Glee!

I found out about Hippocampus in 2011, through a Google alert I have set up for the word. Usually the alert collects articles on treatment for neurological disorders, discoveries about how memories are formed, and evidence of how exercise boosts hippocampus function. Given the hippocampus’s role in memory, it’s not a surprise that “hippocampus” and “memoir” would coincide, but when that alert over two years ago showed me a new market for nonfiction writing had just been established, one that sought to celebrate EXACTLY what I was writing and studying, just as I was in the middle of the Big Push to get my memory manuscript full formed, it was like the stars aligned and the sky cleared to a perfect blue and hot coffee appeared bedside and every other analogy for extra-special-goodness happened all at once.

Here’s what Hippo offers: “a literary magazine filled with fresh memoir excerpts and memorable essays” as well as “a venue to educate and inform those interested in reading and writing creative nonfiction.” Of its name: “The hippocampus is what makes enjoying great memoir possible because, without it, memories would not exist.” If you know anything about me at all, I hope it’s this: those words are some of my favorite words all strung together.

So here’s what I wrote to the editors:

I have a Google alert set for the word “hippocampus.” It’s one of my favorite words, not only for how it sounds, but for what it means to me. I’m writing a book about memory. It’s my response to the childhood memoirs I love to read. Since I have only two childhood memories, I can’t write a childhood memoir. But for the last three and a half years, I’ve been studying memory, undergoing memory recovery therapy, and defining what memory means to someone like me. Though not really a memoir, my manuscript is a hybrid of psychology, neuroscience, and narrative that chronicles my attempts to excavate lost memory. That Google alert—that’s how I found your new magazine. And that’s why I stopped doing everything else today and searched my manuscript for an excerpt that I that I hope you might consider for publication. … Though this letter accompanies my submission, I want to use it to more generally say I’m thrilled to see your publication up and running. For a few years I’ve been dreaming of centers, journals, and outlets devoted to the celebration and study of creative nonfiction. It’s immensely exciting to see the birth of Hippocampus Magazine, and I wish you the absolute best!

They accepted my piece, an excerpt called “The Rabbit Hole.” I responded with exclamation points sized up and set in bold. It was published in the inaugural issue, May 2011. And now I’m learning that it’s being highlighted two years on. Gleeeeee.

I happen to be in the middle of a Big Push to revise my memory manuscript, two years after completing it. And I happen to be at the tail end of an odd and hopefully short-lived existential crisis during which I found myself questioning the purpose of a life of art. And I ALSO happen to be putting the finishing touches on an essay in which the other hippo, the hippopotamus, plays a walk-on part, and that kind of coincidence can’t be understated. So here I am, somewhat cold coffee by the bed, reading this email from Donna at Hippocampus, visiting the site, seeing my essay alongside some of my favorite reads from the last two years, and thinking: my stars, my skies, my coffee, I am living a blessed life of art.

Thank you, Donna and the Hippo team, for all that it takes to continue to put Hippocampus Magazine out each month.

To further honor this moment, I’ll share one article from the latest Google alert on the hippocampus: did you know that third-graders who have a “larger and more active hippocampus” respond very well to math tutoring? BE STILL MY HEART, THE STARS REALLY ARE ALIGNED TODAY. Check it out.

(For my part, I started the semester talking about my baby son, S.)

Since then, though, I’ve been trying really hard to mute a sound that’s tucked up there in my brain. A wheeze, really, that escapes its dank little brain hole the moment I open my laptop. Three words strung together for maximum destructive effect: What’s the point?

It’s awful. It’s awful to hear that whiny buzz—like a motorcycle revving three blocks away, like a leaf blower across the lake—just when I find five or ten minutes to write.

Yet in the face of it, I keep writing and revising and reading journals and reading for a journal and offering feedback on work by friends and caring a great deal about the writing my students turn in.

Right now I’m working on a piece based on a trip took Botswana. I’m very concerned with bird sounds. I have been for at least a month. I want to get the sounds just right.

I listen to those damned birdcalls on birdcall websites, over and over. Is it “zaw-caw” or more “zah-cah” I wonder. Is it even a “z” or more like a “ts” at the beginning? Start again. Turn it up. Lean in close.

How can I possibly spend my time writing birdcalls—rearranging the lettered representations, trying to match them exactly and honor my memory of them to boot—when pain, suffering, and death are happening, everywhere, inevitably? And how can I possibly teach my students that what they are writing about actually matters? That how they say it, how clearly and with how much conviction, makes a difference to anyone at all?

