Literary: Woman on the Couch (Part 2)

Relocation Fund

(I wrote this introduction to my next memoir last August. Since then, I have been in limbo as I look for a permanent home on the Peninsula in Washington State).

As I sit in another in-between place, I contemplate what home means to me. I have lived in houses and apartments for both long and short-term. But my experiences in Bellingham, Washington left me poised on an invisible edge. No place I lived ever felt like home even if this touted city drew me in with her allure. The theme I encountered was, “There’s no room at the inn.”

Bellingham courted me for four years while I lived in Mount Vernon, Washington—another city that drew me in with dreams of the mighty Skagit River. And this caused me to venture north from Seattle—a city that I thought I would live forever, despite my love-hate relationship with the Emerald City.

Like many other people living as middle class or below middle class, I have experienced the tight squeeze from the top. More than ever, I found myself lost in an old patriarchal dream rooted in the divide and conquer mentality as opposed to my spiritual belief in Unity Consciousness. I witnessed a false economy ebb and flow—shrink and expand like an illusion or a trick of mirrors in a movie by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel. And I’m one to wonder about the man behind the curtain twirling the knobs creating these illusions that prevent me from ever finding a home.

So, now, through the kindness of a woman herbalist who inherited her mother’s properties, I type this page in a cabin on top of a hill in a place called Sudden Valley. Behind me ravens croak their morning calls to the skies and 200 foot pine and cedar. It’s not perfect. And it’s just temporary—a phrase my mother drilled into my head and the reason why I’m unable to plant my roots into the fertile ground. Beliefs keep me stuck or living in between homes in an in between land where I wander virtually friendless, unemployed, and always on the verge of hoping. But there’s a saying that you can’t live on hope and I find this to be true. Everything has gone up in price from food to rent which has increased 100% in some cases in this touted city. Good old hope does not pay the rent any longer. This world vomits dreamer types.

It seems that everyone wants to live in this northwest corner of the United States with its views of the Salish Sea, Mount Baker (a volcano about to blow), and the lakes that sparkle like gems in a queen’s tiara. Magazine journalists wax about this “livable” city. And this causes young families, retirees, and Californians (escaping the heat and traffic of their state, but not their hedonistic lifestyles), to relocate to Bellingham and Whatcom County.

I recently saw a new trend that revolves around Millennials leaving cities for suburban areas or small towns. This means that they too will flock to cities and towns like Bellingham—free of skyscrapers (for now) and of glitzy departments stores, large software companies, and corporate America. But where does that leave artists such as me who have barely escaped the encroachment of gentrification?

I still recall Pioneer Square and Bell Town in Seattle when they were artists’ havens. Gentrification has far-reaching effects even destroying the fabric of the cuter small towns such as La Conner, Coupeville, Port Townsend, and Edison in Washington State. The recipe includes artists moving to these places, setting up shop, and giving a quirky charm to a place. Wealthy tourists stop by on a visit, enjoy the café life and spending time in small galleries, and then they decide to relocate to the artist’s colonies—thus driving up the price of real estate and then opening the door to private investors who develop property thus transforming a once livable community into a rich man’s playground.

When I moved to Seattle in the mid-1980s, the city was still considered backwater. Sure, the city had its place in history books as it was a famous stomping ground for gold diggers and early industrialists. Boeing set up shop around Seattle. Jazz flourished in Seattle. And many artists and offbeat people found their home in the magical place surrounded by water and mountains.

I still recall the pre-grunge days when Microsoft was just getting its foothold in the world of transnational corporations. Starbucks had only two locations (Pike’s Place Market and the University District). Had I visited a psychic who told me that Seattle would grow into a giant and that its homegrown corporations would compete for world domination, and that developers would tear down historic homes in favor of glitzy condos, I would have laughed. Seattle’s tentacles are far-reaching and devilishly destructive.

Yet, by 1989, rent was increasing forty dollars every three months. Since I was an underground musician and writer, I didn’t make enough money to cover the rent increases. I moved perhaps ten times during the twenty-one years I called Seattle my home. I thought by fleeing to Mount Vernon in 2007 where I worked briefly as an art and lifestyle journalist, I would escape gentrification. Then the economic crash of 2008 nearly destroyed me.

This is when Bellingham began her flirtation with me. She appeared in glossy national magazines. She appeared in a documentary film. She appeared in my fourth novel, Love Quadrangle which featured a Quebecois architect, a writer fleeing California, an author with a dark side, and a French travel photographer. However, while my characters felt at home in the City of Subdued Excitement, I found myself living in between homes four times and I only lived in Bellingham for six years. Forget the courtship and then marriage to this city. I’m asking for a divorce!

I lived in attics, in basements, in Air B & B’s, hotels, and some scummy places that barely fit the description of homes. I experienced Argentine ants crawling into my laptop and across my hands as I kept up with my blogs. I experienced recluse spiders hanging out near my bed. And I learned firsthand about people with Cluster B personalities since I actually shared homes with them.

