Today I welcome fellow Indie Chick Suzanne Tyrpak to my website. Take it away, Suzanne!
Sometimes life changes in a day. I work for an airline, and this past
summer a gigantic jet-stair ran over my toes. That got my attention. I’d been
asking for a break, and boy did I get one! My story has a happy ending: the
accident gave me time to finish my recently released novel,
Hetaera—Suspense in Ancient Athens. It also gave me time to
connect with the Indie Chicks; what a fantastic group of women! We wrote an
anthology together and all the proceeds go to fighting breast cancer—the disease
that took my mother. I hope you enjoy,
Holes, my
contribution to the
Indie
Chicks Anthology. Sometimes discovering our holes, our weakness, allows us
to become more compassionate and ultimately more whole.
Holes
I used to think I had to be perfect. Of course, I fell short
of perfection on a regular basis so I frequently felt like a failure.
The only way to prevent failure is to hide. If we don’t put ourselves
out there, we can’t fail.
To prevent myself from failing, I hid in a fantasy world. As
a young child, I longed to be a ballerina. I loved to dance, but more than
that, I wanted to escape into the fantasy world of the ballet. I wanted to live inside a fairytale, and in my mind,
I did. I invented worlds I could escape to, perfect worlds that seemed more
real to me than life. Meanwhile, I ate, and ate, and ate. Not ideal, if you want
to be a ballerina. My reality never matched my inner world.
I created this pattern, this external and internal
disparity, throughout my life. I brought it into my marriage, convincing myself
that my marriage was perfect, while in reality it was a mess. Instead of
leaving, I found escape in writing. I lost myself other times: ancient Egypt,
ancient Greece,
ancient Rome—worlds as far away
from my reality as possible. In my writing, I disappeared for hours, days,
years. I got a job working at an airline so I could travel and do research. I
got an agent. I felt sure I would be published.
Then my world fell apart. After nineteen years of marriage,
my husband wanted a divorce. I fought it. Divorce didn’t fit my idea of
perfection, my fairytale. I viewed this loss as a disaster, but in truth it was
an opening, a hole leading me to greater understanding and compassion for
myself and others.
I was broke, trying to live on what I made at the airline. I
was lonely. I had no time to write. Worst of all, I had to admit my life wasn’t
perfect. I wasn’t perfect. Forced to accept
myself with all my imperfections, I discovered that the more I could accept
myself, the more I could accept others. Even my ex-husband. To this day, we
remain friends.
Because I no longer had time to sit down and write for
hours, the kind of time it takes to write a novel, I wrote short stories. I wrote
about my experience, about my struggles as a woman of fifty going through
divorce and entering the dating world. Initially, I wrote the stories for
myself as therapy. Then I began to share the stories with my writing group.
They encouraged me to submit the stories to magazines, and several were
published. I read a couple of stories at our local library and people laughed. Then
my good friend, Blake Crouch, convinced me to publish the stories on Kindle. A
frightening prospect. What if my stories weren’t good enough? What if they
weren’t perfect?
At first I resisted. I’d had two literary agents, and a
longtime dream of being traditionally published. Self-publishing didn’t fit my
idea of perfection. But, in reality, I no longer had an agent, and I hadn’t
worked on a novel for several years. What did I have to lose? Nothing. So I
published Dating My Vibrator (and other
true fiction).
My world changed, not because I was finally published, but
because I changed. I finally found
the confidence to pursue my dream despite my imperfections. I found the courage
to stop hiding and put myself out into the world. This freed me.
I rewrote my novel, Vestal
Virgin—suspense in ancient Rome.
Originally, my characters were a bit flat. Why? Because they were too perfect!
I hadn’t looked at the manuscript for two years, and a lot had changed for me
in that time. I rewrote the book with a cold eye: cutting, digging deeper. My
characters became multifaceted, real people with flaws.
I became busier and busier, caught in a whirlwind, trying to
hold down a full-time job, write, promote my books and have a life. Trying,
once again, to be perfect.
And then the universe stepped in.
I had an accident at work. While moving a jet stair (which
weighed over 1,000 pounds) away from the aircraft, my right foot got crushed. I
fell, screaming, onto the tarmac while passengers onboard the plane watched. A
coworker rushed me to the hospital for the first of three emergency surgeries. I
suffered intense pain due to nerve damage, broken and dislocated toes and,
ultimately, amputation of a toe. As I write this, I’m still recovering.
I spent five weeks at a nursing home, a good place for me (even
though most of the patients were over eighty years old), because it would have been
close to impossible for me to take care of myself at home. While there, I
had a chance to meet a lot of the patients and residents. All of us had obvious
holes.
I learned a lot from the other patients. And I was forced to
face my own mortality. Aging offers us the gift of acceptance. In order to age
gracefully, we must the release the idea of perfection. We learn there are some
things we can change, and some things we must accept. And, when we accept what is, we may find the good in even the
most difficult situations. We learn to accept the holes in ourselves and
others. We even welcome imperfection.
Since the accident, I’ve been thinking about holes a lot. I've
been thinking about being whole, in relation to loss. How can loss make a
person whole? I’ve learned that loss can make a person strong, more self-reliant.
Loss can make us more compassionate to ourselves and others.
Where I had a toe, there’s now a hole, and that hole reminds
me that I’m not perfect. But, despite my imperfection, I am whole. I am me. It
would be ridiculous to think that I am any less of a person, because I’m
missing a toe, because I have a hole. Just as it’s ridiculous for any of us to
think we must be perfect.
Physical wounds can’t be hidden as easily as emotional and
psychological wounds. And that’s a gift. Physical wounds make us confront our
mortality, our humanity. Physical wounds can’t be denied. They are tangible and
force us to accept ourselves, with all our imperfections.
It's impossible to get through life without being wounded.
Some wounds are obvious. Others are internal, even spiritual: the loss of the
ability to trust, to connect deeply, to hold a friend and know that you are
loved.
We run away from wounds. Try not to look at them. We think they're signs of
weakness, but our wounds—the holes in us—provide a doorway, a soft spot in our
armor. We walk around armored, protecting ourselves with platitudes and false smiles,
never touching our own vulnerabilities, afraid to share our tender rawness with
another or even with ourselves.
If we can touch the tender spots, allow ourselves to feel fear, sorrow, loss,
we become closer to wholeness. The more we accept our holes, the more
compassion we can have for others. When we feel compassion we are able to
connect. We are able to expose our soft underbelly to another human being and
share the salt of our tears, the sweetness of our joy. That’s what I want to
write about, that’s what I want to share, because salt makes all the difference
between a bland, protected life, and a true life: pulsing, bloody, messy,
passionate and truly whole.
Flaws, or holes, are what make a character seem real—in life
and in fiction. Perfection is impermanent, an illusion. A person who seems too
perfect is repulsive. We don’t trust him. We know that person can’t be real. Holes
speak of truth. Holes allow us to connect, to ourselves and to each other. Our
holes make us human, make us beautiful. Holes allow the light to shine through.
If someone had asked me last spring, “Would you give up a
toe in order to learn, in order to have time to write your next novel?” I might
have said, “Yes.”
Funny, how life works.
~ ~ ~
Vestal Virgin—Suspense in Ancient Rome
Hetaera—Suspense in Ancient Athens
