Writing with Tanya: Two Prompts

Female Nude with Green Shawl Seen from Behind - Käthe Kollwitz (1903)

  (1)

 Story Portal Prompt: at what point in your life did you feel least like yourself? How did you get back? 10 mins. Go.

Least like myself?  When most depressed back in the 1990s, I feared melting in tears and despair, so began taking anti-depressants.  I am still on them.  I've tried going off them twice, and each time, it wasn't more than a week before I felt again like there was no reason to get out of bed.  So which is the real me?  The one more in control or the one in a sobbing mush on the mattress?  As a medicated person, I've been able to retire from a non-traditional teaching career that I am both proud of and humble about.  I made it through a losing tenure battle, two moves, and two job changes--which included leaving behind the educational theatre for which my experience and PhD in dramatic arts had prepared me.  As a medicated person, I've become a friend of the truth and of Jesus which led to membership in the Religious society of friends and a life as a poet.  Daily, I feel myself becoming more comfortable.  Is this my self?  It is a self that gives me confidence and peace and only the kind of troubled mind that helps me see what way is opening for me.  I love that.  When I look back at the roles I played through the years, they often seem like separate people--Susans I cannot imagine ever being.  

(2)

Story Portal Prompt:  Dorothy Allison wrote: "Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me."

Write a story about going naked rather than wearing a coat the world (or a family member, teacher or culture) made for you.

Try for a beginning/middle and end. Ten minutes. Post if you like.

Luckily, most of the roles I have played throughout my life came with their own costumes: daughter, student, hippy radical, wife, editor, organizer, professor, director, teacher--and those are only the offstage roles!  Now, retired, I have my lounge-around look which is another costume.  Which of these were assigned me and which did i choose for myself?  That's a nonsensical question, given the expectations I--and most humans--have internalized about what success at any moment looks like.  That's all part of the narration, and I was never one to rebel against it when other issues were more important.  Going naked may have more to do with naming--choosing to be called Susan rather than Ms. Chast or Dr. Chast.  Just Susan, a small person of no importance.  What do you do?  is the question that most often greets me, and even now I try to answer it.  "I am a writer," I say.  Not,  

I am retired.  I have no political or religious affiliations.  Here I am, just me, a brown-eyed older woman with a wrinkled neck and a slouch, here I am just doing this thing with you.  Let's enjoy this worship, this film, this performance, this dinner, this task.  Let's grin and enjoy (or frown and enjoy) how we pass the time together."

I imagine my companion lingering a little longer, and then looking for me again when we are in the same place. And again.  And again.  But so far, that does not happen. Nor do applying the hooks of story from experience, the normal clothes I try on to impress people.  I tell myself that people make these connections when young classmates.  During those years, I just kept moving on.  And people make those connections in their families, but my brothers and I are very, very different.  Pursuing this line of inquiry makes me sad, so I laugh myself out of it.  I enjoy being a hermit in the company of cats.  I enjoy writing this and that and reading short poems and long novels and not having any demands on my time.  And so I don the clothes of a relaxed stay-at-home or I sit here naked as I wish.  There is no one to make me rush for cover.  I love being naked.  But that, my dear imagined readers, only leads me to another story.

   © 2020 Susan L. Chast