My epiphanies are never lightening bolts

I wish they were. You see the problem with "well duh" epiphanies is that I forget them and fall back into the habits that led to needing an epiphany in the first place.

For example, my first epiphany for today: my blog is my writing practice. I'm rereading Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and feeling a little defeated that I can't manage the simple writing practice everyday in a notebook. I'm getting dressed and a quiet voice says "You write your blog just about every day."

Which is true, even when I don't get to type them, I'm writing almost everyday. It's not the free form craziness that Goldberg recommends and that's probably why I had trouble making the connection.

Now pushing myself from complacency with writing practice to diving into writing with a purpose is a different problem.

Second epiphany: I don't write family dynamics. As I was pondering the status of epiphanies that led to this post, what I wrote yesterday came to mind. I was exploring how family influnced my perfectionism streak (I will be typing it up; it had good points in it) when I realized it was reflected in my fiction. My protagonists are orphans or estranged from blood kin. If they have a family, it is one they created with a bond beyond mere genetics. If there is blood kin of non-estranged type, it's siblings. I realized the only exception to this was in the Legend of Zelda fanfics. There's probably more to mine here, but I feel it goes better with the other post.

Third epiphany: My parents were not abusive, so where did my sister and I get our shared self-esteem issues? I guess the epiphany is more that we share them. The third kid got all the social abilities that skipped me and the middle kid, and I have never noticed her have these problems. But Kai feels she was an ugly baby who eventually got better and since puberty I changed from an adorable child to a hideous fat blob with boobs. I felt that was in high school; I feel that way now.

I think a lot of it stems from high school. Sure I had boobs but I also had brains and glasses, and the cute boys I crushed on dated the stick-thin cheerleaders with none of the above (though I am doing them a disservice--most of them were in the top ten percent of our class). Dating-wise things didn't get better in college.

Chad puts up with a lot of shit from me over these issues. Because it cuts me hard when he calls me "cute." With size D knockers since the onset of puberty, I deserve to be stunning, sultry, femme fatale, Jessica Rabbit with the slit to the clevage. But my face, my stature, and my personality only add up to cute. How the hell do you equate cute with sexy?

Fourth epiphany: My gender has been assaulted. This particular epiphany is about a month old. I was reading through a feminist blog entry and all the comments it generated thinking how lucky I had been to have never experienced any of that harrassment. Then a memory clicked into place and I realized I had been. Just once, groped and made to feel like a puny small thing until I kicked out. Literally, I was grabbed up by a guy twice my size and where do you think his arms stopped? I didn't do any permanent damage and he put me down real quick and the other boys didn't grab me. And I had always put a size ratio to it. I wasn't going to let some guy twice my size toss me around. The gender fears never entered my head, even though I spent the rest of the party in view of the adults.

I seem to spend a lot of my memories like that, thinking one thing and never realizing the bigger picture. I always thought my great-grandfather had a "shaking disease"--that must have been how it was first described to me and it is what I observed. Mom tells me last week he had Parkinson's and then acted like I should have known all along.

Fifth epiphany: My ego (Freud not Vinnie) needs to get out of the way. The source of my perfectionism streak that blocks me to protect me and all the other armor quirks I have. I'm so deeply flawed but it can't let any of that out.

Yeah, I got to get through, over, around, or under that.

Read Free!
The BookWorm

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