Idiot Compassion, Orgies and Self-Imposed Writer's Block (and a Little Perspective)

 

Looks prettier covered in blood....   

I need to write. But it's nights like tonight that I sit and struggle with exactly what I want to say and how to say it. I know I want - no, need - to write something, but it feels overwhelming and complicated, something I don't know how to do - like those days that you sit at work and wonder "hmmm, when will they all realize I have NO IDEA what I'm doing?"

Part of me wants to write poems, but I need to scrawl those messily by hand - my brain won't communicate poetry to a keyboard. But it's Nepal and the power is off and as romantic as writing by candlelight sounds it isn't really possible when your eyes are as terrible as mine. That leaves me with the laptop and either this journalish 'personal essay' stuff or fiction, and I will be honest: fiction scares me.

I have a few ideas for stories brewing but they involve themes that are still too raw and so I am avoiding them, thinking to myself "oh, that? Yep. I'll write that later." as I slink away and hide and read jezebel instead. I know that the best thing to do would be to plunge my hands in up to the elbows and get messy and haunted with my particular muse, but I have to work in the morning and I have no whiskey in the house (oh, look at me being all tortured and writerly). It's also just easier just to let myself slack and get away with avoiding the big, scary work.

So instead I will give you a piece about my week that will start wanky and Holden Caulfield-y (or Lena Dunham-y, see link above) but get progressively more self-aware, I promise.

It has been a bizarre week. Last weekend I found out that two of my ostensibly "straight" exes are...erm, 'romantically involved' in a 'group setting' on the regular. This news was obviously unsettling, and a bit upsetting - and also kind of hilarious. (I'm pretty sure neither of them read this, but if they do - hi guys!) Now, should I be relieved or offended if they don't ask me to join them? Just kidding. (Am I? Mostly...)

After a weekend filled with spontaneous laughing jags, on Monday I had to perform a "friends-off" and tell a particularly toxic pal in Kathmandu that I could no longer be in their life. It felt shitty to abandon someone who is obviously in need of mental health help, but allowing their abusive behaviour to go unchallenged was not doing them any favours. In this case, I really like the concept of idiot compassion that has been popularized by Pema Chodron. In her words it is defined as "the general tendency to give people what they want because you can't bear to see them suffering. Basically, you're not giving them what they need. You're trying to get away from your feeling of 'I can't bear to see them suffering.' In other words, you're doing it for yourself. You're not really doing it for them."

Had I stayed friends with my buddy after they repeatedly treated me badly (and swore it would never happen again each time) I wouldn't have been helping them, I would have just been enabling them - and that isn't compassion. It's actually cowardly and selfish on my end. Avoiding idiot compassion means that I can be a compassionate Buddhist (or Buddh-ish, depending on the day) without being a fucking doormat. But that doesn't mean it is easy, and I had to be careful that I was reacting in a calm and measured way and not out of spite or anger. I'm proud of how I handled the situation.

To top off the week, I found out that an old flame has moved on - a fact that came to light in a weird, roundabout way. I wasn't at all shocked, and I wasn't really upset. I was just caught off guard and a little bummed, as I think anyone would be. I'm actually more upset that there is no one in Kathmandu with whom to have an ill-advised 'moving-on/kind-of-bored/my-bed-is-freezing' fling. I live in the expat-lady capital of the world (development work is largely a vagina-having thing to do) and so I have pretty much zero options when it comes to dating. Nepali guys are incredibly handsome, yes, but I have weird ethical qualms about breezing into a developing nation for seven months, banging the men and then leaving.This leaves me expat men who are either a) older and married, b) younger and frat dude-ish or c) OH WAIT THERE IS NO C.

By mid-week I was sufficiently feeling like garbage. It was then that I found out that my pal had been attacked in rural Nepal. Mere hours after hearing this terrible news I learned that a Tibetan monk had just set himself on fire in Kathmandu. My heart sank and tears welled up in my eyes, a heavy weight in my chest. This marks the 100th self-immolation in the past year, and the first of its kind in Nepal (the other 99 have been within Tibet and China). The act took place at Boudhanath Stupa (which is located right near Kopan) and I go there quite often to circumambulate and recite mantras. My recent visit to Boudha made the monk's pain and desperation feel more tangible, more urgent. Yesterday I found out that he has passed away from his burns, and this news put my whole 'sorry' week into perspective.

