort turned sacred sex worker.  My friend mentioned that Andras did a show called Radio8Ball based on concepts of synchronicity.  Audience members submit questions to the Pop Oracle and random songs answer their questions.  I eventually became a fan and saw the show in New York, Seattle and LA.

Andras’ girlfriend made mushroom tea, and though I normally do not do drugs, the mushrooms seemed so natural and called to me.  I played it like this was nothing out of the ordinary, but I was nervous.  Here I was with three people I didn’t trust at all about to do shrooms.  Anything could happen.  And in fact, it seemed that night that everything did happen.

At first I felt ill, but once outside and moving, the feeling subsided.  Everything unnatural was disturbing, and in New York City, that’s pretty much everything.  I realized I was not experiencing an altered state exactly.  This was true reality in another dimension, as seen through the soul of a mushroom.

“… the high was only a perspective shift from which to experience reality more realistically (Jones, 36).”

We walked past a man and I knew right away that he had killed many people.  My friend thought he could speak in foreign languages.  And I realized, in my suede jacket, that I was wearing a cow.  I could feel the cow and hear it mooing.  Unnerved, I asked my friend, “Just be my reality, okay?”

We went to Central Park and I could suddenly breathe and the world was made of rainbows and light.  Andras said nothing at all.  He had the grin of a Cheshire cat.  His girlfriend seemed like a doe – innocent and pure, an awesome contradiction to her line of work as a high-paid sex worker.

We came to a stage and my friend walked into the shadows becoming darker, then walked back becoming lighter (his favorite trick).  The three of them felt far away from me.  I climbed the stairs behind the stage, wanting to escape.  There were thick vine trees lining a path and I found the Tree.  I sat in it and the Tree began breathing up through me, rocked in a cradle of inhaling and exhaling wood.  We were melded together as one.  I wanted to be alone and away from all the uncertainty.  But my friend kept calling me, “Lauren, we’re moving on.  You need to come now.”

“No, I don’t want to.  This is where I belong.”

Eventually, I caught up to them.  We walked through a horse round and circled a statue where a panther mutated into a squirrel.  Live animals had become fluffy unreachable entities with no connection to humanity.  Electronic music was a terrible noise while church bells were the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.  People moved in herds except for some crazy disco roller skaters that all moved to their own rhythm.

When we returned we descended into an emotional slump.  I became obsessed with willing a rose to open, and then felt depressed as it began to wilt.  My friend worked on Andras doing massage and Andras had a break down, conflicted over his own masculinity.  We all sat down and my friend began to cry as he confessed that in a past life he had been on intimate terms with the insides of human bodies, opening them up to look inside.  Andras’ girlfriend wanted to work on my friend in a healing exercise where she needed to feel connected to him spread eagle on the massage table.  Andras was getting pissed, so they left us and went into the dark bedroom to finish the therapy.

Andras and I sat on the couch awkwardly feeling jealous.  He began to obsessively clean the kitchen and the living room.  I wanted to catch the train back to Hoboken, and he had plans for the next morning.  He began to yell all of this towards the bedroom, and finally my friend and I got the hell out.  I couldn’t go to sleep when we got back home, and I found the dark room disturbing.  So we lay there for a long time with the lights on, talking beneath the covers.

I would see Andras randomly here and there over the next five years.  Mostly through his show, once at an awkward networking event, and once at his past job as a bartender at Bottleneck Lounge.  He approached me at one point to help find sponsors for his radio program, but I was not at all right for that kind of job.

Accidental Initiations is enjoyable to read, and I don’t think that’s just because I knew many of the stories and people he writes about.  It’s a shame that on Amazon his ‘boring haters’ have made quite the mark, although their crazy attacks made me want to read the book even more.  He left KAOS radio station in Olympia on bad terms, fired for indeterminate reasons.  There was much slander and harassment against him and he’s hell bent on getting his show back on the station.  But he needs to let it go and move on.  The low point of his book is including all the dirty details involved in the case, including letters (that according to the ‘boring haters’) are not accurate.  This chapter has nothing to do with the spiritual journey we are all on with him throughout the rest of Accidental Initiations.  It is more suitable to a temporary platform like an article or a blog, not the pages of a book, which had the potential to go beyond his current audience for Radio8Ball.

Next week I am off to a place of solitude to finish a memoir that has been in the making for the last ten years.  Andras reminds me that our shared history is a strange one, with details impossible to recreate.  I too am not as social as I used to be because of people that have let me down.  And though I began my memoir out of spite, I somehow was able to forgive my enemies as I wrote through their voices.  I became the people that I loved, the people that I hated, and left behind the person that I was.

“One of the key components of any effective cult is some level of getting over yourself as a route to getting truly into your Self (Jones, 51).”

After that night when I sat in the Tree, everything changed.  There is strength in knowing the earth is made of magic.  I didn’t need to find my identity through someone else, because I had my own.  Nothing could stop me from being an artist.  It was time to go home.

Elite Syncopation

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

In E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel Ragtime we are taken into the vulnerabilities and motivations behind such historical figures as Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and Emma Goldman.  We are witness to the making of revolutionaries and criminals.  War is on the horizon – the great equalizer between massive wealth and massive poverty.

