An Open Mouth: A List of Up and Coming Inspirations

A recent milestone: I fleshed out a complete plot line for my novel!

And it's awesome and messy and written by hand (don't worry, I immediately took photos of the curling pages so that it'd be preserved somewhere). It'll probably all change around in another month or so, when I'm frustrated by the middle scenes and need to file down the edges. But my thought process is that if I have an outline, I can start writing 1-page scenes for each of the segments and inch my way towards having a working draft. Not a completed draft, but a working one.

In the spirit of plot outlines (and my own neurotic list making), this post is a list of works and resources that have really resonated with me lately. As I wrote recently, I'm in the middle of a lot of things - otherwise known as the slog - and have been seeking works that make me inspired to keep moving.

"Kindness Over Genius" written and performed by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai 

The novel Chowringhee by Mani Shankar Mukherji

This whole amazing MetaFilter document on emotional labor

Ursula K. Le Guin's short stories from Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences

"To What Do We Owe This Pleasure: On The Value of Not Writing"

 

 Anne Lamott's suggestions from the classic Bird by Bird 

And, of course, the allure of learning something completely new and out of my comfort zone: tabla!

A set of tabla and my notebook full of beats sitting on a printed orna on the floor.

"Worried About Your ___?" (or, The Full Retreat)

A snippet of Lynda Barry's inspiring book What It Is.

If you're curious what the best way is to announce your already-obvious absence, I would recommend writing a journal-style blog post. Here's my take on it.

Working two jobs came to a head for me this month; when my body was in one place, my attention and energy were moving away from it at high speeds. I didn't stop going until I hit desert.

Every book and instructor on creative expression has encouraged me towards discipline in my craft. I've had the discipline, but I still didn't have the right conditions. If I wrote during this month, I wrote single sentences or piled up the same words on different sheets of paper. If I drew, I drew jagged lines on the margins of sticky notes at work. I made my non-work life very small. I got back into watching television. The search for water was on.

Desert animals conserve energy during the heat of the day and spend their nights in great activity. I spent Sundays in front of the stove or the oven, writing in my head, focusing. When you haven't got a lot to work with, sometimes you have to play tricks on yourself to make it through.

At 1am on Friday of last week, when it was all over, I crawled into bed and shut off the lights. If there's one thing that desert animals are good at, it's surviving. But with the work that I do for my day jobs, It's hard to give myself permission to rest and recuperate. There's a huge guilt in not giving your all for other people, and a selfish desire to be wanted. Then on Saturday I re-opened Lynda Barry's book What It Is.

The book has a bit of a history with me - I bought it in pre-college more than 6 years ago as part of a creative writing class that also had me making my first zine (gasp!), and it's one of those staples that I can no longer go without. The book isn't instructional. It doesn't give you exercises for writing or drawing or dancing or singing. Instead, it just asks some very good questions.

When I got to the page photographed above - a comic book panel of an older Lynda Barry (presumably) reflecting on her worries - I knew I had to have it with me everywhere. If I worked at the same desk every day, I would have photocopied and posted it on the wall. Instead I took a picture of it with my cell phone camera and wrote a version of my own:

"Worried about your work?"

"Oh, there's my work, the magazine, healthcare in the U.S., things I did in past relationships, unanswered emails, lost contacts, what a jerk I am, the suitcases cluttering up my house -- and I can't stop worrying about stepping in dog mess."

It made me laugh! Listing out my worries made them seem funny, and manageable. I kept turning the pages of the book and finding new things to smile about. I felt like I'd struck oasis.

It's a process, we all know, to build and re-build your creativity - you try different things, you fail, you rattle around with your worries until you find another set of things to try. Me, I'm looking for stillness. As we move out of my birthday month and into National Novel Writing Month, I'm carefully cultivating my energy, and looking for moments to laugh at myself. Join me, why don't you?

Changing My Own Life

I have recently been entertained by a phrase my friend Jess told me, quoting another poet, "If you are too consumed by grief and have to watch bad TV shows, then you are with your ancestors." Glad to know that my ancestors are not disappointed in me for watching days and days of House on Netflix.

