I don’t remember exactly what led me to the Somatic exercise videos. Maybe it was an offshoot of the lymphatic drainage exercises on Facebook, or the meditation videos that were supposed to help me get to sleep (didn’t work), or the exercise videos I was watching in order to piece together a manageable daily routine (didn’t work), which led me to the Tai chi guy who led classes as if they were one continuous dance, and the one where the teacher kept hitting her head over and over again, and a whole bunch of yoga videos that seemed to believe I have a closet full of yoga props, just sitting there, waiting. But finally, I landed on a series of videos that didn’t annoy me too much and that attempted to explain the reason why the teacher was swinging her arms around her body like heavy ropes or punching her legs or swaying drunkenly with her eyes closed.
“Humans are weird.”
I went down this particular rabbit hole in the first place because I’ve been looking for better ways of dealing with my anxiety than just playing games on my phone all day – well, more productive ways, because the games work too well and stop me from doing anything else – and I came across these somatic exercise videos and found one that was only five minutes long, which is right at the limit of my attention span at the moment, so I gave it a try. This one teacher has videos aimed at various different mental or physical health issues: headaches, depression, dizziness, anxiety, etc., and I decided to try one or two a day and see if it was helpful. But first I had to give myself a stern talking to, reminding myself that I was going to give these videos a chance and not let my inner monologue take over, even though there were so many things that cried out for comment, like the white smoke that comes over the screen each time she finishes one exercise and starts the next, or the creepy smile on her face when she gropes her own arms (something she calls “havening”). But, being me, even sitting alone in my room it was hard to do the self-hugging exercise with a straight face, and I didn’t feel the comfort she was sure I would feel, but at least it didn’t hurt (until I tried to do the fifty repetitions she recommended and my shoulders creaked to a stop, cried, and refused to continue). But there were some arm stretches that felt good, and twists that seemed to loosen up my lower back for a second, and neck stretches that actually made my headache go away for a few minutes, so I kept going.
I would say that the underlying theory of somatic exercise (and somatic therapy, and trauma-informed yoga, and whatever other names these tapping and swinging and shaking exercises go by), is that emotions exist in the body and not just in the mind, and therefore they can be accessed through physical exercises. Of course, some of the emotions they tap into aren’t fun, like shame and anger and self-loathing and impatience, but I’m willing to give it a little bit more time, because sometimes the exercises actually help me feel calm, or steady, or even settled in my body. I still can’t get myself to do the lie-on-the-floor-and-shake-your-arms-and-legs-in-the-air-like-a-dying-bug exercise, but I’m doing my best. I just need to make sure I wear long sleeves for a while, because I bruise easily and all of the tapping and havening and shaking leaves a mark.
“And you still refuse to try chicken treats?!”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
After a year and a half of renovation, a new Uncle Guiseppe’s market opened in the same building where the Stop & Shop used to be. In that time, I’ve gotten used to shopping at the small supermarket down the road, where I don’t need a scooter to get from one side of the store to the other. The prices are higher, but the convenience makes up the difference. And honestly, I’m not eager to go back to marathon food shopping sessions and traipsing back and forth from the car with all of the grocery bags. But I was still curious about the new store, and so was Mom, so we decided to check it out, midday on the Sunday of the opening weekend. Yeah, I know. Now.
The plan was to just run in and look around and maybe pick up a loaf of bread, but we’ve always been a family that treated food shopping like entertainment, so the chances that we were going to run in and run out, when neither of us was up to running, were already low. As soon as we got to the parking lot and discovered that most of Long Island had had the same idea at the same time, I should have turned around and gone home, but I asked Mom if she still wanted to go in and got a solemn yes in response, so I kept going. Eventually, I found a parking spot at the far end of the lot, inches from the exit, and Mom grabbed her cane, and I took the refrigerator bags from the trunk of the car, just in case, and we started the trek to the store.
Unfortunately, in the year and a half since the Stop and Shop had closed people had forgotten how crosswalks work, so even after surviving the long walk from the car, getting to the entrance of the store felt like a game of Frogger. And once we found a shopping cart and went inside, we discovered that the traffic patterns inside the store were even worse. People and shopping carts were entering the lobby from all directions and meeting up in the middle. I was intimidated, but Mom was ready for battle. She saw a pile of honeydew melons across the way and went straight for it while I was still dithering on the outskirts with only the cart for protection. Mom raised the melon like a trophy and it looked heavy, so I braved the unbridgeable divide, and tried not to close my eyes each time another shopping cart came at me, and, finally caught up to Mom and the prized melon just in time. Mom was proud, of herself and of me, and then together we made our way out of the entrance hall into the main part of the store.