In addition, I experienced rejection from employers, and people I tried to befriend (again, narcissists make for bad company). While I felt at home in natural settings and I fell in love with the numerous dogs around the city (except for the ones that tried to attack me), I found it hard to make any real human connections.

It’s true that people in this region act in a passive-aggressive way. They say things like, “If you ever find yourself in trouble, call me,” and then when you follow up, they hem and haw, doing a bunch of fancy footwork to get themselves out of a tight squeeze. And if anyone should end up homeless they have a choice of hanging out with narcissists with hidden agendas or landing on the street. Bellingham has no safety net for people not already living on the streets or in a car, or in a tent. And even then, who wants their name to languish on a waiting list while they’re living in a car?

So, as I write these pages, I live in between homes again. I have no internet and plenty of time on my hands to pursue my creative interests. My eyes itch from mold growing on damp walls of this cabin, but I tell myself, it’s still better than living in a shelter. My heart has already left Bellingham as divorces tend to do that to hearts. But I have yet to find a new home in Port Townsend, knowing that I’m still stuck in a temporary holding pattern. Even though I know that home is in the heart and not near a body of water or on a piece of land.

I’ve learned along the way, on this thorny path. The Creator pulled rugs from underneath my feet and took my crutches (especially in regard to new age beliefs) from beneath me too. I am hobbling into the unknown and taking a leap of faith out of darkness (ignorance) into the light. This is not a communal experience but something each of us does alone. No one can take a leap of faith for me just as I would not have my mother chew my food for me. I am not a bird even if I stand on the edge of a nest ready to take my first flight.

While I will receive help moving to a new town and I will receive help finding a new home to land, once I land, I’m on my own. And that’s the way I want it because I get to decide what I’ll do next.

All Rights Reserved Patricia Herlevi copyright 2017

If you read this far and you would like to help me get into a permanent home, please make a donation to my Relocation Fund.

THANKS.

 

Essay for Woman Sleeping in an Attic

Procrastination is not my friend. Yet, the only work I have done on my second memoir that reflects on living in between homes (several times), comes out as essays. So, why not just write a series of blog essays and then transform them into a book later? 

And lately, memories of the first time I left Bellingham during the summer of 1986 mingles with the second time I left Bellingham three weeks ago. The first time, I left I felt hopeful as I packed up my Datsun and headed to Seattle to break into the music business. The second time, I loaded up a U-Haul truck and I only felt dread as I hauled my meager belongings to a storage unit just outside of Port Townsend. And then settled into my family’s home (not in Port Townsend).

When I was 22-years-old, I considered myself hopeful but still one of the walking wounded latch-key kids trying to make sense of my life. I had my entire life to map out and I mapped it out. I had plans for every area of my life and I had a schedule to keep. When I was in my twenties, I paid no attention to people over 30 and I certainly never expected to reach my menopause years or my fifties.

Like every young adult pursuing a career in the arts, I expected to live in a bohemian-style for several years until I got my big break. Only the bohemian lifestyle continued without the big break and the older I got I just seemed like a loser. I did not achieve what I expected to achieve. I did not marry or live in a formidable home. In fact, many times I found myself without a home at all.

I didn’t do everything right but I also didn’t do anything truly wrong. I made some bad choices, but I never took up the worst kind of habits. And yet, who was I to think that I wasn’t as wounded or dysfunctional as the alcoholics and addicts living down the hall from me in Seattle’s apartment buildings? The good news for the addict is that they get help a lot earlier as their addictions humbled them. While I stayed longer in denial and even acted smugly towards addicts or people suffering from mental illnesses.

And as many addicts I knew got their lives together and experienced redemption, my life kept spiraling downward despite the number of spiritual workshops I took or self-help books I absorbed into my subconscious mind. I experienced many ah-hah moments but I never experienced salvation. I had many people warn me about my defences but my ego shut them out. I thought despite the outward signs of my life crumbling into oblivion that I had it together or I would at least fake it until I made it.

So, as our U-Haul truck made its way to a storage unit in the middle of a cow pasture, I wondered with despair how I ended up in this transition. And my eyes opened wider when I met women from my childhood also going through transition. And then on FaceBook, a few of my friends also find themselves relocating to other parts of the country, getting divorced, or going through a complete overhaul of their lives.

And the Marvin Gaye’s words, “What’s Going On” swim in my thoughts as do water moccasins swim through the flood waters in the southern United States. And the land shifts in Mexico and enormous winds and rain plummel the Caribbean islands. Indeed, I ask why are their so many displaced people? And I think for many, this represents a humbling experience that breaks open our hearts.

In one of my channel sessions, my guides told me that at this time the weak are made strong and the strong are made weak. We are here to learn from each other. Those who suffered before us learned survival skills and now share those with us. We will emerge from coping to thriving. And my wish for everyone is to survive the transition that will lead us to the promised land.

