character

A few days ago, I was asked to submit some "personality pieces." At first, I thought this meant some pieces that reflected my personality as a writer... or a person... or a spirit moving about in the world. You know, something completely ego-centered and self-indulgent, like pretty much the entirety of this blog. But nope! Turns out it means pieces about OTHER people's personalities. Out of the oh, nearly 400 entries here, only two are about other people. TWO. And neither are good for submission because I didn't spend that long on sharpening them. Who has a couple of thumbs and is completely self-centered? THIS girl. Right here.

So what is there to say about that? It's time to grow. Time to expand. Time to wonder why that hasn't been the focus of my writing, think about what I need to do to make it so, and find out all the gorgeous ways I might benefit from a shift in paradigm.

Probably hasn't been the focus of my writing because it's not the focus of my thinking. Not that I don't think about other people; I'd say I'm nearly obsessed. Balancing all the social relations in our lives is what makes us such intelligent people, puts so many folds in our primate brains. We use most of our noggin-energy thinking about how we fit into our social web, how people are related to each other (both in terms of blood, but also in terms of personal connections), the right ways to behave in public, so-in-so's name and what not to say around them, or even the topic of your last conversation together. Think about all the energy you use on these things. It's a lot.

So I get that. But it's not what I can put into writing, at least not this kind of writing. Instead of describing them to myself in my head, as I would describe them to someone else on paper, I focus almost entirely on our social dance together- where we connect and where we miss and why all that happens. But stepping out of that dance and describing who other people are and what makes them tick requires cementing some fluidity and STATING something. "He's the sort of guy who needs to be taken for a walk every day, a puppy straining on the leash of his responsibilities." Or "She holds the corners of her mouth at a 3/4 grin in the mornings, laughing, I assume, at her last night's dreams."

Both of those are about people I work with here and I have never thought to describe them before. It was beautiful to sit, hold them in my mind, let them hover and celebrate them for a moment...

When I write, I try to imagine my mind/intuition-heart as an internal room or landscape and try to describe where the furniture is placed, or how the clouds move across prairies of thought and reaction. So to make this change, I need to change my subject of description. That difficult. Because I'm the only one who gets to describe the couch in my internal living room and I can't get that wrong. I can mess up describing someone else, read them incorrectly. This'll take some bravery.

I think it's also connected to natural inclination. In the Myer's and Briggs personality test, my last letter is a P, for perceptive. My mom, and several other people in my life, are J's, for judgmental. And those people are extremely good at reading other people upon first meetings. My mom can hone in on someone's nature within minutes. I'm too busy dancing to do that correctly. That'll have to change, at least for a few months.

Because, as I am starting to see, writing might be like acting. You don't get to just do whatever the heck you want. You have to try on different roles, open up yourself in different ways, let your water run down different avenues. And thank heavens because I'll take anything and everything to get out of my little self-indulgent corner and open up into something new. It'll require some guidance. Time to head to the writing book for ideas and really, really difficult exercises that scare the crap out of me...