The first thing I noticed was the high-end pastry counter, because it was right in front of me, and boxes of chocolate were piled on top of the counter and cupcakes and petit fours were dancing behind the glass. Okay, not dancing. Taunting me, but not dancing.
The fruit and vegetable section came next, with four-dollar peaches and every size and color of tomato, but I went straight to the organic section where the ready-made smoothies live. Lately, even trips to the small supermarket have been wiping me out, especially in the heat, so I’ve gotten into the habit of splurging on one of the smoothies in order to recover before driving home and trying to carry the groceries into the house. Sometimes all I can see is the magic word “chocolate,” but this time I was swayed by the bright colors and chose a bottle of purple, or blueberry. Mom hasn’t been shopping with me a lot lately, so she didn’t recognize the importance of this moment, and she didn’t hear me when I suggested she choose a drink for herself (she has a lot of allergies and I always worry that I’ll forget an important one and poison her if I do the choosing), but she didn’t hear me, and I didn’t notice that she hadn’t heard me, and we moved on.
Next up were the proteins: chicken, beef, sausages, etc., which we had enough of at home, so we were able to skip past a few aisles and make our way to the ready-made food section lining the entire far wall of the store. There was a small Jewish food section at the beginning filled with huge containers of chopped liver and individual plastic containers with one potato knish in each, as if they were cupcakes, and the prices scared me away. Then we were in the ready-made food section proper, where teenagers in pajamas and moms with baby carriages and, seemingly, every senior citizen from the entire island were standing in contemplation in the middle of the aisle. There were food counters all along the wall, in a long L-shape that reached all the way back to the entrance of the store, like a savory version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but I decided to avoid the counters and focus on the shelves of ready-made meals piled high in plastic containers, because that way I didn’t have to speak to an actual person (it’s like they knew I was coming!). But when I tried to get a look at the different ingredients and prices, I discovered that standing still long enough to examine anything in detail was not really an option.
We had to squeeze through the lines of shoppers, and around random islands of pizza toppings and Italian cheese, to make our way back towards the entrance of the store and then we were swamped by a crowd of people waiting impatiently to pay for their groceries and were carried past aisles of tomato sauce and olive oil and pasta until we hit the next traffic jam, at the bakery section (not to be confused with the high-end pastry section, which was a whole different thing). While we were waiting for traffic to thin out, I grabbed a box of cannoli-cream-filled donuts, because I’m only human.
Eventually we made it to the bread aisle and found a loaf of high fiber bread, and by then we were done. Somewhere along the way, Mom had picked up some fresh spinach fettucine to go with her hard-won honeydew melon, and I gave up on finding the sesame oil, which I vaguely remembered seeing on the shopping list on the fridge. We found a spot at the end of a long line waiting for an open cashier and I finally looked over at Mom, and she looked exhausted. I asked her if she wanted to go sit down somewhere and I could pay for the groceries and get the car, but she said no, if she sat down, she’d never get back up again. Luckily, a nice young man who worked at the store led us to an open cashier (though absolutely no one moved out of the way to allow us through), and we paid for our groceries and trekked back to the car, past many other dazed shoppers, and a few innocents who hadn’t been inside yet.
By the time Mom finally sat down in the passenger seat of the car, and I’d retrieved my purple smoothie from the grocery bags and realized that there was nothing for Mom to drink in either bag, not even a bottle of water, I felt awful. I checked the ingredients on my purple drink, and, of course, apple puree was the first item on the list, so I couldn’t even offer Mom a sip. Feeling like a monster, I sat down in the driver’s seat and drank half the bottle out of self-preservation. Then I piloted us back out of the parking lot towards home, belatedly shaking from the tension of the store.
By the time we got home, I was barely able to stand upright, but I, bravely, carried the two grocery bags up the parking lot steps to the long walkway, where we ran into one of our neighbors and her adorable dog (an ancient Maltese, with a top knot). Of course, I had to stop and pet the dog, and while my defenses were down our neighbor told us that she’d already been to the new store, twice, once at seven in the morning and once at night, when they put their ready-made meals on sale for 50% off and the aisles were blissfully empty. I managed not to growl at her, picked up the grocery bags again and continued down the walkway to our building and up the stairs to the apartment. And then that was it, that was all the energy I had for the day, or the week really. I sat down on the couch and could not move for the next three hours, after which I finally had enough energy to transfer myself from the living room couch to the bed in my own room for a long nap.