My friend and co-author of the Seven Sins Series, Cheryl Wilder, wrote in her essay on Sloth in the writing life:

By ignoring our writing we cut ourselves off from the rewards that stem from this deep thinking and creativity, and we fail a community that needs the respite of a compelling story after a long, hard day, an essay that helps them feel less alone, or a poem that provides courage during a tough time. By not honoring the writing life we are not honoring our thread in history, our connection to the great writers before us, the ones in our midst, and the ones yet to come.

In the last few months I have returned often to these words. They manage to drown out the whiny buzz, even if they can’t mute it altogether.

What am I doing here exactly? In the positive, I’m thinking, creating, connecting, threading.

Today, though, what I find more important is this: in the negative, I’m not causing anyone pain or suffering. I’m not facing down death nor am I facilitating the deaths of others. I’m not relishing in anyone’s pain or secretly wishing suffering upon anyone. I’m not plotting another’s demise. I’m not watching my handiwork inflict immense anguish and feeling smug or proud or relieved or triumphant.

You know what I’m doing here, you wheezy little existential thought? I’m listening to birdcalls and working hard to match them with the right letters. That’s what I’m doing here exactly. Eff off, whiny buzz.

Note, I share in the evening.

And I started this post two weeks ago.

Mama Morning #1: Yes This Really Does Happen And Quite Often At That
6:00 I rouse slowly from a strange and wonderful dream in which I am winning an award for Best Sentence, Five Commas or More. I have been sleeping since 11pm. I reach for the monitor and see my beautiful baby boy is still asleep. Having rolled to his tummy at some point during the night, with head to the right and tush elevated, he looks like a toddler to me. I think, I have a baby. I have thought this, with surprise, many mornings since he was born.

6:05 I feel awake. Maybe I’ll write. I slip out of bed and open our bedroom door. The tiny hallway, the core to our three-room apartment, is chilly. I retrieve my slippers, then open the door to the all-purpose living room. The cats greet me, hungry for breakfast. I feed them. I sit on the couch with my laptop. I write.

6:55 I rouse J—”It’s time for us all to begin our day”— and head to the kitchen to prepare coffees, bottle, fruit, kitty food.

7:00 Through the monitor I hear J’s voice: “Hello! Good morning little one! How are you? How did you sleep? Did you dream?”

7:15 We gather in the kitchen area. J feeds S while The Today Show plays in the background. I tap around the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, cleaning out the kitty bowls, considering what veggie to make for S’s dinner later. We talk about the day to come, plans, medical appointments.

8:00 (because it takes that long for S to eat his breakfast) J takes a shower and I change S into an extra-soft hand-me-down outfit. We hit the activity mat for his daily physical therapy exercises. We sing, stretch, roll. He burps.

9:00 S is as routine-oriented as his mama; he yawns at almost the same time every morning. I feed him some cereal or more fruit, and he nearly sleeps sitting up. J readies for work, plants a kiss through the hole at the top of S’s orthotic helmet, and leaves. I carry my sleepy baby to his crib, start the mobile, the sound machine, and the giraffe that brings Victoria Falls to his bed. He smiles and giggles at his mobile, turns to his right, and falls asleep for the first of three naps of the day. I write.

Mama Morning #2: This Happens Quite A Lot As Well
3:55 I rouse slowly from a strange and initially wonderful dream in which I am winning an award for Best Sentence, Five Commas or More, but someone in the audience is wailing. I am clearly undeserving of this award and will have to give it back. The wailing persists as I wake. The cats. Which cat? Tiko? It has to be Tiko. Then I think, I have a baby! Is it the baby? I reach for the monitor and realize I have left it out in the living room. So is it him? Or the cats? It’s the cats, right? They hate being banished to the living room each night, but they were interrupting the precious little sleep we were getting when S first came home. Yes, it’s the cats, banging on the door that leads from our all-purpose living area to our tiny hallway and the only other two rooms in our apartment, S’s and ours. Poor Tiko is so out of sorts he’s licked a portion of his belly raw. Was I supposed to call the vet back about something? Sala’s heart murmur? I can’t remember. Wait. That is not the sound of a cat. That is, in fact, the sound of a baby. My baby. I have a baby!

