Hello friends,
If you’ve never settled down—or never lived in continually unpredictable circumstances—you don’t know exactly how you’ll react when the opposite appears in your life. For me, settling down in school brought on a new type of thriving.
17. Stable place, unstable family
Junior year of high school was the first time I spent two consecutive years enrolled at the same school. Social insecurities seemed to vanish as I began racking up accomplishments doing things I loved—studying, running, dancing, acting, and cross-country skiing.
Looking back, I wonder just how I did everything without burning out. In the fall, I won cross-country races and danced as the Fairy Godmother in a ballet of Cinderella. During winter and through spring, I was the only girl on the cross-country ski team and played Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. I laughed a lot with my friends, and when I wasn’t laughing, I was studying because straight A’s were essential to my escape plan. Building my college application happened to be fun.
Despite my mother’s insistence that our family stay in New Hampshire so that I could finish high school, Scotty was increasingly absent. He told us he was spending time at the Fernald’s house, our friends from Pike who had moved to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Rob Fernald was running a company called the Aviarium, which made indoor window bird feeders featuring one-way glass so that the birds didn’t know you were watching them.
While I was away for six weeks that summer at St. Paul’s Advanced Studies Program in Concord, New Hampshire, Scotty was also away, leaving my mother alone in the house for the first time since I had been born. She wrote me a letter about a male wren on our property who started building another nest before his other partner’s chicks flew from their nest. In a chapter called “One Way Glass” in Escape from Nowhere, I write,
Papa and I were like the birds coming to feed in an Aviarium. We could only see our own reflections of the outside world. Cheryl kept putting food out for us, but like the male wren, we had already started building new nests.
I’d like to dispel any notions that my rise to success in high school was a fairy-tale story about me pulling myself up by my bootstraps. Any child dealing with tension in the home has to have an outlet, and mine happened to be overachieving. It came at a cost, like a debt adding up in secret until I had to confront the dark underbelly of the pretty story I told everyone. Writing the memoir helped me see beyond the surface story to find the real story.
What pretty story have you told that hid a dark side?
Creativity heals
When I set out to write the memoir, I could not foresee the effects of facing the past in detail. Dedicating myself to writing turned out to be a dedication to healing. Whether anyone reads my pages doesn’t take away the fact that I changed by writing them. Putting together the puzzle of these years was a worthy exercise for my soul.
In times of chaos, any act of creation is like a balm for our souls. When we make something original, we let spirit in, work out what needs to be worked through, and produce something for others to enjoy (if we want them to).
“What wants to come through you? Call it in,” sings Olivia Fern in “Remember Why You Came,” a song I’ve been playing every day for the last few months. (YouTube | Spotify)
What will you call in this week?
Love, Lee Ann
You are seeding a path for others to follow by sharing your writing process. xo