Basically, while I have a few woes with friends and exes, millions of people in Tibet are being stripped of their human rights and their millennial-old traditions are being lost. They are so disenfranchised that they are resorting to a brutal self-inflicted death to try desperately to draw international attention to their plight. While I grumble about the cold and the rain and the lack of dating options my friend sits in hospital with a fractured skull, her career and travel plans dashed (temporarily). Through this ordeal and all of her suffering she has had the most inspirational attitude and positive outlook. I'm humbled.

So I can get down in the dumps and lonely and even stuck with a bit of writer's block, but I lead a charmed fucking life. I don't want to forget how lucky I am and feel sorry for myself when things get angsty - instead, I need to get busy spreading this fortune around. The only things that I know I can do to make this world a better place are meditate, be compassionate, work hard on meaningful projects and write. When I avoid writing fiction or poetry about painful subjects because it's easier to avoid them than confront them, well that's just idiot (self) compassion, and that doesn't help me or anyone. So I need to write.

It seems fitting to end on that note, because it is also where I started.
Good night, chickens.
xoxoxVD

Taking the Pen from Paris - A Writer Wakes Up

At Cafe de Flores in Montparnasse, trying to soak in the inspiration.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
-Ernest Hemingway

Eventually, I always thought, eventually I will be a published and praised novelist/poet. From the age of 14 this just seemed like an inevitability in my head, something that I wouldn't have to work at and would just one day, y'know, happen. "Live an exciting and interesting life, Dear, and you won't be able to STOP yourself from jotting down the next great novel!" As if it would happen absentmindedly in between rounds of vodka sodas, or on top of a cathedral in Europe, or perhaps even in the line for the washroom not used for sex at the Gay bar.

But the opposite is true.

There is a famous quote by Tallulah Bankhead: "Good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have time." And it is true. It's a catch 22 that the busier, the more exotic, the utterly fabulous stories that you acquire and rich layers of experience you gain - the less time you have to write it down.

Not that that is my only excuse for the last 15 years, the 15 years since I promised myself, a raccoon-eyed, Manic Panicked 14 year old, that I would be an brilliant novelist at some point. No, my main excuse comes back to complacency, to school essays and 9-5 jobs where you get home and just want to watch 6 hours of Arrested Development and pet the cats, not pick up a pen or a keyboard and weave magical worlds of complexity. I have been lazy. I haven't wanted it enough. I trusted, stupidly, that it would just happen.

And so of course it has not. This isn't some hilarious sitcom moment where I am going to find out I've been sleepwalking and fulfilling my life's passions while unconscious. I need to put time in, the put down the facebook and the news, to schedule my schoolwork more effectively so that I have the time to write.

BUT, and its a big but, it's not just about time, is it? It's not just about amazing, life-changing experiences and galavanting travels. It's MOSTLY about confidence, inspiration and gumption.

And I got me somma that in Paris.

Great writers have lived in Paris for hundreds of years , and while I am fascinated by the age of the Bohemians, by the characters depicted in Toulouse Lautrec paintings, by the earlier poets Balzac and Baudelaire - the era that fascinates me are the years between the wars.

The writers of the Lost Generation -American and British writers flooded Paris in the 1920s to soak up its rich artistic atmosphere and its relaxed social mores- spent hours in cafes and bars producing some of the most compelling writing of the twentieth century. James Joyce, F Scott Fitzgerald (and his crazy wife Zelda) Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Samuel Beckett - that's just a sampling of the writers that I adore. And they all.lived.here.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary - Ernest Hemingway

Despite (and maybe because of) Hemingway's personal problems, he is one of my favourite writers. His sparse, clean style is what I try to remind myself of when I get overly verbose, and though this photo is all kinds of cliche I was truly happy at this moment. I am seated in the Cafe de Flores, where a coffee is the exorbitant 6 Euros and wannabe writers from around the globe flock to spend it.

Why? It is in this cafe that Simone de Beauvoir huddled during World War II and wrote The Mandarins. It, along with Les Deux Magots next door, is where every single writer listed above has sat and written in the worn wicker seats.

Best address ever.