4:00 Crib-side, I assess the problem. Poopy diaper? Teething pain? Stuck on his belly? He’s fine now, not wailing, snoozing away. Was it Tiko after all? I am going crazy.

4:05 Back in bed, I glance at J’s side, about to tell him it’s his turn next, when I remember his side is empty. He’s in Pennsylvania covering a story. He’s been gone for a couple weeks now.

4:05:01 I curse a little bit.

4:10 Blast. I would like the monitor, but the cats! If I creep out into the living room, they will want breakfast, then they will do what they always do after breakfast, which is play, loudly and enthusiastically. I decide to leave it.

4:15 I should get the monitor. I am, clearly, a terrible mother.

4:17 No. Too tired. Too cold. The cats.

4:20 I know what woke S. I heard it in his breathing, the congestion, getting worse as his cold settles in. I need the snot sucker, in case he wakes again. I ran the tube through the dishwasher last night, so I slip out of bed and into the hallway, pausing to laugh at the poor cats, their pink pads pressed to the glass panes of the hallway door, a feline The Graduate. It’s your lucky morning, I tell them. I head to the kitchen where I realize I forgot to restock the cats’ food. Anything we have is in the nursery bathroom, since that’s the only place we have for storage. I don’t want to creep in there for fear of waking S when he’s sleeping through this cold. The cats will have to wait. I smell, then see, that one of them pooped half in and half out of the litterbox we leave by the front door overnight. I stoop to clean it up and start to cough, as I do each morning when I clean out the litterbox, normally J’s job when he’s not in Pennsylvania. I curse a little bit more.

4:30 The litterbox is clean, I’ve inhaled my asthma medicine, I’m fully awake and ready for coffee.

4:31 There is no coffee. New beans are, in fact, in the nursery bathroom, along with kitty food. I open the dishwasher to retrieve the snot sucker tube. It’s not on the top rack where I’m sure I placed it last night. It’s not on the bottom either, not with the silverware, not stuck by a mug. I run a search of the entire main room. Behind the TV. Under the desk. Between the couch cushions. I return to the dishwasher for another look. And there it is, on the floor of the dishwasher, half of it still a tube, the other half melted over the heating element.

4:32 I return to bed.

4:35 Did I finish my grading?
4:36 Did I change the pediatrician’s appointment?
4:37 Do we have to select an occupational therapist or will one be assigned to us?
4:38 How do you treat a cat heart murmur?
4:39 What exactly is occupational therapy?
4:40 What is Beasts of the Southern Wild about?
4:41 Should I have kept the kitty poop for the vet? Is that what I’m forgetting? A sample?

4:42 I reach for my phone so I can Google occupational therapy, heart murmur and cats, Beasts of the Southern Wild. But my phone is not on the bedside table. It’s not on the bookshelves we’ve got turned and stuffed behind our bed as a headboard. It’s not on a dresser or on the bathroom sink. It’s in the main room. With the cats. I should just go out there and start my day. Write. No, empty the dishwasher. No, I don’t want to deal with the melted plastic mess. Just write. No, I have that grading. No, this is my time to write. If I don’t write now, I won’t be able to write for the rest of the day, the week, possibly a couple weeks, until J returns. I have to claim this time, even though I’m no longer fully awake. Can I write without coffee? I don’t think so, I really don’t. Maybe.

5:30 I rouse slowly. I have been sleeping since 4:43am.

My week started Monday Jan. 14. By Sunday the 13th, with Claire’s guidance, I’d created a list of rules that would govern what constituted a complete draft. I spent a lot of time on those rules and they proved to be critical in measuring whether a draft was indeed complete or needed more time and attention. Creating the rules and discussing them with Claire beefed up the challenge with accountability and structure. I’m a really good student, always have been, and would ABSOLUTELY follow these rules. Of course I would!

Monday morning, I started an email to Claire and right then decided I would write her a daily log, then send it at the end of the day. My first entry:

Alarm goes off at 5. I know second alarm is set for 5:15, so I lie in bed, thinking, actually not afraid I will sleep through. Mind starts to race, seeing words and sentences and stories jumbled in the dark space around a glowing white document. Second alarm goes off and I sit up, pull my laptop over, and panic. 

I closed my eyes, a Claire-ism, and began to write, word-by-word, describing what I heard. It began. By the time S. awoke, I had a rousing start. By stealing five minutes at a time throughout the day, writing in my head, and returning with more time after S.’s bedtime, I turned up a whopping 1718 words by lights out.

