Finding the Extraordinary Me.

"I can't take it any more," I complained to Chris, one of my friends in high school, over our instant messenger chat one fall evening.

Platypusman: can't take what?

"I feel like... like the world is trying to tear me apart, piece by piece. Everyone comes to me to cry on, yet when I need someone to talk to, no one's ever there. I feel like soon there won't be anything left of me." This statement took nearly five minutes to type, as I had to force myself to admit to what the core of my depression had always been. Five minutes of agonized deliberation about every letter, every word, wondering if Chris would give a damn about my pain or if he would blow me off. "He's my friend, he's GOT to listen," I told myself and didn't believe it.

Platypusman: You want my advice?

Convinced that he didn't know anything, I answered, "sure."

Platypusman: you care too much.

I bristled at his assumption and poised my fingers over the keyboard to blast him with my angsty teenage wrath, but he continued, disrupting my thought processes.

Platypusman: You should stop caring so much about everyone else. Let them take care of their own problems. You need to take care of yours. So forget them.

On later thought, perhaps Chris wasn't the best person to go to for advice on the subject, or perhaps he was the right person, but I took it wrong, or perhaps I took his words exactly as I was meant to for his advice did help me. It was at that moment that I asked myself, "Why the Hell do I care about people who won't listen to me when I've got a problem? There's no point!" With a nearly audible snap, I released my hold on my heart, allowing it to drop down into the dark depths of me. It was in that moment that the compassionate version of me was pulled out, stomped, and buried, and in the wake of that sudden void, I knew peace for the first time in years.

I honestly didn't care, and it was wonderful to be free of the guilt of being unable to help anyone.

I never realized how much I would miss that compassionate version of myself. She was the one who could have true friends, and the one who wasn't a hollow shell that faked emotions and was never touched by love or sorrow. From then on, my relationships with my friends had gone steadily downhill, though I hadn't realized it at the time. I stopped talking to my best friend of nine years when she decided to move to New Zealand with her new husband, I later stopped talking to Chris because of various real and imagined insults. I stopped talking to everyone I'd met in high school, and even the new friends I made in college were more like well-known-acquaintances rather than what I would consider real friends. I was afraid of opening up to them and I still didn't give a damn about what they thought or felt, after all, they wouldn't have cared about me, right?

Because of my contradictive nature, I've never liked talking about myself, yet felt depressed when no one listened. As a result, I turned to fiction writing as an escape – a way to express myself and use the feelings I had in a constructive way and a way to explore new worlds that I could never see in person. Writing became my love, and when adults asked, "So what do you want to be when you grow up?" I would answer, "A novelist!" Of course my answer usually got me stared at oddly until I showed them my writing and they realized that I was indeed serious. I admit that I've not always been willing to try any type of writing at least once, poetry, for example is the bane of my existence. It was only recently that I've decided to open my mind and try different kinds of writing in an effort to learn something that might improve my fiction writing skills to achieve my dream of being published with the best book ever. So I signed up for a class called "Creative Non-Fiction" even though I didn't have a clue what the title of the class could possibly mean, however, I was determined to find out and to learn something, and indeed I did learn many things but not what I'd expected to learn, nor do I think it was exactly what the teacher was trying to teach. Or maybe it was? After all, the class was all about "finding the extraordinary in the ordinary" things of life and exploring them.

Memoirs, however, confuse me. I can rarely get my throat to unlock when I want to say something to one of my friends about what's bothering me, how could I write anything about myself and allow complete strangers to read it? Yet it is through writing memoirs that I finally confronted several topics that I had long been avoiding thinking about – topics that I'd thought I'd gotten over. It was through memoirs that I finally reawakened that old version of myself I'd killed that day talking to Chris on line – the one who actually gave a damn about her friends and family. It is through memoirs and the process of writing them that I've realized a few things about myself that I'd never known, things that would be so totally awesome to put into a character in one of my fiction stories.