I have been suffering from moments of defeat recently, personal and professional. I moved too far into possible futures and instead ended up just where I started -- stuck. Life is not so easily changed, no matter what my fantasies.

I don't know how often most people give themselves permission to hide under the covers and feel overwhelmed by the doors shutting all around them. Facebook tells me that I am meant to have a montage of successes, near-professional photos, and funny cat video re-posts. And it's easy to feel like I'm burdening even my most well-meaning of friends when none of the material things have changed. My life situation isn't any better, but it isn't any worse. I am exactly where I've been before.

I've been thinking about resilience. It takes tremendous strength to change your own life. But I have been meeting more and more people who, despite their burdens, have been making that effort. It's not glamorous, but it deserves praise. And while I'm stewing and scheming, pushing back deadlines and spending time "with my ancestors," I must remember that I too am one of these people.

Until I can feel well again, I have been listening to poetry that inspires me. Check out these poems -- inhabiting very different emotions -- by Stacey Ann Chin, Tarfia Faizullah, and warsan shire.

Shaking Me Out of My Skin

"How do you honor people in your pieces?" I asked two different poets these past few weeks.

I've been struggling with this question as I think about writing and publishing more publicly. I always have ownership over my own stories, even when they include other people - family members, friends, and people who look suspiciously like them. Who gets visibility when I write them into my stories? My writer self or the subjects that I sit with? I've been asking for an easy answer, but I only get more complexities.

I've been writing in my head, but I've been writing badly. After the Eyes on Bangladesh event, I was fried. I started to describe my stress in waves. All the stimuli of having weekend after weekend of events made it hard for me to concentrate on anything but practicalities (did I send that email/write that post/eat today?). I love all of my work, but because I love it so much, I have not learned how to adequately say 'no'. To only get rest when someone cancels is no way to live your life. Something had to change.

What I needed was poetry.

And movement.

My friend of many years, Jess X. Chen, came to stay with me and since she is a poet, upon landing she had a list of events for us to go to. I inhaled Tarfia Faizullah's poetry collection Seam after seeing her perform. I listened to Cathy Linh Che and Jenna Le in Ocean Vuong's living room, humming and asking questions. It helps to have friends who can drop you a casual invite to an unfamiliar community.

Poetry influences a lot of my writing style, in part because that was the first form I wrote in that integrated my art and activism. These days, I don't keep up with poetry as well as fiction, though whenever I need inspiration I turn to my well-worn Pablo Neruda collection. More and more people of color poets are doing amazing work and getting noticed for it. These poets shook me out of my writing skin. This period of writing badly has reminded me of another lesson:

My art is slow. In form and content, I need to spend more time with my pieces. I need to draw inspiration from a wide range of sources. I need to listen to the people in my head before I can even think of honoring them.

I encourage you to also try drawing some other inspirations apart from your usual. I'm a fan, of course, of fabric arts (hence all the in-progress pictures in this post!). It's been immensely helpful

Tiny Heroes

When you're a kid, you cherry-pick the best stories about your family to make them seem grand.

I'm still seduced by the tales of immediate family having hijacked trains and defected from the army, given the first contraception lessons in the village or immigrating across multiple continents. As a result, some of my own life goals are patterned in the same way. Fascination with mastering practical skills? There. Calling to work in crisis management? Check. Pressure to learn more than three languages? On the list. (My sister, on the other hand, prefers to sleep.)

Despite my best efforts, I am still a macro-planner at heart. To use Zadie Smith's metaphors, I do not build a narrative linearly, and that includes the narrative of my life. When I unravel and cast on yet another string of words, I can see this constructed family is a holdover from learning about them relatively late. As an adoptee, I only had the benefit of hearing these stories far after they had become legend. And I have been writing about them ever since. Sometimes they come as ghosts and narrators in my fiction, but most of the time they come as incomplete thoughts in my journals that I never get around to fleshing out.