The panic returned Tuesday morning, the panic about THE IDEA. I reported to Claire about this terrible, paralyzing panic. She told me: “You can write when your mind is entirely empty of ideas. That’s the beauty of the way our writer-minds work. You don’t need an idea. You just need a thought. And you always, always have a thought.” 

Claire, in case it’s not yet clear, is really smart. If you don’t know Claire and her smartness, go here and say hello.

Each morning I awoke to an encouraging email from Claire. She responded to my fears and concerns, shared wisdom and tidbits and highs/lows from her year-long challenge, and basically heaved loads of positive energy into my apartment and brain. Yes, I called her Coach. I began the piece for the day, most days not knowing what that would be, but on two days grabbing at a thought or bit of language from the day before. I logged throughout the day. I sent her my log + specs on the day’s piece each evening. Claire responded, and we often spent the 10pm hour exchanging emails in deep conversation about the writing life, submissions, habits, genres, exhaustion, morbidity, gluttony, revision, and on and on. I scrutinized my generative process like I’ve never, ever done before. Midweek I realized I was back. Back in an MFA-like experience, immersed in generating, talking, thinking, fearing, rejoicing, WRITING.

I also realized this. Now this is very very important. Perhaps the most critical thing that I learned from the Daily Shorty Challenge.

I do NOT need much to write. 

Let me draw this one out, since it’s so critical.

I do NOT need
coffee
chocolate
optimal health
a good night’s sleep
a medium night’s sleep
really much sleep at all
an idea (thanks again for that one, Claire)
alcohol
long blocks of time
uninterrupted time
a pain-free body
a quiet environment
lack of other responsibilities
a computer
to write.

What’s NICE when I write: fruit, accountability, support, slippers.

Hmmm. I might take this challenge twice a year, even once a quarter. Why? Because I have seven complete drafts to play with, drafts that didn’t exist before. Remember, my heart belongs to revision. What a Lusty few months ahead.

The specs:

Drafts completed: 7
Mornings of panic: 3
Pieces I hated while working on them but learned to like by the end of the day: 1
Times I started my daily log with “Booyah!”: 1
Longest Draft: 1718 words
Shortest Draft: 142 words
Forms/Genres: 3 Narrative Prose, 2 Lyric Prose or Prose Poem, 1 Meditative Prose, 1 Poem
Number of pieces that include the baby in some way: 4
Number of times I read my drafts to S.: 10
Number of times he understood me: 0
Number of times he enjoyed listening to me reading my raw work to him: 10
Number of times he spit up on my laptop: 1
Favorite working title: Jingle Collar Crime
Favorite sentence as of right now: At the heart of Southern Africa, in Botswana’s northwest region, on a long thin island surrounded by vast flood plains, inside a thatch-and-canvas tent room built on a wooden deck twenty feet above vegetation and animal habitat, I sit on a plush white bed, surrounded by mosquito netting, staring at the locked sliding glass door and cursing my husband.
Number of writer friends I encourage to take the DS Challenge: 83? 117? Everyone.

One of the first things to happen to me this new year is thumb arthritis. Tendonitis? I don’t know. I never do. Most of my joints have acted up, looking for attention, at some point. This is a first… double thumb pain. The good news: less writing time means more reading time, and I’ve cracked the Ploughshares Fall 2012 all-nonfiction issue edited by Patricia Hampl. Not only is it marvelous reading, it is marvelous READ-ALOUD reading—a dear friend reminded me that S., only six months old, just wants to hear my voice, no matter what I’m reading. So S. and I are on the fifth essay, though I admit the first one,  Charles Baxter’s “What Happens in Hell,” tugged my “is this ok?” string.

Have another bite of apples, S. I just pureed them in the machine Daddy gave me for Christmas. / “And every day the new skin is burned off.” He said this sentence with a certain degree of excitement. / Oh! That’s a new sound! You’re blowing bubbles into your apples. / “It is very painful as you can imagine.” / Yes, I think it’s hilarious too. Happily eating apples. We’ll call this Happily Apply time. / “And the pain is always fresh pain.”

Here’s to apples, hell, and the lucky number ’13.

Until now, I haven’t posted a thing. In fact, I haven’t spoken much either, not to my family or friends. A lot has been said. But for many of us, silence has edged out all else.

All I have to offer is this, a short piece I wrote about my niece when she was six. Having lost my dad when I was six, I was trying to understand the age when I observed my niece and wrote this. So for each number 6 or 7 after the comma after the name, this is what I know.

