MORE ON WRITING, NOT WRITING, AND IDENTITY
Since I last wrote, I have had a number of further adventures in not-writing. These include riding in a vintage Jaguar at 100+ MPH on a racetrack; kayaking in the East River; and snorkeling over a coral reef in Freeport, Bahamas.
The last of these was a shore excursion from a cruise about which I harbored some trepidation beforehand. I wasn’t worried about the snorkeling or other physical challenges I had signed on for—I have grown increasingly relaxed about those over the past six months. A more intense threat loomed—that of spending six days on a boat filled with “normal” people—the sort who, unlike me, go on cruises.
My family, and my brother's family, had planned this vacation--a celebration of my nephew's graduation from high school--for years. Originally it was to be a sojourn to Co. Donegal, Ireland, to participate in a massive gathering of the O'Dochartaigh clan. About a year ago, we admitted that we couldn't afford even the cheapest possible trip to Europe in the summer. We agreed to look south, on the theory that all the sane, fiscally stable people would be heading to cooler climates. We found a primitive, but attractive, lodge in Costa Rica. Then, about six months ago, my husband learned that he needed eye surgery, and I started getting medical test results that seemed to indicate that I might be using a wheelchair by July. A four-hour bus ride from the airport on unpaved roads, to a lodge that required significant hiking just to get from one's cabin to the bathroom, began to seem decreasingly viable. In the end, we settled on the cruise.
Since childhood, I have been self-conscious around regular people. I don't appreciate team sports; gambling; or most television shows. I don't read Stephen King or Michael Crichton. It's not that I can't imagine that smart and interesting people would enjoy these diversions--I just don't have the microchip, and this causes awkwardness. We run out of things to talk about quickly, and I start feeling like the boring class nerd I used to be. I imagined an entire ship populated by such people. I didn't want to get on.
As it turned out, my apprehension was justified--sort of. Many of our fellow cruisers gave our family the cold shoulder when it became clear that we weren't on board primarily for bingo, the casino, or to drink beer in the hot tub. The others dealt with this shunning with equanimity, but I found myself retreating a bit. I fought down the conviction that no one wanted to socialize with me because I was a boring wet blanket. Between ports, I found myself holing up in the ship's library--ostensibly to finish some editorial work I'd taken with me, but actually to hide among my most reliable childhood friends, the books.
On the last full day of the cruise, a nice-looking middle-aged man and woman sat down near me. The man and I busied ourselves with our laptops, while the woman sat engrossed in a book. We exchanged smiles.
After about half an hour, I felt the man's eyes on me and looked up. He said, "I have to ask--are you a writer?"
"Yes," I said. "How could you tell?"
"You look like one of us." He turned out to be a journalist and novelist. He and his wife were on the cruise because he had been engaged by the cruise company as a guest lecturer. The three of us talked intensely until I had to leave to meet my family. We agreed that the cruise would have been a very different experience if we had found each other earlier. We exchanged email addresses and web sites. I left feeling that I had attended that clan gathering after all.
One other important thing happened. As they were disembarking, my son, brother, and nephew were forced to endure a form of harassment by a cruise employee that was maddening in the moment, and surreal in retrospect. The incident haunted me all day, and the next morning I said to my son, "You know, what happened on the gangway would make an amazing story."
"Are you going to write it?" he asked.
I've already started.
Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. Her book, Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity (Seal, 2007) is now available in bookstores. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.
Wonderful post, Sue -- I can truly relate.
Posted by: T | July 21, 2008 at 12:04 PM