Reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own was perhaps an expected assignment to receive at a small, previously all women's liberal arts institution like Wells College. As a diligent student, I read the book, underlined, starred, assigned great swooping parentheticals and took notes of my own insights as I went. Certain writers and poets really said what I needed to hear in a way that I needed to hear it. Wordsworth had the most profound impact. Obviously his work, but perhaps more so was a lot of what they wrote about how they believed a poet should be.
He believed writers could feel everything anybody else could, but to a far greater degree. Their senses were heightened and they spoke in the language of regular folks. Basically, they were translators who guzzled down intense imagination, sensation, spirituality, and emotions- any of those great mystifying experiences that leave most without words- captured their essence and created work that everyone could access in order to feel and remember and think about those times again and again.
When I graduated from my quaint lakeside college, these ideas and concepts were radiating through my heart, charging down my arms just waiting to bolt out my hands onto paper. All I wanted to do was write and create and I had so much to say. At my senior sports award banquet, I announced to the entire athletic department that I would be leaving Wells to earn my master's degree and then go off to win an academy award for best original screenplay. I had been accepted to a graduate program at an incredibly competitive institution, and I was ready to charge in with the other creators and get going. That year I watched students from USC accept an Oscar, so my sights were set high.
Upon arriving at my new highway-side university, I found myself a lone fish swimming in a sea full of zebras on sea doos. I was there to dive deep into new thought, strategy, technique. Everyone else seemed to be splashing and crashing around some party in the sun that I didn't seem to be aware of. I was almost immediately swimming against the current created by my classmates going this way and that. Was I missing something?
My first assignment was to make a short silent film inspired by the notion that life imitates art. I based mine off of Keats' poem "Ode to a Grecian Urn." I wasn't after creating high-brow work, but I wanted my work to have substance. When searching for a story line that is based on gesture and confined to a 60 second time-frame, poetry seemed like a good place to start. However, my classmates found inspiration in MTV knock offs, binge drinking, water skiing and reality TV. The discussion in our classroom critiques entertained such venerable comments as, "I like that song," "cool shot," "wait, what do you mean white balance?" Keats and I sat cross-armed and swaddled tightly in our amazement, sensing that an early tragic death wasn't just an inkling, it was indeed truly near.
In speaking with one of my professors, he took me under his wing and helped me make meaningful connections to industry professionals. This worked wonders for my motivation and allowed me to reclaim some measure of sanity and hope for getting out of this program with the feeling that I had accomplished something.
Early on, one of the connections was his son. I think it was a perfectly innocent introduction. I was kind of the odd one out of the cohort, and people in their 20s often do get looped into the match-making game every now and again. We did hang out, it was fun, and I was able to settle in to somewhat of a more comfortable social circle with that.
However, some of my classmates didn't see it that way. Now I was the snobby goody-two-shoes with special treatment.
Not long after, a second match came forward, this time from a different professor. In a fun twist, he was the match. I declined as politely as I could. I was not treated the same after that. Internships fell through. Work had different feedback. The classroom became this shuffle board court where passive aggressive comments slid my way across the tables, knocking my pen further and further out my hands.
I tried to turn to my poets, but it was hard to find the same solace in them that I had just months before at my other school. I felt like I was messing up this great opportunity. I wasn't forming the professional connections that I wanted to. I wasn't creating anything that I was really proud of.
I graduated. What I left with was a very expensive endorsement from an institution with a far more illustrious reputation than my own which I could now latch onto and ride off into my dreams. No need to use my own legs to get there.
I wasn't ready to make the move to LA. I stayed local and worked at a nonprofit multicultural theater. I learned a lot. I grew. I had some fun. I didn't earn much, but I ended up being proud of what I accomplished there.
An opportunity came along for me to work for a corporate position. At this point, my writing dreams had dimmed and I just wanted to pay off my loans and maybe buy some better clothes. Then I would write again.
I took the job. I stayed for about 8 months and left with a gender and age discrimination lawsuit. This was pre-#metoo. There was no wave of female power to wash the experience off of me. There was a botched legal system that better served the accused than the accuser. I was powerless and I really felt it. It drained me. Other women in the office had pushed me to go forward with a case.
"You have to speak up. You have to be the one to changes things around here. It's been going on too long. We are too old with too much to lose, you are young, you have nothing to lose- go for it!"
But I lost a lot.
I had lost my way. From winning an academy award to making flyers about urinal cakes? And enduring extreme harassment along the way? What twisted hell hole did I climb into?
I lost a sense of community. No woman stood with me. They watched me walk into the fire as they fanned away the smoke smell from behind their cubicle walls. Later, they went on to win settlements. I won nothing. I felt betrayed.
I lost my motivation.
I lost my sense of confidence and pride.
I used to read books and write amazing pieces with such ease. Now, I got bored trying read and struggled to write anything meaningful at all- if I even felt like picking up a pen in the first place. I didn't know what to do next or what I wanted.
What threw me off? All the loser guys in positions of authority? Sense of hopelessness with loans or achieving financial security? Should have left town after all?