- – -

At six, my niece has decided she will only eat a sandwich if it has been cut into five triangles. She will not eat “munstard” or “spimach.” She will, however, try a “no-thank-you bite.” This means she’ll take a bite, pull a face, spit it into the garbage can, let the lid drop with the thud of rejection, and say, “No, thank you.” I took care of her while my sister stayed in the hospital after giving birth to twins. She melted down one morning over breakfast, triggered by the lack of her favorite cereal. I allowed her to cry herself out. She might have been crying at the loss of cereal, but I think she was crying at a bigger loss, the loss of her undivided parental attention. Maybe it really was just about cereal.

As stubborn and independent as my mother says I was, my niece insists on choosing her outfit for her first day of kindergarten. She starts with a pink t-shirt adorned by a butterfly appliqué. Over it, she puts on a blue and green striped cotton sundress. Underneath the dress, she pulls on yellow sweatpants. White ankle socks and shiny black Mary Janes complete the lower half. On the top, she adds a white cardigan, buttons all the buttons, and then unbuttons all but the top one.

She picks her nose on the bus. When she sees a neighbor out the window, she rips her finger out of her nose and waves.

Six, she pets her second best kitty. “Einstein was my best cat,” she says, “but I love Laptop, too.” In a few hours, because of heart failure and a blood clot, Laptop will be euthanized. “Laptop is a good kitty,” she says to an unknown listener as she plays with the long fur on the back of Laptop’s neck. “You should know that.” She has just finished her first full week of school. “My teacher knew all about me. She gave me a nametag and a cubby on my first day!” All teachers of young children know the importance of warmth, especially on the first day of school. A shaggy golden coat hides Laptop’s skinny frame. My niece reaches her fingers in to scratch his skin and looks up to her bedroom ceiling, dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars that, during the daytime, are just smudges of yellow. She says to the ceiling, “He’s a good kitty. Will you be ready for him?”

Her little sister, perched against her will on the back of a pony, is screaming. “I’ll take the rest of your ride,” says my niece, magnanimously. She turns to her little brother. “Will you cry, too?”

During a family weekend, she participates in the adults’ enthusiasm for the Olympics by planning her own event. She loads a cardboard box with the supplies valued by a six-year-old. Linen paper, plastic hand clappers, fabric paint, fish stickers, elephant-shaped paper clips, pipe cleaners, used bookmarks, cat toys, rubber bands, plaid wrapping paper, and, her absolute favorite, tape—Scotch tape, masking tape, packing tape, double-sided tape, pink tape, glow-in-the-dark tape. With input from my sister, she names the event “Project Production” and tells her parents and aunts and uncles that she will judge them on their creative craft skills. As her adult relatives work, she peers at them over her glasses, composing her mouth into a dispassionate line. We labor on our crafts. We try to sabotage each other. We talk smack. I, however, hold an ace up my sleeve. My niece likes jewelry. I know this because she often fingers my bracelet or necklace when we snuggle up for hello hugs. I make her a bracelet. When time is up, she carefully inspects each project and asks questions. She deliberates for a few minutes, and then awards me the gold sticker.

She wants to be an orange tree for her six-year-old Halloween. Not, she says, a tree with orange leaves, but a tree that grows oranges. My sister, having inherited my mother’s crafting skills, creates a green felt tree costume and glues on tens of large orange balls. My niece beams six in her Halloween portrait.

My sister and her family visit us in New York. My niece has just returned from an outing that included taking the elevator lit up by lasers to the top of a skyscraper, peering over the railing and trying to count all the buildings, identifying the spots of Central Park in which she’d run and pet animals and eaten ice cream the day before, exploring television studios, posing at the anchor desk of a well known journalist, skipping through the hallways of J’s newsroom and swiveling circles in his desk chair, and eating a hamburger the size of her head. When asked, she says that her favorite part of the day was drawing a blue heart for her uncle to put up “at his work.” She’d scrawled the words “I love you” in shaky capital letters across the middle of the heart, like an arrow.

My niece has been given special privileges to play on J’s computer. She prints. She had asked permission, but her father and mother both said no. Still, she finds the key with the apple picture, and the “P,” and presses them both. For a few seconds she has done something wrong but is not yet in trouble. But she can’t stop the whir of machinery warming up, the swish of paper sliding under the rubber roll, the sigh as new Valentine’s Day pictures are ejected to the tray.