Each character ricochets off the next, creating a stream of events flowing from one to another.  The book begins with Evelyn Nesbitt.  Her beauty causes a murder among the rich and powerful.  Her picture sends newspapers flying off the stands.  She becomes the standard model for every sex goddess that follows after her. “Goldman sent off a letter to Evelyn: I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few.  The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.  Carrying his newspaper with your picture the laborer goes home to his wife, an exhausted workhorse with the veins standing out on her legs, and he dreams not of justice but of being rich (Doctorow, 71).”

One of my favorite scenes involves J.P. Morgan, who in his quest for Egyptian mysticism spends the night in a Pyramid seeking a sign of his greatness.  He only finds that the place is infested with bed bugs.  His feeling of elite superiority to be in such a place is even more diminished when he is led out in the morning to find a team of ill-mannered baseball players goofing off on the ruins.

Coalhouse Walker, a liberated black man, seeks justice against the crimes committed against him.  He turns into a revolutionary willing to sacrifice his life, staking out J.P. Morgan’s library of artifacts and rigging it with dynamite.  As Booker T. Washington tries to reason with him, Coalhouse replies, “It is true I am a musician and a man of years.  But I would hope this might suggest to you the solemn calculation of my mind.  And that therefore, possibly, we might both be servants of our color who insist on the truth of our manhood and the respect it demands (Doctorow, 238).”

Throughout is the rage that we are experiencing in our own time in the same phase of a century – rage against the one percent.  I grew up around wealth.  I went to high school blocks away from Bill Gates’ mansion in Bellevue, Washington.  My sixteen-year-old classmates drove BMW’s and Mercedes’.  My mother wanted to make up for doing without as a teenager, so she bought me one thousand dollars worth of clothes every fall and spring.  I learned quickly, that having everything you want doesn’t make you happy.  And after college, I had no idea how to deal with real life or live on very little.  It took years to train my brain how to stop being magnetized to extravagance.  Eventually I gained the survival skills I needed.

My number one lesson was that I was too impulsive to own a credit card.  As a teenager I’d never looked at a price tag, but now I became an obsessive bargain hunter.  I sought out the cheapest market in my neighborhood and bought all the food I needed for a week for under $40.  I learned to like my natural hair color and taught myself how to cut my own hair.  Instead of buying beauty products, I only use almond oil.  Natural remedies have replaced doctors and prescriptions.  When buying clothes I tend to do day’s worth of research, and think out my choices and price options for the best quality at the lowest price.  It pays to buy things that last.

I have yet to own a car, though I did spend six months puttering around on a sporadic 1974 Honda CT90 motorcycle.  I realized my own two legs were more dependable and I like the exercise.

I’ve been living on random jobs for eleven years telling myself that I can keep doing this while I wait for that book deal to happen.  And every year has seemed like the last year I will do it, to the point that it amazes me that this distant carrot could keep me going in the same way until the day I die.  I’m okay with that.

Jobs always come up when I need them, like magic.  But there is a constant scramble for backbreaking work.  One of those jobs is as a part-time contractor.  I am the person wearing dirty overalls, up in my head all day sanding, patching and painting in the routine movements of a machine.  When I work in public places, I note that people regard me as being beneath them.  When I wear my normal clothes, the same people regard me as their equal.

I sometimes work for a friend, serving food and mixing cocktails at parties.  We work for the one percent.  I hate the feeling of subservience the very rich can make you feel.  You’re not allowed to really exist.  And I’m good at being a shadow on the periphery, taking care of their every need.

At one party, the couple was our age, in their mid-thirties.  He worked in commercial real estate and she did nothing but buy designer clothes for all I could see.  She didn’t know how to work the stove, and he couldn’t be bothered with knowing where anything was in the kitchen.  They owned a mansion with forty-foot floor to ceiling windows with a full skyline view of the city.  The kitchen counter was also forty-feet long.  The house itself was built like a fortress with a ten-foot wide wooden door opening into the courtyard, and a glass door twenty-feet tall to the house.

Usually the very rich live in houses that are not to my taste.  But in this place I found myself becoming more and more green with envy as the night wore on.  I was disgusted with myself for feeling this way.

They were lonely people living at the top with the usual token gay bestie who worshiped their lifestyle.  The husband did the usual boasting of only flying private, and told boring tales of doing without comforts in foreign countries.  He was anal and obsessive compulsive.  You could see he wouldn’t have gotten this far, this fast, if he hadn’t been.  Everyone was slightly bored and more amused by the view of the city than the company.

I appraised their lame choices in art and thought of the paintings I would hang instead.  I imagined where I’d put the grand piano and how I’d rock star the place out.  Desperately, I wanted to go back to my own life so I could begin to forget.  Then back at home I kept looking over towards their neighborhood from our balcony, pin-pointing exactly where that magnificent house stood amongst the crevices of the hill.

Is it bad, or is it okay to find motivation from being around the rich?  On a good day I feel like the upstanding socialist – equality for all.  And I am lucky to have the life I lead – rich with experience, vibrant, full of love and time enough to write.  But as a human being, we are all competitive by nature.

