No blog posts since April. Not that I haven't had ideas. It's just that I flit. Like a dragonfly.
I've identified with dragonflies since I was 30, because I thought they modeled being patient about making my mark on the world. My BIG mark. The one for which people would remember me.
Dragonflies? Fame? Not an obvious association. Let me explain.
I caught the wish-for-fame bug early; in second grade, I dressed as Miss America for Halloween. After watching the Academy Awards for the first time, I wasn't sure about acting, but I sure did want to make an acceptance speech on t.v.
In sixth grade, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In was the show everyone watched on Monday night. Tuesday mornings, at Stanford Elementary School, we regaled each other with our impersonations of Lily Tomlin. If I could do what she did, I thought, people would love me the way they love her.
Two years later, the memory I took from seeing the Stuttgart Ballet wasn't the dancing or the music, but the piles of bouquets tossed to the prima ballerina by her adoring audience.
I wanted that kind of love! Four years of ballet followed.
The reasons are many, but my subjective experience of childhood was overwhelmingly one of feeling inadequate and anxious. I perceived myself as not pretty enough, smart enough, or clever enough. My environment was full of ambitious, striving, workaholics, and it stressed me out.
I didn't have the words for it then, but I longed for a balanced life, one in which there was such a thing as "good enough," one which had time for evenings, weekends, and vacations
At the same time, I developed an unspoken desire to "show them" by becoming famous.
Immediately after college, I began writing and performing comedy.
I became famous enough, in an early-80s, Seattle lesbian community kind of way, to understand that I didn't like having strangers recognize me at the grocery store. Furthermore, recognition made me paranoid. Just like the comic stereotype, I made people laugh then went home alone to stew in my sorrow.
Two years later, I was out of jokes, out of money and out of a relationship that had crashed and burned, I gave myself a geographic cure to Minneapolis where I worked with a theater and learned to distinguish gradations of below-freezing and windchill.
When the theater no longer wanted my questionable talents, I returned to Seattle where I could be wounded and confused among people who knew and loved me
Just before I turned thirty, I got a Masters degree in social work and believed I was a late bloomer.
Enter the dragonfly.
Sitting on a dock at Greenlake, I noticed a brown stick. It began to crack open. Then it changed color. I had no idea what I was seeing. As the brown shell fell away, a moist, fragile, gangly green thing emerged, a dragonfly nymph. It was a powerful moment which I felt privileged to witness.
A little research informed me that dragonflies spend years underwater as larvae before emerging onto land and becoming the beauties we see flitting about. The brilliant, darting period of their lives, the part we know and love them for, is brief-around two weeks long.
They are late bloomers, too. I found much comfort from this.
Although I'd already explored and rejected a certain type of public recognition, I still had this sense that I was destined to do something "great." As with many of the ways we cope with childhood pain, felt less like a choice than like a virus I'd caught and couldn't shake off.
When it became apparent that I wouldn't become famous in the field of mental health, developing groundbreaking theories which I would write about in prestigious journals, I was okay with it.
However, I still carried the virus. So when I began writing for publicaton, my acceptance speech fantasies returned full force, unbidden, like flurries of sneezes..
(When I imagined myself receiving my Newbery, my speech wasn't very gracious; it was always about how accolades and awards are less important than process and living with integrity. I believe that, but it just isn't what's said in an acceptance speech.).
As friends wrote books, sign contracts, and got their books published, I knew something was changing for me because I didn't feel jealous, I just thought it was really cool to get to see people's dreams come true.
Last year, I finally expelled the last of the virus. I know I'm done with it because I don't daydream about acceptance speeches anymore.
I was sad about the dragonfly thing, though. Since I no longer aspired to late-blooming brilliance, did I have to give up my connection to dragonflies, and all the dragonflyanalia I'd collected?
Heck no! Dragonflies flit. And flitting is something I've always done well, whether I've wanted to or not. Lately I've been flitting in my garden quite a bit, and to Seattle Mosaic Arts. I'm lucky to have a job that takes me all over a big school, where I get to flit from room to room. I flit to SCBWI events, even when I'm not writing, because I like to see my friends. I light down at home every night and gain love and stability for the next day's flitting.
It's my dream come true.