She is sent straight to the naughty spot, not a fixed space, but a state of mind that travels with the family. Today, the naughty spot is just inside the front door of our apartment. Because it’s J’s printer, my sister tells her she must apologize to him. Her fingers are still blue at the tips from drawing him the heart. Her lower lip wavers so violently that she sucks it into her mouth and spits it out again. Her face deepens to crimson. On trembling breaths she heaves out an apology, the words expelled one by one, each riding a gust. “I’m… sorry… I… used… your… printer,” she manages. Her face relaxes as J tells her, “It’s ok. Thank you for saying you’re sorry. That’s not always easy to do.” This experience of being in trouble traumatizes her. Should nothing more traumatic happen, will she remember this? Earliest memories, I’ve read, change quite a bit, becoming fixed only later. It’s yet another aspect of memory that frustrates and confounds us, that destabilizes what we think we know.

Sometimes she wears a patch over her right eye in order to strengthen the lazy left one. In this moment of healing, she looks for connection. “You wear a patch, just like me,” she tells J, who often wears a white medicinal patch on his forehead when he has a migraine. Her eyes, still wet, search his face. “We both wear patches,” she says. “And glasses.” She leans into J’s waist, giving him her best “squeezy arm” hug. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “Do you want to play Cinderella’s Enchanted Slipper Game with me?”

He says yes, and I join in. We sprawl on the floor, all three of us on our bellies with legs kicking behind us. J and I let her win.

I learned a great deal as we imagined, created, and revised this essay series.

I learned that I don’t want to live Lustfully inside writing to the extent that nothing else matters or even exists. I learned that the other things in my life feed my writing and my love for it when I do get to sit with my pages.

I learned that I can’t live without writing, and that even though I cherish the other things in my life, I never really experience the world without wearing some form of writer’s attire.

I learned that I don’t really feel Greedy. But I did once… when I first finished a draft of my manuscript, a draft complete enough to submit, I wanted so badly for it to be accepted that I mentally skipped over what the submission process actually entails. As I walked with that first envelope to the post office, I thought only about the end game, believing I knew what it would look like. Many months helped stamp out that narrow-minded Greed, and taught me that a manuscript and its writer have much to learn even through submissions.

I learned that I don’t feel Wrathful anymore, toward Jamie or toward others. In most cases, my peace reflex has kicked in, protecting me from Wrath. In some cases, my Wrath, like fresh wet nails under a manicure fan, has hardened into a long-lasting resentment.

I learned that Envy and I live together, and like Cheryl’s Slothful beast, Envy sits on my desk, sometimes striking my cheek, sometimes scratching my arm, sometimes nipping too hard, and I either succumb to it or beat it back. Sometimes I give it a treat and it falls asleep for a bit.

Between devising this series and completing it, I had a baby. And I learned that of all my busyness tasks, caring for my son and writing are the ony two that pull me in so completely I am not thinking about anything else while doing them.

I learned a new version of collaborative writing, and I learned that collaborative writing kicks ass.

I learned—again—that writers should never, ever underestimate the value of an invested and caring editor, and no matter how much more challenging and time-consuming the revision process becomes as a result, writers should clamor for such an editor and rejoice at each bracketed comment, strike-through, and request for expansion.

I learned that writers are willing to own up to their sins. As they do, they write about it in novel and elegant ways. And therefore I learned so very much from Tavia Gilbert, Rich Farrell, Lavonne Adams, Jason Mott, Risa Nye, Jennifer Lunden, and Adam Arvidson.

I learned that if I have an idea, rather than calculate the time and effort it will take to see it through, I should just go for it and breathe later.

I learned that sinning in my writing life is cyclical and necessary and good, as much as it is stunting and unnecessary and dangerous. I learned that sinning is inevitable, but dealing with it is a choice.

I learned that I’m Proud to be a sinner.

And with that, I move on to new writing, and face the deadly sins all over again.

Of all the deadly sins, Wrath proved the hardest for me to explore. I used to be really, really angry. Not only at the person I highlight in my essay on Wrath, but at a range of circumstances that sucked memory and childhood happies out of me. I’m not angry anymore. I have many thoughts about Wrath, but airing them on the page without actually feeling Wrathful led to multiple false starts. Then I found it.

I’ve learned that once you feel Wrathful, even if you heal, you can always knock on that tender spot and bleed.