I've always felt, when creating characters that there is something at their core that differentiates them from everyone else, something that if changed would make the character cease to be the person they truly are. Take for example; Vathion, though sixteen, is mature for his age yet still prone to massive bouts of angst and shyness. He is also a good actor – a skill he puts to good use after inheriting his father's fleet of battle ships, bluffing the universe into thinking he's cool and confident while he's really shaking in his boots. The driving central force behind Vathion, though, is his desire to be like his father, yet at the same time loathing the man. It is this trait that makes Vathion interesting to write and he isn't the only one of my characters I've used as a playground to explore the complex dissonance between what is said and what is done.

So when I was asked to write a memoir for my first assignment in Creative Non-Fiction class, I wasn't very sure of what exactly I was expected to do. "Make the ordinary extraordinary," Dr. Bell had both said and written this on every assignment paper in class. The only problem is that I thought I was the most boring person in the world and I'd never given my own thoughts and lack of emotions any thought whatsoever. Though I've always been good at creating characters, I'd never considered myself as one too, which was what I'd thought I would have to do to write the assignment correctly. "How do you write humor, character development, and angst into a memoir?" I wondered, "It's not possible! The event is in the past! I can't change it and make stuff up!"

Then, it came time to write our first papers and I panicked, "I'm so very boring. Everyone else is writing about cool stuff but me. I don't have any interesting memories, except for that date-not-date I had with Joe, but that's more amusing than interesting. I know, I'll write that!" I decided in a flash of brilliance and I proceeded to write down nearly exactly what happened as best I could remember it without further thought.

I was completely unclear on the concept. I had no idea who the characters in my essay were. Joe, I at least could figure a few things out about. He's interested in finding love but isn't too concerned when a date doesn't pan out into real love. He's also slightly overprotective of girls, walking them to their cars when it's night in a parking lot, even if it's unlikely anything will happen. Myself though... I had no clue who that girl calling herself "I" was in my essay, and that was why I got a C.

Again, it ties back to my problem of being unable to open myself up to anyone. I even felt self conscious about writing the homework assignments, and as a result most of them ended up in my diary never to be graded. I kept finding myself asking the same question for the first few essays in my Creative Non-Fiction class. That question was, "Why should anyone give a damn about Jimbob's seventh grade experiences and what he thinks of them today? Was his life really that interesting back then?" I half believe in that ancient curse, "May your life be interesting," only because when writing, I inflict the most amusing and interesting situations on my characters and they generally survive, but they usually come out bleeding. I love tormenting my characters, it's so very fun to watch them squirm and try to figure out the answers, and this was another point that was impeding my writing. I just didn't have any truly horrific stories to tell where me, as the main character, was tormented the way I abuse my fictitious characters.

I've been told before that most authors hate the process of writing but they like what comes out in the end. I actually love the process of writing, and I love reading what comes out in the end. I get to go on interesting adventures when I'm writing and directly influence the outcome of events. With memoirs, though... that was another real sticking point. "It's already happened, how boring!" were my original thoughts. However, it comes back to that one objective written on every assignment, "Make the ordinary extraordinary." I had yet to figure out that those words were the real key to finding something to write about. It wasn't that my memories themselves had to be interesting, it was the act of reflecting on them that made them interesting.

Finally, I decided to give the next assignment a better attempt, and the fact that it was supposed to be about someone else was easier to handle than it being about me again. I know now that I can probably do an even better job on analyzing my friend, Alexa, and I likely will now that I've remembered how to care about people again. The third assignment, the place essay, I knew was garbage. I just wasn't getting to what I wanted to say, for I couldn't find whatever message was hiding beneath the surface, and I didn't have enough time to really and truly dig my hands in and rip apart my memory of my high school. As a result, the voice of that essay was whiny – exactly the opposite of what I'd intended to write. Again, I believe it is because I still didn't know that girl calling herself "I." In my freestyle/collage essay, I believe I'd started to realize the truth, but it was still hidden beneath the surface, needing to be spoken out loud for me to finally understand the significance of what I'd written.

So I decided to think on a few things and took a couple days off from writing anything to make an honest attempt at getting to know myself.