Montmartre, Montparnasse, the Latin Quarter - neighbourhoods so steeped in lore and fairytale that walking through them feels surreal, like I need a good pinch (not on my rear, either - although S is happy to oblige) to really be able to absorb that I'm there.

No, actually? This is the best address ever.

As if fate stepped in, in our wanders we unintentionally stumbled upon a place that I had planned on seeking out a few days later - Shakespeare and Company. This place is truly legendary amongst young writers - a bookstore on the Left Bank of the Seine that opened in 1919 as part shop/part library and part hostel for aspiring writers. In fact, I found out that to this day there is free rooming upstairs for impoverished scribes - and I may head back next Summer to take them up on that offer.

Catching up on my literary smut in the Latin Quarter.

In the 1950's a competitor, George Whitman, took over the name and applied it to his shop, formerly called Le Mistral and also on the Left Bank. In this era the famous erotic novelist (and longtime paramour of Henry Miller) Anais Nin was a frequent visitor, and her quote is posted in the back room:

And there by the Seine was a bookshop, not the same, but similar to others I had known. An Utrillo house, not too steady on its foundations, small windows, wrinkled shutters. And there was George Whitman, undernourished, bearded, a saint amongst his books, lending them, housing penniless friends upstairs, not eager to sell, in the back of the store, in a small overcrowded room, with a desk, a small stove.
— Anaïs Nin, Diary, Vol. 5.

I got goosebumps being there.

Yes, I rinsed my mouth. A lot. With wine. And more wine.

After an Edith Piaf walking tour, we ended at the Pere LaChaise cemetery to visit her grave. I then made a beeline for Oscar Wilde's tomb, and in keeping with tradition gave it a big lipstick smack while S looked on, horrified. "It's all for art!" I exclaimed, giddy with life and promise and, well Paris.

So maybe I have it now. Maybe I have that missing piece - the bone-soaking, encompassing inspiration that walking Paris' cobblestone streets gives a writer. I mean, if they could do it, why can't I?

And it's a good lesson, no matter what. Your dreams - especially if they are scary and bewildering and overwhelming - won't just happen. You make it happen. I make it happen.
And so it's time to grab life by the balls. Or, in this case, the pen.

My Life as a Writer

I was about to start writing about my experiences visting the writer's haunts of Paris, then I realized that this short piece I wrote for an assignment in a writing class sums up my history as a writer quite nicely (and I hate reinventing wheels) so here it is - the Paris part will follow tout suite!

When asked to describe myself, I often use the word "writer." I like the way it sounds, the images that it conjures of a mad poet awake until all hours scribbling frantically into a notebook because what he has to say will vanish into thin air if he doesn't get it all out as fast as he can. This image stems from my romantic teenaged ideas about Bukowski and Baudelaire, authors posessed by inner demons that could only be expelled by putting pen to paper and living tortured and decadent livee. I am a poet at heart - I have examples of four line cuplets that I wrote when I was six years old.

But the word "writer" is nice because it can also refer to a journalist – an intrepid traveler scouting the globe and documenting her experiences one hairy situation at a time. I just recently was hired as a freelance journalist for a nightlife magazine - not quite the same amount of responsibility, but the situations could get just as hairy....

I write fiction as well – stories both long and short and I one day hope to finish a novel. It used to be very easy for me – as a child and teenager I was quite prolific, filling binders decorated with band names and logos with hundreds of pages of fiction. I have just recently started again, writing short character studies and even working on a script for a graphic novel for a friend who is a comic book artist.

When I write regularly it does something wonderful to my brain – I stop and stare at the most mundane sights, I listen to people differently, hearing new things in familiar voices. Words become play things, like children's blocks that I can move around and manipulate. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I feel somehow more myself, more alive when I write.

I have gone through long periods of writer's block. Throughout much of my twenties I have written little other than academic essays, with the exception of the last year. When I stop writing or slow down dramatically, it becomes incredibly easy to not write, a skill and a hobby that falls by the wayside as I choose to watch films or read instead. Ideas still pop into my head, but with less vibrancy and frequency. When I wasn't writing I certainly didn't text myself ideas when no paper was handy like I do now. Writing can be urgent for me.