It all reminds me too, that there is a part of me that is still that spoiled adolescent.  She resides deep in my subconscious, causing me to make impulsive choices every now and then.  Like J.P. Morgan, sometimes our illusions of grandeur need to be taken down a notch by bed bugs in the Pyramid.

Disney Princess Nightmare

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

Imagine you are living in a universe where everything is pink, every girl is a princess, and men are vague figures on the periphery, only appearing when a girl needs saving.  This to me sounds like a nightmare, and yet little girls are taught that this is a dream come true.  A few weeks ago I saw Peggy Orenstein give a lecture based off her new book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, defining exactly what is wrong with princess culture in girl land.

“… princesses avoid female bonding.  Their goals are to be saved by a prince, get married…  and be taken care of for the rest of their lives.  Their value derives largely from their appearance.  They are rabid materialists.  They might affect your daughter’s interest in math.  And yet…  parents cannot resist them (Orenstein, 23).”

In the Disney Princess franchise, for the first time we are allowed to see the Disney Princesses grouped together as long as none of them are looking at each other.  They each exist in a universe, all their own.  They only make friends with those who are not on equal footing; such as crustaceans, raccoons, birds, dwarves, fairies.  No one is as special as they are.

Not only does princess mentality isolate girls from other girls, inspiring competition and a lack of empathy; but it also creates a huge divide between girls and boys.  Boys are given active toys that include all the colors of the rainbow.  They are encouraged to be doers, and to learn through play with tool sets, chemistry sets, etc.  For girls, however, there is a major emphasis on primping and materialism – spa day, shopping, and make-up for your six year old.  The girl’s version of a chemistry set revolves around learning to make perfume.  In the Monopoly Pink Boutique Edition, girls can go on shopping sprees, buy a mall or a boutique.  This all teaches them to strive to be spoiled and valued on the basis of their appearance.

At a toy fair, Orenstein observes:  “The preschool girls’ section was decorated with a banner on which the words BEAUTIFUL, PRETTY, COLORFUL were repeated over and over (and over) in pink script…  In the next room, a banner over the boys’ section, scripted in blue, exclaimed, ENERGY, HEROES, POWER (Orenstein, 51).”

Words used for girls are passive descriptions of how an object looks.  Boys on the other hand get all the action, the doing, the winning, the leadership.  Over and over boys and girls are ingrained with these perceptions at an already difficult stage of social development where they are first coming to terms with categories of gender.

“By the end of the first year of preschool, children spend most of their time, when they can choose, playing with others of their sex.  When they do have cross-sex friendships, they tend not to cop to them in public – the relationships go underground (Orenstein, 68).”

Some of my earliest memories are of playing with my friend Patrick.  My dad’s favorite story to tell is of me at around age four playing football with Patrick and his little brother Freddy.  Apparently I pushed Freddy down and he went crying to his dad.  His dad turned to him and said, “But that’s how the game is played, son.”  At a later age, I can assure you, I would not have had the guts to push a boy down.

Since I was the second child, my parents were a little lax with teaching me a few basics, so Patrick taught me the alphabet and I taught him a few ballet moves.  I loved playing Heman with him and I was convinced that boy’s toys were better.  Barbie was fun, but all she did was primp and go to parties.  Her big climatic moment was when she danced with Ken.  They would fall in love and begin to fly.  Then they would go home, take off their clothes and lie naked on top of each other in their Barbie bed.  My neighbor friend and I would gaze at this mysterious act with awe.  All the effort went into making Barbie look as beautiful as possible so that Ken would sleep with her.

Heman was active.  He was a hero.  There was something more empowering about being a boy.  I was jealous.  I was also jealous that Patrick didn’t give a shit about what people thought of him.  One day he pulled down his pants and peed right on the sidewalk.  It didn’t matter that there were ten other kids playing around him when he did it.  I couldn’t imagine ever feeling that free.

As soon as we entered kindergarten, though, Patrick rejected me.  He wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a girl in public.  I felt heartbroken.  I realized our friendship could only exist in my mind as a memory.  But I still admired him from afar.  Matters were made worse when in the first grade we were all lined up to go in after recess.  I was at the end of the line, Patrick was up ahead, and the boy in front of him (who I didn’t like), yelled out, “You like Lauren?!”  It was as though the most embarrassing thing you could possibly do was like me.  Everyone started laughing.  Patrick looked humiliated.  I wanted to disappear.  It was hard to understand why this was such a horrible thing.

So then we entered a new phase.  Since Patrick “liked” me, I now had a crush on him.  This explained to me why we were no longer allowed to talk to each other.  Everything became secretive, underground.  It was now all in the non-verbals, like when he silently chased me on his bicycle.  I pedaled as fast as I could, laughing hysterically over the excitement of the chase.  For a few short moments, he was actually acknowledging that I existed.

At that point the major gender separation in toys was really just beginning.  It was the early eighties, that big bust of consumerism.  My Little Pony, Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears – all inactive toys that were cute and had no real function.  I barely knew what to do with any of them, but of course wanted them all.