I’m still curious about the new store, especially the possibility of going at night when the aisles are magically empty and the ready-made meals are almost affordable, but first I’ll need to wait for this trip to become a vague memory. At the very least, next time I will know to avoid going there over the weekend, though with my luck I’ll show up at 8 o’clock on a Tuesday night and find out that it’s pizza night at Uncle Guiseppe’s and there’s a live band. Eventually, I will get up the nerve to go back, though, and take the time to actually look at the items on each shelf. Given how good the fresh spinach fettucine tasted when we eventually had dinner that night, the pasta alone deserves a second look.
“Mmm, pasta.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
After all of your thoughtful responses to my failed-mystery-writing-summer, I felt like a kaleidoscope that had been shaken back into place. What it boils down to: you don’t have to try to be someone more market savvy, or normal, but you do need to focus on getting your own particular stories written, whether they are fiction or non-fiction, whether the outside world is desperate to hear those stories or not, and stop letting the need to be acceptable cut you off at the knees. Because, really, what if we’re all more interesting than we’ve been given credit for? And what if expecting everyone to hit the same milestones at the same times and learn the same life lessons from our disparate lives is a misunderstanding of why we’re even here in the first place? What if the things that feel vulnerable and not good enough about me are the real things I have to offer the world and by trying so hard to fit in, or sound normal, I’m losing what’s special about me? What if by reading an endless supply of stories about the same successful, good looking, well-regulated people, we’re getting only a tiny speck of the wisdom the world has to offer us?
I don’t completely buy this vision yet, to be honest. I’m still too aware of the American ethos that everyone should be ruggedly independent and capable of surviving by ourselves in the wild; every man is an island, etc. But I’ve never actually been able to live like that. I’ve always needed help to get from point A to point B, and the only real variable is whether I ask for the help I need, or fail to ask for it. And maybe that’s normal. Maybe most people are just putting on a shiny gloss and pretending at normal too.
So, my job is to write the stories, essays, songs, novels, that keep screaming at me to be written, and not to sit in judgement of all of those stories before they’ve even been told. It’s still hard to ignore the voices in my head telling me to just shut up and let the smart, capable, useful people talk, but getting so much support and validation from all of you makes a real difference. I can’t promise that my brain won’t go off the rails again by tomorrow, but at least for a few minutes I’ve been able to take in the love and acceptance you’ve been offering me, just as I am. And I am so grateful to you.
“I could use some more chicken treats, Mommy. just so you know.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
The last story we looked at in Bible Study, before breaking for the summer, was the sacrifice of Jepthah’s daughter in the book of Judges. This is clearly not the most inspiring book of the Hebrew Bible. The first five books are the stars, of course, with the origin story of the Jewish people and their relationship with God at center stage, so even when those books get boring you give them a pass (I see you Leviticus and Numbers, I see you). Then in Joshua, you get the (mostly) triumphant story of the first military leader of the ancient Israelites as they return to the land of Canaan after generations of slavery in Egypt. But then we have the book of Judges, where the ancient Israelites are living in the promised land, but still in tribal groups, and being led by one military leader (aka judge) after another. These are not the great heroes of Jewish history, and they are not portrayed as if they are.
“Are there any dogs in this story?”
Jepthah’s name in Hebrew (Yiftach), literally means “He will open,” and therefore my rabbi nicknamed him “big mouth,” because his most obvious quality is that he opens his big mouth when he shouldn’t. He’s introduced as the disinherited son of a prostitute, kicked out of Gilead by his more respectable brothers, living with the bad boys in a place called “Tov,” which, ironically, means “Good.” Eventually, the elders of Gilead go searching for him, because they are under attack by the Ammonites and he’s developed a reputation as a fighter.
Of course, his first response to them is disbelief. They kicked him out of town and now he’s supposed to save them? But then they tell him that if he can deliver them from the Ammonites, he will become their leader, which would be the ultimate turnaround for him. And, we are told, God is with him. Unfortunately, Jepthah either doesn’t know that God is on his side, or doesn’t trust in God, so he makes a vow to God, “if you deliver the Ammonites into my hands, then whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return shall be yours and will be offered by me as a burnt offering.” To be fair to Jepthah, people kept animals in their houses, so he probably assumed he would be sacrificing a cow or a goat or a chicken.
