Outside the Comfort Zone

When I was a little girl I was afraid of the dark. Mother put a nightlight in my room to try to alleviate this, but I believe the nightlight made things worse. I had a four-poster bed and the posts cast snake shadows on the walls. Once, my foam rubber pillow slipped off the edge of the bed, rested against the nightlight, and started a smoldering fire. The smoke woke Mother and there was a lot of alarm about this incident for a while. Then Daddy found a different kind of nightlight, one that lasted, I know, for fifteen years. It was small, cylindrical, and casts snake shadows just like the first one had. But we had no more fires.

I have never been a great sleeper. I fall asleep fast but staying asleep has always been a problem. As a child, I remember waking in the middle of the night, most nights, terrified of the shadows, afraid to peer out the window by my bed, a window by the way, that was usually open. This was before we had air-conditioning, and in Corpus Christi, we needed cool air far more than we usually needed heat. After a while, I would get out of bed, creep to my open doorway. Mine was the first room off the hallway. I would glance towards the living room. There was a window there that reflected light from the streetlamp on our corner, and those reflections looked like demons to me. I would race to the end of the hallway where my parents' room and my brother's room opened opposite from one another. If my parents' door was closed, as it usually was, I would opt for my brother, my Bubbie, my protector, my adored one. He never even awoke, but in his sleep just hugged me to him and I felt safe there. His window was also beside his bed, and I remember staring out that window at the streetlamp on the corner, feeling the soft breeze coming through the screen, and falling gently off to sleep. This same feeling still comes to me when my SO hugs me close to him during the night.

After I was grown, I carried this fear of the dark with me into my marriages, secretly. I didn't want to admit openly to being so silly, so scaredy-cat. My second husband was a traveling salesman. We lived in Jackson, Mississippi, far far from my old home. When he was gone, I slept with the lights on. What was it about those lights that made me feel more secure? I talked to my mother about once a week, and finally ventured to tell her about how noises in the night could paralyze me, make my heart pound uncontrollably. I'll never forget her response. She said, "Go see what they are." Go see? Actually get up and go find the thing making the noise. What a foreign idea that was to me. She said she had even gone outside in search of the thing that was making her afraid. "How can you do that?" I asked her. "Aren't you scared you'll run into a burglar or a prowler, or someone who wants to hurt you?" She replied, "If I'm outside I figure I can outrun them. Inside, I'm trapped."

Once I was raising my own children, I began to practice my mother's method. Get up and go find the thing that was frightening me. It always turned out to be the refrigerator, or a limb blowing against a window, a click-bug in the bathroom, or simply the house settling. I don't know when it happened exactly, but somewhere along the line, I stopped being afraid.

Years ago, before I ever had anything published, I attended a writer's conference in Houston. One of the instructors said something that stuck with me as well. She said, "Every day, do something that causes you unease, or that you dread." She was speaking mostly about learning to deal with rejection, with the business end of writing. Call an editor. Seek an agent. Submit a story. Get outside your comfort zone.

I recently had a little piece published in Birds and Blooms Magazine. It was submitted so long ago, I had actually forgotten about it. Two years ago, right after I built my greenhouse at the Buffalo Wallow, in my enthusiasm, I wrote a little article about backyard greenhouses. A few weeks ago, an issue of that magazine arrived, had been forwarded from Texas. I didn't even open the package when I saw who it was from, could not understand why I was getting this magazine when I had ended my subscription to it long before we made the permanent move here to the mountains. I figured they were just trying to induce me to re-subscribe. I tossed the package into a stack of other magazines waiting to be perused, on the trunk in the corner of the living room.

A few days later, my aunt called. She had been in her doctor's office, in the waiting room. She picked up a magazine, was reading along when she saw my name in the byline. She said she laughed out loud she was so surprised, and told another patient in the waiting room, "I just found an article my niece wrote." As I listened to her, I went over to the trunk where I had pitched the Birds and Blooms packet. I tore it open, and there it was, a thank you note from the editor, and my article inside the magazine covers.

Well, well. And what do you know! I am a writer -- still. Just one who isn't writing much at the moment. It isn't always simple to wrestle with the desire to write and the desire to live life. And let's face it, there is fear involved with writing. It's so damned personal, and has so much ego wrapped up in it, and you have to fight the feeling that a rejection is about more than just the work. I think it's this fear that keeps me from biting off the BIG, time-consuming, full-length novel that nobody might want to publish, or if published, to actually sit and READ. And there's this niggling thought in the back of my brain telling me it's risky, that it might, just might, have contributed to the failure of my marriage, and God knows I don't want this new relationship to fail, too. Because when I'm writing, everything else in my life is tuned out. It's not easy for me to find balance. But I'm trying every day to face this fear. Because the payoff, my name in a byline, a little teensy-weensy check, gives me the ultimate feeling of purpose.

Onward....