Much more memorable is the summer when the girl next door and I decided to make a mud factory out of the piles of dirt behind the garage.  We made mud pies and even mud hot dogs, which my aunt told us, looked more like poop.  Then there was the year in grade school that I started an icicle hunt at recess – a game that spread like a virus till the whole grade school was involved in a battle of who could collect the most icicles, as well as the biggest.  I felt like a HERO.  I felt POWER.  I felt ENERGY.  It felt good!

When Peggy Orenstein finished her lecture on princess culture, the audience was invited to ask her questions.  Every woman that went up to the microphone bumbled through her words, skittishly made apologies, and skipped backwards through the aisle like an uncertain little girl.  Then a young man got up to ask a question.  He spoke directly with authority.  When he was finished he calmly walked back to his seat with assurance.  Just in that moment, it was easy to see, how we are all shaped by society’s messages on gender.

It’s time for women to create a new female archetype for the future – heroic, intelligent, with guts, courage, charisma and empathy.  She is prepared to fight to protect the right to be anything she wants to be.  A woman who doesn’t need saving, yet understands that we are stronger when we unify.  She is the best in all of us.

 

 

The Man Trap

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ 2 Comments

            In Alix Kates Shulman’s 1972 novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Sasha fights against the traps of being a woman.  As a child, the boy’s are pure enemies.  She is attacked, held down and pantsed so the boys can stare at her vagina with a ‘seen one, seen them all’ look on their faces.  As an adolescent she is lured into a ride home by a group of boys, only to be driven to a remote location where they can force her to touch a boy’s penis.

Her first boyfriend cares less about her than about getting laid, though she knows that if anyone finds out she’ll be expelled from her sorority and shunned by her classmates.  Her first job backfires when the cook threatens her to try and get her to sleep with him.  In college her dream of pre-law is put aside when she falls in love with Philosophy and the Philosophy professor.  By the time she’s playing with the big boys, attempting a PhD at Columbia – she is treated with so much disdain for being a woman in the program that she stops speaking in class and flocks to the safety of the wives in the kitchen.  She begins to panic that she’s getting too old and too educated.  So she marries the first guy who treats her well.

As soon as they’re married, of course, he stops talking to her.  He can’t hide his contempt.  His life has a grand purpose, while she supports him at menial jobs.  Her mind is no longer stimulating to him or to herself.  All he wants is his dinner.

“Why was everything nice he did for me a bribe or a favor, while my kindnesses to him were my duty (Shulman, 5)?”

She embarks on a series of affairs, but every time she leaves her husband she falls into the same man traps wherever she goes.  A lover in Spain, in Italy, and then eventually a second husband and two kids.  Completely dependent on a man who secretly hungers for carefree youth, she is constantly afraid he will leave her.

Interesting too, are Sasha’s musings over her physical self.  At fifteen she is crowned Queen of the Bunny Hop.  By twenty-four she fears that she is old, and that people would find it laughable to think she was once considered beautiful.  There is always that disconnect between how others see her, and how she feels she looks.

“Could it be that the prettier I grew the worse I would be treated?  Much likelier, I thought, I wasn’t really pretty (Shulman, 49).”

You have to wonder, though there were many disadvantages to being a woman at that time, did Sasha’s beauty add to her disempowerment?  Beautiful women are rarely ever noticed for their minds.  Sasha hates a come-on as much as she loves it.  On one hand it proves she’s still beautiful, on the other it reminds her she is vulnerable, even to possible attack.  Being valued for her looks is also emotionally damaging as age removes her worth.

Forty years since this book was published, the ultimate value of a woman is still judged on the basis of physical beauty.  A woman in the public eye who is not attractive is torn to shreds (for example, Hilary Clinton), while a beautiful woman is adored by everyone (Angelina Jolie).  Success and accomplishment are no protection from the scrutiny.  But will we remember Angelina Jolie for her excellent screenwriting skills, or will we remember her more for how hot she looked baring her leg at the Oscars?  Being beautiful, unfortunately, is a distraction from the accomplishments you weren’t born with.

I can vouch that when I was in my physical prime (early twenties), no one was really interested in hearing my poetry.  They just wanted me to wear hot pants to a party, and I was more than willing to flaunt it.  I never felt valued for who I was on the inside.  But I enjoyed all the attention otherwise.  And eventually I learned to lead with my personality rather than my appearance.

Beneath this was an insatiable need for affirmation.  Growing up in school I had been completely invisible.  I was always quiet and up in my head.  I was a dork – ugly, awkward, insecure, with bad grades and braces.  My quietness made the other kids uncomfortable.  Boys never talked to me unless it was to mock me or scare the shit out of me with sexual threats.  Maybe it was that total and complete lack of control that turned me into a control freak.  All I knew was, someday I wanted to be in charge.

If I had remained in the church, men and the life in general would have most certainly been a trap.  But outside of the church and those old fashioned values, men were my freedom.  In fact, the men I fell for brought my dreams to life.  For a long time I lived in a fantasy.  All of my relationships were open with no responsibilities involved.