Jepthah, of course, successfully defeats the Ammonites, and when he returns home his only child, a daughter, comes out to meet him, dancing and playing a tambourine (as one does). Upon seeing his daughter, he tears his clothes in mourning. “Ah, my daughter! You have brought me low; You have become my calamity. I have opened my mouth to Yahweh and I cannot turn back.” The Mishna, composed by the rabbis 1500 years after the period of the judges, says that a vow like this that goes against Jewish law is an invalid vow, but Jepthah didn’t get to consult the rabbis and he clearly thought he had no choice. His daughter quickly accepts her fate and just asks that she first be allowed to go away to the mountains with her friends to weep for her virginity, and I was sure this would be the moment when she ran away to live on a kibbutz, or something, but no, according to the text she is then sacrificed by her father. There’s some debate among the commentators over whether she is actually killed, or if maybe she was dedicated as a servant to God (and therefore remaining a virgin for the rest of her life, which would explain the mourning for her virginity thing). The act itself is not described, so there’s some wiggle room.
The lesson of this story has come down as: don’t make a hasty vow because there are consequences to your words. Though you could also choose to learn the lesson that if you are so insecure in your relationship with God that you can’t feel when God is with you, bad things will come of it. Of course, it’s hard to focus on either one of those lessons over the horror of child sacrifice. There seems to have been a lot of confusion in the ancient world over whether God wanted human sacrifices or not, because it was something everyone else was doing at the time and it seemed like such a good idea.
To try to make sense of this story, we read excerpts from Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror, which compares the story of the daughter of Jepthah with the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham.
Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” and he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “the fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So, the two of them walked on together.
When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of God called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” He said, do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now, I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.
Later, when Abraham returns to his servants and they all go back home, there’s no mention of Isaac at all, and the interpretation has been offered that in an earlier version of the Hebrew Bible Isaac really was sacrificed, and it was only a later editor who let him live, but didn’t bother to give him anything to say, because, really, what could he say?
My rabbi has long had a fascination with the story of the binding of Isaac, if only because we read about it every year during the high holidays and he has to come up with something interesting to say each time. So, as we re-read the story from Genesis, my rabbi not-so-subtly suggested that someone should write about how Isaac felt that day. Ideally, he would take poor Isaac out to lunch at his favorite diner and get the story from him first hand, but if he couldn’t do that, then maybe someone could imagine how that conversation might go. But to be honest, after reading the scene again, I was as silent as Isaac. His father almost killed him, for no reason other than that a voice Isaac could not hear told him to do it. All of this after, in the previous scene, his older half-brother, Ishmael, is exiled from the family encampment and left to die of thirst in the desert, if God hadn’t, again, stepped in.
Abraham is presented to us as the first person who can hear God’s voice, and the only one at that particular time, and he is so devoted to God that he is willing to sacrifice his sons because God asked him to, and poor Isaac (who, some commentators suggest is actually in his thirties or forties at the time of the attempted sacrifice) is then traumatized for the rest of his life. The end. What else is there to say? God and Abraham are the stars of the story, and Isaac’s fear, or anger, or confusion at his father’s murderous behavior are clearly beside the point. With Jepthah’s daughter it’s even worse, not only doesn’t she get a name, she isn’t saved at the last moment like Isaac is, which is probably why the commentators are looking for loop holes, because this can’t be the story, can it? Why is this even included in the canon?
There are, if you can imagine, even more horrifying stories in the book of Judges, all meant to portray the struggles of becoming a nation, and while we tend to prefer the stories where the people are better than average and God is generous, I think the fact that we have to sit with our ancestors’ mistakes is probably the point of reading the Hebrew Bible. Sure, it’s nice to imagine that your ancestors had a direct connection to God, but how does that help you figure out how to live your life today without God telling you exactly what to do? The word “Torah,” literally means “teaching,” so it’s fair to assume that we are supposed to be learning from these stories about how not to make the same mistakes as our ancestors (though some present-day politicians seem to think those mistakes are actually a road map to be followed). Eventually, instead of leaders who are focused solely on war and security, we start to see prophets and kings and priests who are more self-aware, more strategic, and more connected to God. But we’re not there yet.
We didn’t read the story of Jepthah’s daughter at this particular moment because we knew it would resonate uncomfortably with the present day Middle East, it was just the next book in the series, and, according to my rabbi, we have to read every word, no matter how boring, or how many unpronounceable names we come across (usually it’s my job to read the unpronounceable names, and the repetitive lists of animal sacrifices, because I’m the youngest and have dues to pay). But there’s something reassuring in knowing that, eventually, even the book of Judges will end, and better times are ahead. With new elections coming up, both in Israel in October and in the United States in November, there is the possibility that smarter, better leaders will prevail over our present-day Jepthahs, and this cycle of history can finally move on. We can only hope.
