Feeling Talented

MML #1: When professors like things you write so much that they read it to the entire class.

... And you sit there torn between being embarrassed and being insanely proud that something you wrote was considered good by someone besides your best friend and your mom.

Right, so this actually made my life yesterday, but after I spent ten minutes setting up this blog last night I was simply too exhausted to actually go through with the effort of posting something. As you can see, I'm off to a great start.

Anyway, as I mentioned in the previous entry, I'm an English and Creative Writing major; my eventual goal in life is to be a novelist. So it was pretty cool when my professor said she'd be reading mine, and I was surprised because I thought I had done the entire assignment wrong and that it was way too personal for anyone to be able to relate to.

Anyway, here's the entry. It's a response to the short story "Decisions" by Alice Munro.

"I’ll state the obvious: this is a story about healing. It’s about healing from and dealing with something that I could never possibly understand. And yet, somehow, I do. Somehow, despite the fact that I have no real idea yet how much a woman loves her children or what it must be like to lose them, despite the fact that I’ve never been in an abusive relationship, somehow I still felt like I understood this story and really identified with this character.

Because I do know what it feels like to visit a mother in the hospital. And though I am fortunate to still have my mother, I know how just seeing the woman who raised you in such a weakened state can weaken you, too. It’s like suddenly your world makes a little less sense, because the woman who has taught you everything you know at being human is abruptly made weak, incapable. I know that it can make you feel lost, because you don’t know anymore where you are supposed to turn for the answers you need. You question your identity because you are questioning her identity and all you want is someone around who understands, who can make it seem like everything is okay.

And that’s the other part of this that I understand. I know what it’s like to care about someone so much that you can lose your personality in the midst of forming a relationship or friendship. Things start to go bad and you don’t even notice because you can still remember when things weren’t bad. Everything seems like it’s going okay – not great, but at least okay – one day and then all of the sudden you realize that you don’t trust the person standing next to you anymore. You still love them or care about them, because even if they’ve been truly horrible sometimes it’s just not as easy as flicking an off-switch. And you can be furious at them for a while, or hurt, but that doesn’t really help anything. Eventually you just have to make yourself a little numb.

So I get why she keeps going to visit him. Why she wants to understand. Despite the fact that she doesn’t love this man, probably hates him for what he did to her and their children and their life, there is a part of her that still needs him to validate the things that she believes to be true."