Marriage and monogamy, however, are so based in reality, I have to admit, I’m still struggling to get used to it.  It’s hard to keep marriage exciting – especially when you are living with your best friend.  Sex is not the first thought, it’s the after-thought.  And it is sometimes difficult to not equate marriage as an institution akin to the church.  When I left religion, I celebrated all of my freedoms from repression.  But then when you get married, there are parts of yourself that inevitably become repressed to protect your relationship.  It’s like a catch-22, because you’ve never been happier than with your partner, but in order for that to survive, you can’t just do and say whatever you want.  You can no longer be selfish as you begin to think through this other person and their feelings.

But for the first time, I am finally loved for who I really am, and my husband embraces the free spirit in me.  He brings warmth and brightness to my life, whereas before, life was dark, edgy and unpredictable.

In Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen Sasha bemoans the traps of womanhood, laughing it off as all her fears come to pass.  There is always the clock ticking, the beauty slipping, the value falling down.  She runs from her own brilliance into the arms of man, where frets and responsibilities distract her from dreams that became insurmountable.

Memoirs was written from the standpoint of a very different time – but every time has its pitfalls and struggles for the sake of biology.  The balance between men and women is precarious and difficult.  Alix Kates Shulman based much of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen off of her own life.  Though her life story is such a great success (even helping to lead the famous protest at the Miss America Pageant), Sasha’s story ends in defeat.  I prefer to look beyond the book’s ending into Shulman’s inspiring example, trailblazing for women, allowing nothing to hold her back.

The Supporting Role

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

I once had a friend who was a famous child star.  I will protect her identity out of respect and call her Amy.  We both worked at a restaurant, and every now and then, super fans would appear to gush and beg her to sign an old lunch box or record.

Amy had retained the cheeriness of a child star though she was now in her mid-thirties.  She had a haircut that was more fit for a ten year old in the 1980’s.  I kept trying to help her brush up her image, and wanted her physical looks to match her dynamic personality.

Being Catholic she wanted to save herself for marriage, but it stunted her sexual maturity to a great extent.  She avoided it by only being physical with her gay costars from Broadway shows, and had a hopeless crush on a married actor.

I realized to a great extent, Amy retained age ten because she peaked at age ten.  She could never let go of the hope that she would eventually find success as an adult, but the problem was, she just wasn’t believable as an adult.

Sometimes she’d score a part in a show and be out of town for a month or two.  But more often than not, there were endless auditions, and the self-sabotage of drinking too much the night before and losing her voice.  She had a condo she could barely afford because she’d purchased it in a more successful moment.  The life of a creative person is extremely difficult with constant ups and downs, drama and rejections.

For a long time Amy was my closest friend.  We had all sorts of adventures and got into plenty of mischief.  But then I introduced her to straight men – a bunch of raucous musicians to be exact.  Amy wanted to make a husband out of the first one that slept with her.  I tried to protect her from the obsession, and warned her that he was seeing other people and wouldn’t change.  But Amy told me I was a horrible friend for saying so, and that she picked the wrong guy (as in, she should have picked the guy I hooked up with every now and then).

I was hanging out with her love obsession one day at the bar, waiting for her to show up from another dive with my every now and then guy.  Love obsession turned to me and said, “I have this feeling that right now the two of them are stabbing us both in the back.”

He was right.  I couldn’t believe it.  Amy and I never talked again.  Well, except for one night when I was too drunk and left her a nasty message at 3am.  For months I felt an immense pain in my gut.  I’d expected that sort of thing from the guy, but not from her.  I still regret that we never got over it.  Who doesn’t go crazy for a minute when they lose their virginity at 34?  But if we really want to dig into what was going on – I think she couldn’t handle that she wasn’t the star of the show.

When we first met I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.  And then somehow I passed her up along the way.  She was so charismatic, and chipper and extremely social.  But in certain circles, I took the lead and she accepted the supporting role.  Competition destroyed our friendship.  And on an astrological side-note, being an Aries, I have noticed my friendships with Cancers always follow the same pattern – intense and combustible.

This week I read Fame Junkies – The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction by Jake Halpern.  In three sections he covers aspiring child celebrities, celebrity entourage, and celebrity worship.

Increasingly, children want to become famous for fame itself.  They don’t see the importance of having a talent or something to give through fame.  They feel that fame will fix everything that is wrong in their lives.

“In fact, one could argue that the desire to be famous is simply the desire to alleviate pain – the pain of being bullied, the pain of feeling like a nobody, the pain of not getting the dates you want, and the misery of being below the people who inflicted the pain on you (Halpern, 34).”

Who isn’t more driven towards fame than the lonely child who wants to prove to everyone that they are worthy of the love they never received.  This child is more apt to watch five hours of TV a day and become absorbed in the celebrities that appear to be receiving the adoration they so long for.  Here Halpern sums up the research of psychologist, David Elkind:

“… teenagers are prone to believe they are destined to live exceptional, celebrity-like lives…  by their very nature, adolescents are unable to grasp what other people are thinking or feeling, so they exist in a sort of egocentric daze, assuming that everyone else is as obsessed with their lives as they are (Halpern, 16).”