“Or we can hide until it’s over.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
My plan for the summer included writing the first draft of my mystery novel, finally, after years of thinking about it and plotting it out. Everyone I talked to said it sounded like a great idea, and of course I should pursue it, and it would be so much more fun than all of my other writing ideas, which are, let’s face it, pretty depressing. So, I wrote out my list of open questions about the plot and the characters and who was getting killed and who was doing the killing, and I printed out worksheets with one prompt per page (so it wouldn’t be too overwhelming), and I got through the first few pages and then…nothing. I also bought a few (used) copies of How-to-write-a-mystery books, and I read half of one chapter of one book and then that petered out too. Which is, I guess, my brain’s way of telling me that it’s not the right time for the mystery yet.
“I think you need a nap.”
But I’m not sure what to work on instead. Most of the summer, and for a long time before that, to be honest, the writing that has come most naturally to me has been memoir essays, for the blog and otherwise, but does that mean I should be writing a memoir? Because I still don’t really believe that I can write a whole memoir, or get it published, and I’ve also been thinking about a bunch of other projects that have been on hold for one reason or another, and I’m asking myself how much memoir and how much fiction is the right balance for me at this moment. How much of my own pain can I tolerate? And how much fiction do I need to infuse into my life to make it bearable? I once had a non-fiction teacher who said that all writing is 80% true and 20% fiction, whether you choose to call it a novel or a memoir, which sounded both jaded and possibly true to me at the time, but then a lot of memoir writers got caught outright lying, so… Honestly, I’ve always believed that full-length memoirs only work when people are writing about suffering and struggles and vulnerability that they have already overcome, and therefore I should write fiction until my life works out, and then I can write a memoir if I really want to. I’ve also never been much of a memoir reader, even when literary memoirs were at the top of the best seller lists, and they say that you should write the book you want to read, which is why I thought I should write a mystery in the first place. So, I’m confused.
My therapist used to tell me that my problem was stubbornness. She believed that I was choosing not to write the kinds of things that would get published, and choosing not to do all of the other things that normal people do – because of my ideals. And I would love to be able to take credit for that, but it’s bullshit. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out academic writing, until I finally had to accept that a PhD thesis would probably kill me. And I took classes in poetry and TV writing and playwriting and fiction and non-fiction and on and on and I tried to figure out what was getting published and how to write it, I just wasn’t successful. So, sitting there in therapy and being told that I was being stubborn, and a perfectionist, when I knew that’s not what was going on, left me feeling like I couldn’t be trusted to know myself, or know anything. If no one believes you are who you say you are, are you still you?
I love writing the blog. I love writing essays, period. I always have. In college, I used to write essays for my teachers, not for credit, just to try out my ideas and process what I was learning in class. But when I sent my essays out to literary magazines, and my short stories and poems and novels, they were rejected over and over again. And I figured, first of all, if I’m going to be rejected, I’d rather it be for something that isn’t 100% me, thank you very much. And second, I can’t really fix who I am to make myself more palatable and marketable, but I can make things up, so better to stick with fiction. Except, I don’t know what to fix in fiction anymore either. I really don’t know what makes one story/novel/memoir/artist successful and another an also-ran.
I’ve been watching the auditions from The Voice Israel on Youtube and most of the people who don’t get a chair to turn, sound (to me) just as talented as most of the people who do. It has so much to do with what each judge can relate to, in that moment, on that day. And that sucks. If I can be just as talented and work just as hard as another writer, but because their stars align and mine don’t, they are successful and I am not – where does that leave me?
And I guess I’m thinking, maybe there is no “right” answer. Maybe there is no type of writing that will automatically be successful, and I’m not stubbornly avoiding the correct path, and I don’t need to browbeat myself into becoming a totally different kind of writer, because it wouldn’t make a difference.
Ideally, I would have a plan going forward. I would work on one project at a time, research the perfect agent/publisher/audience for it, become wildly successful, and then move on to the next one. But my brain doesn’t work that way, and trying to twist myself into shapes that don’t fit me is both really uncomfortable and clearly a waste of time. So, what does that mean? I have no idea. I guess it means that I should write what I’m up to writing, when I’m up to writing it, and ignore as many of the insistent shoulds as I possibly can, except that ignoring those voices in my head is not one of my natural talents either. Basically, I’m getting my writing done, if I’m learning about myself and the world around me and I’m doing the best I can, maybe that is enough for now.
“Have you considered chicken treats? They’re like magic.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 