Reading is like fuel for my writing. I was a voracious reader as a child, taking out the public library's maximum allowance of books per week and racing through them. Children made fun of me for using big words, but it didn't – couldn't – stop me.I still read fiction constantly. Studying does cut into the time that I have for pleasure reading but I still try to squeeze it in as every book I read changes the way that I write. I do have to be careful – at various times I have found myself imitating the styles of Hunter S Thompson, William Burroughs and others a little bit too much after reading their books.

Despite giving myself the moniker of "Writer" I have never been published. Part of this is laziness. The literary world seems so vast and overwhelming that I don't know where to begin. Even my website, with its twelve hundred readers, could be a lot more popular with agressive promotion. Part of me likes that my poetry and fiction is just for my friends and I to read, but the other part craves an audience, especially for the pieces that I like the most. I plan to get more serious about getting published once I have graduated.

Academic writing is a challenge for me – certainly more challenging than the random collections of pretty words that I churn out on a daily basis. The main reason that I am taking this course is to shave off the more casual, personal feel of my papers. After five years away from school, I also want to refresh my brain in the art of academic discourse, re-build my confidence and ensure that I am prepared to correctly write papers across the disciplines that I am taking. Who knows – maybe I'll even write a poem about it.

Violet on the Block....

It always amazes me that there are still coffee shops that do not have wifi. I mean, a Timmy Ho's I can understand, I am talking about your socially conscious, free trade organic coffee shop where the baristas have ironic haircuts and berets. Don't they need the internets to download the latest Devendra Banheart album?

I digress. My point is that when you are enjoying a green tea and a piece of icing-heavy carrot cake (yoga will cancel this out – right? RIGHT?) while you wait for yoga to start and you realize that your writer's block may indeed be over you should have access to your blog. I mean, I had more free wifi in Cambodia. The Olympics are coming, Vancouver – and people want their wifi.

What's that bit I just said about writer's block? It's more of a 'blogger's block.' I am churning out fiction and poetry like a Bronte sister on meth, but the moment I stare at the happy orange and blue Blogger interface it all goes to hell. I have a dozen blogs half written – a particularly nice one about Jaisalmer, the top ten reasons I love LA and a piece about Vancouver's opium den history to name a few. Do you think I could finish them? Or, at the very least, stop thinking about finishing them and then beating myself up as I open another folder instead?

I like you guys. I really do. I don't want to lose you. You, ermm, complete me? Had me at hello? Take a piece of my heart? Shine on you crazy diamond (oh wait....)

Another confession – and I make this one with a grimaced face – I am back in school. University. Taking four courses, each with insane work loads. And tut tut tut- before you congratulate me and give me air high five - you do know what that means, right? It means that my every waking moment for the next 4 months will be consumed with reading, writing, panicking, drinking tea, panicking, drinking beer to forget the panic and reading. And more writing. And probably at least two (oh let's be honest – 4) fits of complete Klaus Kinski style hysteria. Will I have the time and the heart to blog for you?

(As an aside, the two week break that I get during the Olympics (yes, even the Universities here in my fair city are closing) is going to be filled up by another amazing opportunity – I am going to be leading the Vancouver Police Museum's "Sins of the City" walking tours, taking tourists through the seedy underbelly of Vancouver's not-too-distant past. Come and visit! Take a tour with me! Apparently the whole world is coming - you should too!)

Part of the problem is that my blog is about - and should continue to be about - my travels (being a tourist in your own city counts) and not just my random thoughts. Random thoughts are easy. That I can do every day or so and let you all know the weird and random pop culture and film crap that is flooding my brain at any given moment – but it's no 'majestic sweeping rice paddy' description. But then what happens to my archives? My hard work at crafting a travel website that I would read goes down the squat toilet and I end up just being another random musings blog. Do y'all like me enough for that?

Do I like me enough for that? Sigh.

So here's the rub – I promise to write about my past travels (and finish the Jaisalmer entry – I started it in the Philippines during a typhoon, for Shiva's sake) and my new travels and like, actual interesting activities but for the sake of my grades and (in)sanity I may also just spew out random thoughts as well. Is that okay? Are we all okay with this?

I hope so. And let's all just hope a girl can get some wifi up in here.

And just to blow all y'alls minds - this is what S and I look like when we are NOT disgusting backpackers.