If this is true, then celebritydom is the ultimate extension of the adolescent mind.  Promising an entourage and fans that buzz around you like peons, non-entities that meet your every whim and serve up admiration on a platter.  Halpern reflects on Dennis Hoppers Personal Assistant at the time:

“And yet even when she emulated a friend or a family member, it wasn’t exactly a realistic scenario because on principle, she was refusing to talk about herself or even to recognize her own emotions.  The result was a pseudo-friendship, in which one person did all the talking and feeling, while the other deftly maneuvered to stay out of the way (Halpern, 95).”

As taxing as the job is, and though she and other personal assistants are unable to have personal lives due to the constant beck and call of the job, she loved being within the inner reaches of the famous.  If she could be a part of their lives, she didn’t need to have her own.  But many assistants eventually wake up to the fact that their lives have passed them by with nothing to show for it.

“Some research psychologists have come to believe that the need to belong is every bit as urgent as the need for food and shelter (Halpern, 112).”

It’s an ancient survival tactic to emulate the alpha to gain success in the group.  In return the alpha can teach skills to the protégé and gain power through numbers.  But what are the returns for celebrity worship, especially when people become famous for nothing.  It’s a large-scale machine, completely distant and remote from real life.

“Celebrities are probably of less interest to people who live exciting, fulfilling lives – people who are involved with their family and community.  But how many people do you know who live exciting, fulfilling lives (Halpern, 144)?”

Every year, thousands of children join scam agencies, where parents fork out thousands of dollars for the miniscule chance that their kid will be discovered.  They often put more stock in a chance at fame than in a college education.

Before my prefrontal cortex had fully developed logic, I myself was gullible enough to go into credit card debt for classes and a modeling portfolio at a fake agency.  I thought I could make some extra fast cash.  But the owner and her assistant took all the real jobs and tried to get us to work for free.

Amy said that she wasn’t sure she would have been an actor if her strong willed mother hadn’t pushed her into it.  It struck me as insane.  Most people don’t come to conclusions about what they will do for a living until they are in college, or even sometime after.  But here she had been told that she was an actress before she had even fully become a self.

 

 

 

 

European Sampler Platter

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

In my junior year of college, I had the opportunity to tour Western Europe in a student group.  We traveled through Rome, Florence, Venice, Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Normandy, Paris, and London for three weeks, and I chose to extend my stay for two more weeks in Paris, London, and Edinburgh.  At one point, we hit four cities in 24 hours, and I experienced culture shock in each new destination.

The energy was frenetic in Rome.  Vespa’s buzzed between lanes of traffic and came inches away from our feet in alleys.  Buildings loomed majestically and echoed with centuries of history.  Sexy people were everywhere in tight pants and bright colors.  My fellow classmates made embarrassing comments like, “The women here dress like whores.”

They taunted me for checking out the men and I started a running joke, “I’m admiring the architecture.”

When the men approached us, “American girls!  Where are you from?”  One of the girl’s snapped, “Don’t talk to them!  They’re probably in the mafia!”

I desperately wanted to talk to them, but every time I made an attempt, the girls pulled me away.  The boys at our school looked nothing like Italian men, didn’t know how to dress, and never acknowledged us as sexual beings.  It was thrilling to be noticed, even if they noticed everyone.  I didn’t care.

I felt as I usually did, that my classmates were from the backwoods, and had no compass for reading other cultures.  I began to completely disassociate myself from the group entirely.  I did not want to be identified with them, and started doing whatever I could to blend in wherever we went (something I have mastered so well over the years that in foreign countries, people ask me for directions).

Though the others were amazed at religious sites, I felt sick over the obsessive power of the Catholic Church, and the awe instilled for the church through art.  We were told that the foot on the statue of Saint Peter had been replaced because it had been worn away from too many kisses of the devout.  I watched as people broke down in tears, so moved to kiss a stone foot.

I never quite got over how much I loved Italy.  I’d been so excited to see the other cities, that I failed to grasp completely, the place I was in.  Austria was beautiful, while Germany was the exact opposite of Italy.  We went from anarchy, passion and wine to precision, sterility, and beer.

In Bavaria, amidst the opulent rooms of Kind Ludwig’s Hunters Palace, I actually passed out on the floor.  Once again, the history of squandered wealth, over-consumption, and insanity overtook my psycho-sensitivity.

On the outside, I managed to put on a happy front, and had a song to sing for every place and time.  But I felt increasingly alone, and recorded my thoughts privately in a journal.  I figured out how easy it was to get lost on purpose and lose the group.  In Paris I lost them in the Metro, and realized I hadn’t been keeping track of how to get back to the hotel.  I stared cluelessly at a metro map when a little man approached me, “Come with me!  I can take you where you want to go!”

“No thank you.  I’m fine.”  I learned quickly to make it look like I knew what I was doing and spent the afternoon wandering the Champs Elysees.

When the tour ended, the other students went home or broke off into small groups that I met up with now and then.  In hostels I was suddenly exposed to the sort of people I’d been kept away from all of my life.  Aimless wanderers hoping to hook up with someone, bragging about how many bottles of wine they’d finished off in a night, solving the mysteries of humanity through astrology.  Before this, under the scrutiny of our group leaders we’d been lucky if we could sneak off and drink a glass of wine.