What are we to do with these pieces of our stories that do not knit up tightly? My father has always talked to me about the shape of things: you have the contours, so the details will fill themselves in. This goes for everything from filing taxes to building a writing career. His own immigration story embodies this - there were no certainties but for the shape of "coming to America." Only in retrospect does it look like a smooth transition from the "First Boy" in the village to the expatriate Bangladeshi man on the far side of the United States. Taking his example as I pass through this transitional time post-grad, I can also see that some things will eventually get smoothed out in the re-telling.

Instead of heroics, I've lately been performing skillful surgery on bell peppers and embarrassing myself in front of teenagers. Most of my heroism is exhibited in providing a listening ear and a plate of food. I remember how quiet and undervalued this work has become. How the best part of my family's stories are not always the grandest ones, but the ones that continue to unfold. My Amma acting as matriarch of the family, finely dicing onions on the bhoti. My cousin celebrating a new baby. These are the mundane triumphs that set me to my pen each day writing and re-writing stories about caregivers and South Asian women - groups of tiny heroes that in my life often overlap.

Note-taking and Nested Inspiration

Yesterday, I mentioned that one method of celebrating the day-to-day is to take notes. This advice was first introduced to me by Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird. The first time I read it, the message didn't necessarily sink in - what was I going to do with the mountain of notecards/notebooks/computer files that held my random thoughts? Surely not all of them would become full-fledged stories. At that time, I was concerned mostly with the goal of writing rather than the process. In a way, this was a metaphor for how I treated my life at the time.

It's hard to unlearn goal-seeking. It's also not something that should fully get taken away from your life. But one of the side effects of revisiting this mentality has been for me to realize: not every action must produce an intended goal.

And, with this in mind, I revisited the notes.

Monday Muse: Finding Inspiration

Yesterday, I watched a lot of TED Talk. TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design) brings me many inspiring videos of their conference speakers, such as the ones I've posted below. But I wanted to take this post and talk about something that I often overlook when seeking inspiration: finding things in myself that are inspiring.
Oftentimes, I will watch a video or read a story about someone who has done something awe-inspiring. Kavita Ramdas when she speaks on her experiences of talking to women the world over... Eve Ensler telling us to embrace our inner girl... Tony Porter speaking on behalf of men against violence towards women... William Ury's Abrahamic walks... Bart Weetjens with his rats... All these stories are amazing and interesting, and I think "Woah, how could they possibly have done that?"
It seems so intense, so amazing, so radical that they have done these huge things of their own volition. I get pumped up on their amazing journeys, and then... I get down on myself. I think "What have I done in the past year? What have I done in my life that could be comparative to that?"
It starts that cycle of self-doubt and self-criticism that I try to avoid in the rest of my life. I try to separate myself from judging my body, my mind, and my skills too harshly in most concepts. But when I look at someone else, those ideas fly out the window. What happens then?

As my Well Woman peers would echo: this is a classic case of perfectionism.

Not in the traditional sense, mind you. Perfectionism towards yourself is something that I avoid like the plague, letting myself do as well as I can and being proud of that endeavor. But seeing perfect people everywhere else? That is something I do every day. Think about any time that you do something new - don't you get a little flash of fear that you are not going to be as good as some people in the group with you? Even if you know that they've been doing this stuff just as long as you? Or if they are an expert on it from their own long hard work?
I think in our society we refuse to believe that people who are good at something had to work and fail and try again before they attained that position. We just see the perfect part and that's where it stops. And that's something that sorely needs revising.

So, this late Monday, I challenge you to... watch a lot of TED Talk. And, of course, I also challenge you to love yourself by not judging yourself against others. And, also, give others that you see the same break that you are giving yourself. That means: do not think that everyone just grew up perfect and you did not. Do not hold them to some phantom standards that you think are higher than you could ever reach. This is a key feature of accepting yourself and your own personal accomplishments.