At this time, I met the man who became my husband. It was right at the peak of my confusion and self-doubt. As I began to meet his family, they always asked, "Oh and what do you do?" I have daily panic attacks and spend my days wondering if I will ever become someone I'm proud of. I always came up with some overly flowery flattering gag worthy version of "I'm freelancing." Unfortunately, my foundation in this new family was set as someone who failed to claim a presence and identity.
My husband constantly urged me to be honest, mostly as a way to ease the self-inflicted anxiety. He wanted me to be at peace with where I was.
“Just be the person who is hurt, confused, unsure. Just be it. You're not less than for being here.”
His frank confrontations to my fears and doubts were one of the signs I knew we would be together for life. He loved me for who I was, not for who I was hoping to convince everyone I was. He showed me that I didn't have to have it all figured out before he and others would love me.
I finally got another job once I just said flat out why I left the last place. I had been trying to cover it up and it just made me seem like I was hiding bodies in my meat freezer at home.
"I had to leave my last job because of an age and gender discrimination issue. It was a horrible place to work and really not the right place for me to be" I blurted out.
The response, "How terrible. You don't seem like a litigious person at all. I'm sure that was hard."
Honesty and directness worked. I started that week.
I liked my job that I held and I stayed for 5 years. Towards the end, I started to feel that it was time to move on. The business was growing and changing along with everyone's titles and responsibilities. I was going to have my first baby. My creative dreams were spilling over from overcooking on the back burner.
I debated about leaving before or after the baby and maternity leave. Every woman I knew implored me to take the leave.
"You have to get your paid leave. This is all we get. It might not feel right, but nothing is right about this. You have to take what you've earned." There was such desperation in their voices.
I've been home with our first baby for almost two years and our second baby is weeks away from arrival.
I finally took the plunge and started my own business that allows be to write more and take charge in a way that I had been afraid to and forgotten I had wanted so badly. I still get frustrated. I’m often too scattered or tired to create.
Why do I have to wait to fulfill my dreams?
Did I do this to myself?
Does it really take this long, or did I mess this up years ago?
When I read Woolf’s work now, I can’t help but wonder if there is some trap women can fall into that stops us in our tracks.
“What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?… If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might have dined very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of wine; we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honorable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortable at half-past four to write a little poetry… Consider the facts… first there are the nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent feeding the baby… People say, too, that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and five. If Mrs. Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have had…” A Room of One’s Own
What stands out to me now is that writing, thinking, appreciating art and travel are all portrayed as luxury activities that are only able to be enjoyed once one has achieved a certain status and social position. Get rich, important, well-connected and then you can appreciate and create. And it is impossible to achieve if you have children, or you will, at the very least, have a five year interruption.
But why?
Wordsworth's most influential work started out as an experiment. He just wanted to see what happened if he wrote about "incidents and situations from common life.. in a selection of language really used by men." He rejected the idea that writing should be high and lofty, asserting that, "...such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent and a far more philosophical language..." and that writers should not "...separate themselves from the sympathies of men." To him, the best work came from a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" that later was "recollected in tranquility."
He observed the innocence of children and how deeply they connected to nature, creativity and the divine.
When I think about what makes a poet- observing more, feeling more deeply- who does that more than a woman with children? We are the poets. We feel everything for ourselves. Everything for our children and for other people. A deeper compassion arises. A far greater fear for what goes on in the world. A dire need to see emotional development and needs met in our families and others.
What makes a poet? A mother makes a poet.
So we can't wait. We have to stop sitting outside and looking in. We have to devour life in whatever random order we can bite into it. We have to stop trying to live out these meticulously planned timelines of career first, family later, no overlapping. We might lose both if we try to. And no, we are never going to have it all figured out or have all the resources we need- so why keep trying to?
And forget seeking approval from the Academy or the Times or from any other institution. There is no category for “Best Screenplay Written While Breastfeeding” or “Most Sane Thought Composed While In Labor” or “Best Portrayal Of A Woman Ignoring Bra Strap Pain.” And hey- maybe some of these woman-led companies ought to create new distinctions.
Men and women will always be creating in very different conditions. Even if we do find total social and political equality, we have completely different biological environments.
Wordsworth was able to see that poetry should be for the middle class, average people. He was considered revolutionary in this thought. But why, Virginia, do you assert that one first must access privilege before being able to create? What is the woman's vantage point that it is eternally positioned as the outsider looking in? Are we looking in the wrong direction?
We cannot create like men. We ought not aspire to. We must create from where we are, and maybe that means creating something jumbled, distracted, rambling or incomplete. I don't see this genre anywhere. The genre of motherhood, of womanhood. I believe we must start embracing where we are and create what we can and see what happens.
As I close, my son, desperate for a fruit crusher, thinks that this is the best place for me to talk about a backhoe and a dump truck.
We can't wait for a room of our own or money before we write. We will be wasting away long before we get those things. And maybe our best writing is hiding in the chaos.
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