In Paris I stayed in a crappy hostel and caught something, possibly from brushing my teeth in the tap water.  I was later diagnosed with a strange combination of virus’s that resembled a cross between Mono and Hepatitis.  My neck swelled up to the size of Rocky Balboa’s, and I needed to sleep all afternoon.

By Scotland I was very weak.  I walked through the ruins with a girl from Quebec.  On her first day in Scotland a guy on the street yelled cuss words at her for no reason at all.  She hated it there, but I kind of enjoyed the grittiness of the culture.

The day before I met her I had a fit of extreme anxiety and depression (a common occurrence back then).  I realized that if I took a walk without my ID, and got hit by a car and died, no one would have known my identity.  Insignificance and immortality hung over my head, and I fingered my laundry cord, trying to think of a place to hang from.  Preposterous, since I didn’t even know how to tie the knot.

I had met someone in a nightclub in Portland before the trip, a trombonist whose band was #2 on the pop charts in Paris.  It was strange to hear their music on the radio.  He had a golden look about him, and was everything I’d ever dreamed of – intensely creative, passionate, and most unbelievable of all, attracted to me.  In every city I kept seeing his face over and over – in the server in Austria who winked at me, in the Englishman who gave up his seat on the tube for an older lady, in the sexy dancer who stole the show in Fosse.  I was so obsessed that I bought tickets to see the show again, but an understudy filled in for my dancing man.  I was afraid that being gone for so long, the trombonist would disappear, just like the dancer.

For the last few days of my trip, I left my hotel where I’d had breakfast with stamp collectors and workingmen, and took the tube into a wealthy neighborhood to stay with an American couple that could put me up for the weekend.  When I arrived there was banana bread and tea waiting for me on the table.  They gave me a large room with a queen size bed, sink and vanity in my room.  It felt like a luxurious paradise after all the dank empty rooms and nasty beds with springs poking up into my back.

I was painfully shy at the time, but as my trip progressed, I began to talk to people more and more.  The desperation of traveling alone with little contact stretched me out of my comfort zone.  I was about to come into a new place in life of empathy.  And my journey through Europe would change me, most noticeably after I returned home.

That following summer I would fall in love with the trombonist, or think I did, and begin to write obsessively about everything that I felt.  I learned that in order to truly experience people, you have to take risks.  I didn’t want to be like the other girls on my trip, constantly shying away from life out of fear.

This week I read one of Henry Miller’s lesser-known works, The Colossus of Maroussi.  As World War II broke out, Miller left Paris and went to Greece where he found a spiritual place, uplifted by the history of gods who share our humanity.  He was stunned by the white lightness of the landscape, the generosity, the poverty, and the women who resembled queens, even in such a harsh way of life.

“To live creatively, I have discovered, means to live more and more unselfishly, to live more and more into the world, identifying oneself with it and thus influencing it at the core, so to speak (Miller, 206).”

Europe was really the beginning of my life as a writer – learning to breathe into the world, awakening to my senses.

Portrait of an Addict

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

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            For the first time in twelve years, I am sober now for the last five months.  I am happier and more productive than I have ever been.  My mind feels crystal clear every morning – excited to write, bursting with ideas and thoughts.  And when I’m out with friends and the bars close and they’re all loaded and stumbling through the streets – I realize I am the only person who is really seeing everything, feeling everything, experiencing a memory that won’t slip from my mind by morning.

I have just finished reading Bill Clegg’s memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.  Clegg is a successful Literary Agent in Manhattan who struggled with an addiction to crack.  The very drug, crack, is symbolic of his state of being at the time.  Though outwardly he is a success – amazing job, parties, beautiful home, loving and supportive partner, friends that care about him – on the inside he feels an absolute disconnect.  He does not love himself, does not even seem to know himself, and he would rather be dead.  Eventually, he loses everything he had.

“It feels as if each week, there is some lunch or some dinner or some phone call that is going to blow my cover, reveal that I am not nearly as bright or well read or business savvy or connected as I think people imagine me to be.  My bank account is always empty, and when I look at the ledgers at the agency, I wonder how we will pay our employees, the rent, the phone bill…  I often wish it all felt the way it looked, that I could actually be living the life everyone thinks they see.  But it feels like a rigged show, one loose cable away from collapse (Clegg, 128).”

I relate to this so completely.  I too worked as a Literary Agent in New York and never stopped thinking that someone would blow my cover.  My boss was a bit of a rogue, and I liked that about him.  We clicked – I was his first employee, and in the beginning it was pure joy.  He trained me intensively.  I read books on law, and editing, and publishing.  I read manuscripts to report back with critiques.  He helped me refine my style and challenged me.  Then I began taking on clients and lunching with editors, which is when the shit hit the fan.

