I tell wonder-filled stories about hope and healing
Ira Glass, I love you. I love you for so honestly putting it out there: storytelling is a craft, an art, and it takes a really long time to get good at it. And the only way to get good is to try over and over and over again. Write. Write. Write. There is no substitute for practice. There’s no shortcut. It takes blood, sweat, tears, and time.
Thank you for encouraging writers everywhere to keep going. Check out Ira’s video:
For those of you who don’t know, my middle name is Rose. I’m named after two people: my two aunts who are both named Rose.
My first Aunt Rose
My first Aunt Rose, or Rosie as we call her, is 86 years old and she is in the sunset of her life. We found out last week that she has stage 4 lung cancer that has metastasized to an alarming degree. Chemo is no longer an option and the treatments she will undergo are meant to make her comfortable in the remaining months of her life. We are all heartbroken by the news because we love Rosie very much and because it feels like losing my grandmother Sadie (her sister) all over again. She looks just like her – they both remind me of Bette Davis with those gorgeous doe-like eyes and soft rounded features. I look at old photos of them and my jaw drops. They were and are stunning, as beautiful inside as out.
My Aunt Rosie is only 14 years older than my mom so they are more like sisters than niece and aunt. They are so close that she was the maid of honor at my mom’s wedding. She’s also my brother’s Godmother. And she holds the title as my family’s original yogini. Last year we lost my Uncle John, Rosie’s husband. While I was at her house before the service, she showed us an exercise book that she’s used for many years. It was published years before I was born and depicts daily yoga exercises for better health. I never knew she practiced. I guess I was meant to be a yoga teacher – it’s in my genes and my name.
My second Aunt Rose
I never knew my second Aunt Rose. She was the first child of my paternal grandparents, and she died when she was just three days old. Their three children who followed Rose were all boys. My dad once told me that every year on Rose’s birthday my grandfather would cry all day. This tough, gruff Sicilian man who survived the Great Depression and so many other difficulties, in Italy and in his adopted country, never cried about anything except the death of his daughter. Before my older brother, Joey, was born, my grandmother bought my parents a tiny pink dress in the hopes that Joey would be a girl. (But make no mistake – they both adored Joey.) My grandmother died the year before I was born, but my grandfather was still among us. When I was born, my parents gave me the name Rose, and when they told my grandfather he was so happy. He couldn’t wait to meet me, but we never got the chance.
The night I was born, there was a heavy snow storm. My grandfather was shoveling out his car so he could drive over to the hospital to meet me. He pushed himself too hard and had a heart attack. He was rushed to the hospital, but never regained consciousness. He died the next day without getting the chance to hold me, the little girl he had been waiting to have for almost 50 years.
What’s in a name? In my case, a lot. A lot of love, and dreams, and honor for two people – one who has lived a long, happy life and one who never got the chance she deserved. I’m proud to carry them both with me.
Every night, Phin and I take a spin around the block and we look up at the stars. We see them twinkling there. Phin’s just trying to find his next great pee spot and I’m trying to figure out where I go from here and how. A few months back, I had the idea of wiping the slate clean on my career and my life, starting over on a number of levels, fearless about my future and unhampered by my past. Then, I wanted newness in all its forms, and that’s what I want now, too, more than ever.
When we look at the stars, we realize how small we are. A speck in the cosmos. But still a speck, occupying some amount of space for some amount of time. We’re not nothing. We’re something. And we should try to do something meaningful and helpful and useful with our cosmic something-ness. That’s what I learned by staring at the stars and having them stare back at me. We’re here. We don’t know why, or how, or for how long, but let’s make the most of it.
I’m learning this lesson in spades this summer. I’m in the midst of working on a handful of stories that have been churning in the depths of my mind for years. I’ve worked on them in fits and starts, stopping short when I would hit a roadblock that I couldn’t figure out how to remove. And so they’ve sat, unexplored and never shared.
“I’ll think of something eventually. I’ll meditate on it. I’ll just leave it alone and somehow it will fix itself.” I would try to make myself feel better with these affirmations. Really, they are just excuses.
The thinking doesn’t help. The meditating doesn’t help. The leaving it alone doesn’t help. The only thing that fixes writing is more writing. Yes, you have to lean into your writing, especially when you don’t know what to do.
You have to say to hell with the fear of writing garbage. All writers write garbage. It’s part of the process. It gets edited out later. Ditch the fear of being a screw up, of being wrong, fear of putting crap on the page and having it stare back at you. Write anything and everything that comes into your mind. The devil, and the answers to my roadblocks, are in the details and those details only step into the light through writing.
Once I committed to take action, I stopped being a writer and transformed into an observer. I follow my characters around as they tip-toe, stomp, saunter, skip, hop, and run through my imagination and the world they create in it. Rather than writing a story, I decided to trust my characters; those highly flawed, beautiful, totally irrational beings create something much more authentic and poignant for themselves than I can build for them. I set them free and let them act the way they want to act and do the things they want to do. They mess up. They hurt each other, and themselves. My instinct is to protect them like I protect my friends and my family, but that doesn’t serve anyone and it’s not my place.
So I let them be exactly who they are, and I love them all the more for it. To honor them, I play the scribe, getting it all down as accurately as I can. I take a page from Anna Quindlen’s advice on how to live life: “I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.”
Two people go through the exact same experience and end up in radically different places. Why? Because of their stories.
What happened to them before the experience? How did they view the experience while it was happening? What did they do with what they learned from the experience? The answers to these questions build out a person’s stories, the ones they tell themselves and the ones they tell others.
When you go out into the world, you are bound to have things happen. Some of them will be wonderful, and some will be awful. We can bear them all and make good use of each one by putting them into a story. Stories help us cope. They give us an outlet for celebration and for understanding. To write a story, we have to stand at the nexus of our experiences, past, present, and future. We have to be in the moment while also reflecting back and looking forward.
If we can tell a story that’s honest and helpful, then we have lived well.
We all get stuck. But we don’t need to stay where we are. We can move, grow, extend, and transcend.
When life gets heavy, lighten the load by opening up. Your eyes, your heart, your time. Be willing to be surprised by what you find, and then be willing to act on what you learn.
Life can leave us with many questions. Are we in the right job? The right relationship? The right city? I’ve found the clearest way to figure out these big questions is to move away from what we know. When we create some distance, literally or figuratively, we can see things more clearly.
For over a year, I’ve wrestled with the idea of leaving New York to create a new home in a new city. I was very conflicted about the decision so I decided to get away. I decided to take a break from New York and be totally open to any answer that rises up. My escape to Los Angeles did something really amazing, and totally unexpected. By going to LA, I found my way back to New York as my definitive home. I answered the question of “Where should I live?” not by thinking about it, but by leaving it behind. I didn’t need to angst over the decision. I needed to let it go and give it the space to solve itself.
What a powerful lesson. What an incredible discovery. I let go, and the sky didn’t fall. The world didn’t come to an end. I didn’t break. I let go, and then everything fell into place.
is every day. Make the most of it!
A powerful lesson for Dorothy, all of us, and our little dogs, too.
Sometimes the simplest actions that we do for ourselves and for others have the biggest impact. Yesterday The New York Times ran a story by Edie Littlefield Sundby, a woman who walked 800 miles from San Diego to Sonoma after she fought cancer for 6 years.
It was a grueling physical challenge done over several months with a lot of emotional support from friends and family. And she had never felt more alive, confident, and hopeful for the future. All it took was the determination to get up and out into the world. Sometimes the very best thing we can do when we feel stuck is to summon the will to move.
Christa Avampato 