In Ten Year's Time

Something that I've struggled with much of the time I've lived in The Netherlands is, will I ever come out this? Will I ever come out of the seclusion I've found myself in the past nine years. I'm positive the answer doesn't lie in the Dutch culture itself. I'll always be a foreigner here, even though I speak the language, and have a Dutch passport. It isn't possible to be accepted as a whole into a culture that isn't one's own. People will always look at me as the American, which carries with it elements of suspicion and misunderstanding that I surpass in my own culture. I'll always be an outsider, and I don't like it. I have a strong need to get out. I feel like I've been watching my life go by here, and that I'm shut out of a lot of opportunities as a writer by the nature of where I live. My life and development stopped when I got here. There were a lot of things I could have done rather than come here. I have this vision that I will pick them up once I get back, if I ever get back.

My old fiction workshop teacher Alice Sebold's new book The Almost Moon came out. I took two fiction workshops with her at Hunter College in Manhattan in the early 90s, before she left for California. Obviously, she's achieved enormous success, and I can't aspire to that. From what I've read, it sounds like her opportunities to really develop as a writer, to take things further, started when she became a graduate student at UC Irvine.

I was surprised that she remembered me when I took her second workshop, since I took the second one a few years after the first. My stories often silenced the class. She told me that there was "a brittle disparity" running through my work.

I feel like I could possibly take my writing somewhere, given some opportunity, and a little support. I find myself starving for those two things where I am at now. Maybe I have them already, and I'm taking things for granted too much. Maybe I just need to be like the little steam engine, "I think I can. I think I can" all the way up the hill. Everyone has obstacles. I just need to stop grumbling, and get to it.

Living where I do, I'm shut off from any community at all, let alone the intensive writing community that a graduate program provides. It sounds ideal, but perhaps I'm dreaming.

I'm completely stranded here with my kids all of the time. My situation leaves me feeling so hopeless, it's so discouraging, that I find it impossible to work up enough confidence to start writing again. I have enough material, and ideas to work with, but I just need to convince myself to follow through a bit.

There have been periods when I've felt some inspiration, and I start ticking away, writing some things down, but it hardly ever comes to that. Most of the time I'm stuck here feeling ship wrecked. I'm sure it isn't interesting to read about, but that's what most of my days look like, and I really need to put it behind me soon.

People who live in Amsterdam can talk about what a great city that is to live in, but I don't live there. It's an hour and 15 euros away by train, and let's face it, I can't afford too many trips.

It pains me to think of all of the time that's passed, the daily struggle I've had to face since coming here. Maybe I'll write a novel one day about alienation, after experiencing it for so many years myself. First I need to gain some perspective on the situation, and I don't see that happening if my emotional life continues the way it has been for the past nine years.

Perhaps it's taught me a valuable lesson. I feel like I know what it's like to be a discriminated minority, to be shunned by the majority. Maybe that's a valuable lesson, something that I can take with me somewhere else. I try to think that it can be a form of empowerment, but those are only moments. It's not something I can sustain, or lean on in any way in the day to day.

Some people come here, and are happy that they can work less, and that the health insurance is cheap. They think it's a better society, but that hasn't been my experience at all. Living here isn't better than living in the United States.

People I knew have gone on to getting higher degrees, getting published, going further in their careers, but I'm shut off from all of that by virtue of being here. Maybe if I had lots of money, and lots of freedom, I'd feel differently, but I don't. I could travel back and forth. I could do an expensive online program. I wonder where I'll be if I have to face another ten years of this. It's a scary proposition.

Emancipation

In Brussels several months ago I read an interview with the Dutch author Hella Hasse in a local newspaper. In it she said that she didn't see how the freedom to sit behind a desk and perform menial office work was emancipation. I couldn't agree more. Of course, working in an office gives you the freedom and power that your own income brings. Being dependent on a man's income isn't an option for most women today, although 62 percent of women in The Netherlands work, most of them part-time, so there must be a lot of dependency going on here.

I read Martha Quest and The Grass is Singing over ten years ago, and I'm not even sure where my copies are anymore. After Martha is married, has a child, and is living miserably as a housewife, Lessing remarks that "she woke up everyday to endless deserts of time," waiting as she did everyday for her husband to return.

In in The Golden Notebook Lessing remarks that each housewife was locked up at home alone and isolated in her own personal hell.

Of course Doris Lessing worked hard, and wasn't afraid to think, or to draw from her own experience.

She said that she wouldn't recommend raising a child without a father, especially a boy. She and her son Peter are still living together today.

Writing a good novel is just as all-engrossing as raising a child well. I doubt very much if the two can go together. Either you neglect the child, or you neglect your work. If you have the money, or you have to work, you can pay someone to raise the children for you. There's always a sacrifice. Of course if you raise your children, and you'd really rather be a novelist the entire time, the children are probably going to grow up being made aware of it somehow. Few people have the true measure of freedom creativity requires to thrive. Perhaps you just have to be bold enough to take freedoms. Someone, or something, eventually has to give. Either that or you wind up on the boulevard of thwarted dreams. Or are they illusions....

Write 1000-2000 words a day

Here's a goal: If you want to be a writer, you should write 1000-2000 words every day! Of course, all of the advice says, if you want to write, you have to write regularly. Fair enough. Very sound advice indeed. Although, I can't seem to follow it.

Does this mean 2000 words of blather? Or does it have to be focused, purposeful writing. Will "automatic" dadaist writing do? The advice doesn't say. So many days go by of me persecuting myself for not coming up with something brilliant, predigested, and perfectly worded, that I do not write a word, but writhe in a lack of profluence.

Some of my best writing is under 500 words, which almost always comes out in a minute of inspiration. Problem is, inspiration running low.... Of course, this was an advice website for aspiring freelance journalists, a career I gave up over 15 years ago. The guy said that he reads hundreds of magazines. I just don't have the stamina for that anynmore. I may have back in my early twenties, but I changed, and now that's all over.

Even though I am not hyper-productive, and I question my motivation a lot, underneath it all, I like to think I am a writer.

Some other advice I've read is to tell people that you're a writer, if you want to be one. I did this for years in between dropping a journalism career, and dreaming of writing stories. Okay, I'd written some stuff in Alice Sebold's creative writing classes at Hunter College in New York, so I can't say that I was a total fraud. I'd written lots of other things. But I did feel like a fake a lot of the time when I told people (mostly in the art community of New York) that I was a fiction writer. Some astute people would want to know what kind of fiction I wrote. I had a remedy for this, too. I told them the truth, which is that I play around with voice, using material from my own life, developing different persona's.

Once, years ago, in the process of giving up a journalism career, I met with a guy who was a feature writer for Forbes or Fortune. He told me that when he was starting out he had what he like to call the "impostor complex." He was working at Time, but had a constant internal dialogue that he was an impostor, and that sooner or later, someone was going to find him out, and that he would get the sack. Of course, his fears were never played out, and he went on to have a career in journalism.

What a shame that I've never had the guts to go for anything. Even with people around me telling me that I was capable, I was always intent on proving to them that they were all wrong, and that I was right. I really was the impostor. It's a great way to squander all of your talent, grinding it down into sodden ashes.

There can always be a new dawn. I might just achieve my personal millennium goal to become a writer, yet. Hooray!