Being an agent is like being a gambler – and I’ve never had good luck.  You put your time and energy into a book in hopes that the editors will buy it – but you don’t get paid until they do.  My boss wanted me to quit my restaurant job, so I did.  He gave me $1,000 a month – but my dad always ended up having to give me $300 more.  After paying the bills, there was barely anything left.  Lunch with the editors was the only time I wasn’t eating hot dogs and lentils or some other cheap fare.

My boss gave me money to go out and buy a decent pair of shoes, but the ones I finally found didn’t even seem right.  I certainly couldn’t walk miles in them, and I realized they were too trendy.  I felt like I was wasting all of his money.  He believed in me so much.  Outwardly, I looked and seemed ready to be a success.  But on the inside I was a raging artist, becoming more and more lost in the role I was playing.

There was this voice that wouldn’t shut-up inside my head – I believed in my own writing more than anyone else’s.  It felt selfish.  But I was putting all of my energy into the others – and nothing was left for me.  My boss grew upset that I couldn’t keep up with the two new hires.  I wasn’t reading fast enough.  There was no time for a life outside of work.

But I was leading a parallel life.  I lived in Hoboken.  My tribe was a crowd of never do well musicians.  The bartenders only charged me six bucks to drink all night.  And when the bars closed we’d head to someone’s apartment and drink till the sun came up.  On weekdays, I’d wake up with some passed out rocker in my bed and then go into the process of switching lives – from braids to sleek ponytail, from combat boots to heels, from gypsy skirt to pressed slacks.  I’d rush to the train in a crowd I didn’t belong in – the yuppies that we’d just been taunting the night before.  And then I would reach the perfectly sleek office with the glass doors and the blonde hardwood floors and the giant view of the Empire State Building and the insanely bright lights.  Suddenly I would realize that I looked like shit – that my eyes were bloodshot and my skin dull and dry.  At lunch I’d buy something greasy like a patty melt from the corner deli.  My boss would cross over from his office to my cubicle and stare down at my desk at the mess of a sandwich and say, “Hangover food.”  And then I’d make some lame denial, “Not really, it just looked good.”

My first potential sale was a client he’d pawned off on me – a chick lit thing that I didn’t really like.  I failed to sell it and felt humiliated.  The pressure was unbearable.  None of my clients seemed exactly right.  I’d grown attached to them and was driven more by the emotion of making their dreams come true than by their talent.  Their work was good, but not great.

It all came to a head.  I lost my footing completely and anxiety took over.  And then came the talk.  My boss took me to the conference room, and said, “Lauren, you are the artist, not the agent.  This is a waste of my money.”  I called all of my clients to tell them they would need to find new representation.  I’d lived vicariously through their hopes and dreams, and it felt terrible letting them down.  My hands were shaking.  But there was a huge sense of relief as I walked out the glass doors, rode the elevator down and was at last out on the street where I could breathe.  Where I didn’t have to be something for anyone.

Drinking was only part of my failure as an agent.  I was young, introverted, uncertain, and completely inept at sales.  My boss always told me, “If people are drinking, you drink.  If they are smoking, then smoke.  If they’re talking about church, then you’re a church-goer too.”  But I didn’t want to live my life to please others.  I’d escaped from that already.  All I wanted was truth.

I didn’t stop drinking of my own accord.  For years it was normal to have six drinks a day.  I’d try to take two days off a week, but rarely managed that.  Then for the past five years, after particularly heavy nights, my liver started to hurt.  By last summer the pain became constant.  Even one sip caused sharp pangs to shoot through my side.  Physical activity grew difficult from the swollen discomfort.

I’m not sure if or when I’ll ever get to go back to that feeling I always loved.  Not much beats that charge of excitement, that interconnectedness with other human beings; on the other hand – the monotony of going in circles, the hangover, the lagging energy, the boredom.  It used to be a social crutch, but now I don’t need it, and don’t need to go out as much.  The worst of it was, alcohol was always good for taking a romantic night and turning it into a knock-out fight.  Eventually, it may have ended my marriage.

I enjoy the experience of being around others who are drinking.  I like to ride the wave of their energy and partake in the free flowing conversation.  I’ve learned to not try and make sense of what they say beyond a certain point.  And the only time I feel depressed is when there is a ridiculously nice bottle of wine on the table, and I can smell all of those complexities and the journey it could take me on -complexities that I was known as an expert for describing.

“But it’s more than just a conversation, it’s the best sex, the most delicious meal, the most engrossing book – it’s like returning to all of these at once, coming home, and the primary feeling I have as I collapse back into my desk chair and watch the smoke roll through my office is:  Why on earth did I ever leave (Clegg, 187)?

            For years I looked down on people who were numbing out the pain and not working through their issues.  Their drug of choice kept them stagnant.  But when I quit drinking, I realized that I was this person.  Everything came up from before the time that I had my first drink.  I had recurring dreams of being trapped in college.  It began to purge out of me, painfully, as I remembered the person I left behind a long time ago.  I began to make peace with her.  And I am still making peace with the fact that addiction can steal your life away.

Bill Clegg was a man who lacked self-acceptance.  But I think he found it through his writing and through sobriety.  He purged his secrets, and freed himself from the power they had over him.  Having a perfect life is a façade that doesn’t really exist.  Accepting the truth makes for a much better story.