Check out some other places I have found inspiration in the Caught My Eye series, as well as some other lessons I have learned in this life.
You may also be interested in some of my opinion pieces, such as Writing Live, Discrimination and Mixed Metaphors, or Single Sex Education for Women and Girls.

Speaking with Myself

In the last week or so, I have decided.
Yes, decisions were made. Big and small, long-term and short-term... but all in the name of rejuvenating my motivation. And, thankfully, it seems to be coming back (yippee!). So let's see what some of them are...

1. Junk food detox - currently, I am on day 3 of this; no junk food for a week in order to reset my eating habits. Willpower! Must... be strong...
2. Journaling - I realized, recently, that I don't need to pour out all my problems onto other people when I can have a relatively simple fix by writing it down. So, I have begun daily autopsies of my current state. Not for this blog, but my private journal (something I haven't done since 7th or 8th grade - imagine that!)
3. Note-taking & writing - writing has been sooo far away from me lately. Like, lightyears. After going to Write-o-Rama this weekend and re-awakening my love of writing down crazy random things and making zines (which are just perfect for miniature thoughts, haha), I realized I cannot just put down writing until I go to college. It's something to be done in the here and now! And, it is something to post up on this blog.
4. Bursting of stage fright - I took the opportunity to do some performance work at Write-o-Rama; needless to say, I'm out of practice. But, I believe that, after bursting my stage fright bubble with my grad speech, I have to memorize, internalize, and personalize it before I can find it acceptable. The nervousness is because I haven't worked with it yet. I haven't molded it into what I want it to be. So, that's my next step.
5. Stuff to do! - I made another, much longer, list of things to do. And it includes biking with my dad, cooking something daily, and a lot of other projects that will occupy me with the act of doing something. My biggest realization? Start now. I have been putting off many of these items because of petty reasons ("It's not summer..." "There are other things to do right now...") but what does it matter if I finish this book next Wednesday or in August? There are always new things to start later.
6. Explore Washington - belatedly, I want to explore my home state. With my boyfriend, with my friends, we will pass through the memories and create new ones before I go. (Come to think of it, it sounds fairly dreary when I say it that way...)
7. Returning to old passions - perhaps the most important on this list, I have decided to return to moments that I love but have chosen not to do. Writing is one, yoga is a big second. Then there are just other things that I haven't even thought about doing but know I want to - like knitting a project other than the squares, photography, making a collage, and re-learning how to Photoshop. All very important things that I seem to have let quaver along the way.

Time and time again, I have these realizations. Most of this list is hopeful in nature; I haven't yet done everything but definitely will work on it. I want to re-establish who I am and do stuff for me. School has taken that away from me, but it's not the only culprit. I have definitely let my steadfastness slide with the final weeks of school trickling down...

Countdown: 8 days left.
See you at the finish line!

I am grateful for...
This sentence: "I have sent you nothing but angels," said by God in the story The Little Soul and the Sun, which my yoga teacher suggested when I asked her about how to control anger. You should read it; it can be found here: The Little Soul and the Sun

Check out some more posts featuring my photography.

Coming Home - John Legend

The messages from The Universe really keep me going.
I get them in my email and I think that everyone else should too - because they're just alternative to what you often hear with the little "words of wisdom" you see once in a while and just stop believing. Today the message was:

'See through the fog that tells others nothing matters, nothing is happening,
and it does no good.
They realize not, Jordan, that every second of history... was optional.

Burning down the house,
The Universe'

It makes me appreciate that all of these things are present. It makes me feel a little rebellious. And it makes me feel like whatever I am doing now, regardless of how difficult it may be, is definitely mine.
Thank you messages from The Universe. I am going to shamelessly plug you right here so that everyone can have a little laugh or a little thoughtfulness at your awesome new advice.
TUTs Adventurers Club

(By the way, nobody will know, but I was practicing shutter speed timing with my little bobblehead tiger that my friend in South Korea sent me a really long time ago - it was bobbling away as I snapped this shot - sweet, huh?)

Check out some more posts featuring my photography.