Mirror in hand, I looked into that other blonde's eyes, recalling that her friends had called them the color of dark chocolate, and I said, "Who the hell are you?" I was determined to figure out the answer to this question. After all, perhaps I might find it useful later? Besides, all my other attempts at figuring out the answer had failed miserably, perhaps because I'd been trying to use the skills I use in fiction writing, which I believe were probably the wrong tools for the job. It was like trying to scoop fish out of a tank with a spatula, or trying to catch an eel with my bare hands. When I write, I imagine myself as doorway through which my imagination is channeled, giving others a glimpse into the universes that multiply like amebas in my head. This path had always been a straight conduit through which concepts flew one way or the other – either I was reading something and partaking of someone else's universe, or I was writing one. This whole writing about myself thing, though, made me feel as if I'd taken that path and twisted it to plug one end back into itself but only the forlorn whistle of air was coming through the duct taped joints.

"Who are you?" I asked again. The girl in the mirror, of course, looked confused.

After staring at her for a long moment, admiring the way light fell across her cheeks, smoothing the blemishes of her skin into a pale cream I started to get the urge to draw, but stifled it in favor of not getting distracted in this exercise. Again, I asked in an accusing tone, "Tell me what makes you who you are?"

"Oh," she said cheerfully, "That's easy. I am a contradiction and I love being better than those around me, not because I want to rub their faces in it, but because I am constantly trying to improve myself."

"A contradiction and a snob, eh?" I wondered, irritated to find that the girl in the mirror was a complete bitch – a psychotic bitch for that matter, sitting in her room talking to herself. Then, I turned back to my computer and stared at the multiple word documents I had open. "15 minutes late and it's free," one document was saved as – the other was "Craft essay 1." Irritated and still unsure of what I wanted to write, I then turned to the internet for another moment of distraction, logging onto LiveJournal to check and see if my friends had posted anything. Sure enough, one of them had.

I remember that day of deciding to not care, and ever since that day I'd been convinced that I had killed all my capacity to feel sympathy, all my drive to help people and be their shoulder to cry on. However, upon reading that entry after agonizing so long over finding out who I was, revisiting the past and looking back at the girl I had once been and sort of wanted to be again, I felt as if someone had cracked my chest open and pointed, "Hey, look! It's not stone!" What a shock!

Mixed sorrow, joy, and sympathy coursed through me for the first time in years, I was nearly brought to tears. My friend's life sucked and I wanted to help her and it was the greatest feeling in the world. After writing a reassuring reply to her post, I turned back to my documents with renewed energy. I'd just realized that there really was something extraordinary about a movie and ice cream with Joe, the moment had far more meaning than I'd ever thought possible now that I knew that girl who'd been flirting shamelessly with everything, and the fact that I'd realized this was extraordinary as well.

Though, I have to admit that memoirs confuse me still, albeit for different reasons than when I first started this class, I think I've begun to understand their purpose. Where at first I'd been stuck on the question of, "Who the hell cares?" I now think, "I know what I'm reading here, but this probably means something completely different to the guy who wrote it." How could anyone ever explain fully the universe found in a memory and make someone else understand it in the first person the way the author does? I don't know that answer yet, but perhaps I will if I keep trying. In the meantime, I may not understand other people's memoirs in exactly the same way the author does, I can at least understand mine. The act of writing and reflecting on these memories – these seemingly innocent and ordinary things – finally gave me the chance to confront the reasons for my apathy, breaking past the ice to the point where I could realize and internalize something that I'd written in another story. "Life is not about just breathing, it's about learning to forgive yourself and leaping past your limitations to become, fully, what you were always meant to be," (Searching for Sanctuary).

I'm not sure I've found out exactly what I was always meant to be yet, but at least, by using my memories as stepping stones, I can actually contemplate the lessons I've unconsciously learned. Maybe you can't change the past, but you can change how you perceive it, and that is what broke the ice on my heart, allowing me to live and feel again for the first time in years.