 

Write it–Tips to Writing a Powerful Memoir

When I first starting writing my memoir, I got caught up telling instead of showing my story.  I waded in exposition that bored every tooth in my head, not to mention my eyelashes.  In the past, I ran into boring exposition in other people’s memoirs too.  Why do we equate memoir with boring story?

Well, I can think of two reasons: First, we’re afraid to include dialogue because we can’t remember the conversations we had with others verbatim.  We’re afraid that someone will ring our neck and drag us into court if we put words in their mouths.  Second,  we worry that if we add an actual narrative with scenarios that include action along with dialogue that we entered the world of novel writing.  But let me ask you this question.  Do you really think that memoir authors such as Liz Gilbert remembered all her conversations as they were exactly spoken?

Now, there’s a huge difference between making things up and relying on memory to the best of our ability. The second scenario involves integrity and ethics because we’re trying to get it right to the best of our knowledge.  The first scenario implies that we’re just making stuff up and placing words in other people’s mouths that we would have liked to have spoken.  Wishful thinking does not equate an honest telling of the past.  That lands in the fantasy realm.

The other thing I learned is to get all the anger, resentment and negative feelings out during the rough draft and a second draft if it is required.  Then delve into a space of forgiveness and compassion for everyone involved in the story.  While it’s still your story to tell and through your eyes and your memory, ask yourself what it would feel like to walk in the other people’s shoes.  Psychoanalysis of others isn’t required and we’re best avoiding placing our memoir characters on the psychoanalysis couch.  Also avoid the exposition that results from delving into someone else’ head space.  Memoirs reflect our memories and our point-of-view which readers of this genre do get.

Avoid adding anything (especially that sounds bitter, self-pitying and resentful) to the story that actually doesn’t move the narrative forward.  I cut out a lot of this type of writing from my first draft because I realized I was ranting and not sharing a cathartic story.  I thought of readers wading through paragraphs, if not actual pages of me joining a pity festival.  This pity party didn’t move my story forward and just made other people look like predators out to destroy me, which in reality wasn’t the case.
So we can write dialogue that comes from the best of our memory and we can write scenarios in the same way that we write fiction, but it’s stuff that actually happened in our lives.  We also have the right to invent structure so we don’t have to tell our memoir chronologically, meaning we can step back and forth through time.  In actuality, I have never met anyone with a linear mind.  How often does your mind wander into the future or into the past? Try meditating and you’ll see what I mean?

Even Liz Gilbert with her carefully structured three-part memoir travels back to her past.  Even when she’s in Italy and India, she’s still bringing her divorce and marriage from the past into the present.  That’s the way our minds work, especially if we have undisciplined minds, which most of us do have.   Besides, memoir is French for memory and memory doesn’t occur in the present moment.  This means that we can play around with structure.  I encourage you to watch movies with unusual structures or books told in fragments to inspire you about creating the structure for your memoir.  I chose to tell parallel stories in mine so I have ten interludes about suffering from multiple chemical sensitivities interlaced with my housing quest in 2014.

The final element required for a memoir besides dialogue/scenarios and narrative structure is a voice.  The best memoirs feature a strong voice whether that’s a wry and funny voice or a spiritually powerful one or a fragile voice of someone coming into their own and beginning to acknowledge his or her personal power, I guess the word I’m looking for is vulnerability.   Once you have the dialogue/scenarios, structure and voice, the last selling and reading point is strong writing.  Work on sentence structure by varying length of sentences, balance exposition (telling) with scenarios (showing) and give the reader a good reason to read your memoir when they have thousands of other books they could pick up and read.

I’ll share more of what I learn during my memoir-writing journey as I work on my revising this spring.  If you would like a intuitive coaching session for writing or other creative projects, sign up for a session at Metaphysics for Everyday Living.  

Holding Out for the Cinderella Ending

I thought I had completed my memoir, Woman Sleeping on the Couch last spring, but with a recent turn-of-events, I still have one last chapter to write. And I’m hoping for a Cinderella type ending.

At the beginning of August, my landlord gave me 30 days to vacate my current home. This home was never meant to be permanent but a jumping off point to my dream home. I have dealt with spiders, mold, and other irritations for the past several months, but at the same time I was grateful to live in the Sunnyland neighborhood of Bellingham.

Given my experiences from last fall, mainly dealing with narcissists and their ensuing drama as I couch surfed, I went into panic mode at the beginning of August thinking that I would have to experience the in between home scenarios once again. But then something miraculous happened and a friend hooked me up with a channeled session, much like the Abraham-Hicks work and I began uncovering my blocks by transmuting fear and despair into anger that burned through all the lies I had been taught since childhood. I let go of defenses and allowed myself to dream big.

So with a few days left to manifest my dream home (something I hadn’t even considered prior to doing Louise Hay’s affirmations and this clearing work), I see myself walking into a counter intuitive situation and living in a beautiful home for free by exchanging creative services (interior decorating, photography, etc). It can be done and when this dream home manifests, I’ll complete my memoir and begin another round of pitches.