The World Has Changed (18 page)

 

A.W.: Not for long. Don’t worry about it, it’s their problem. [laughter]

 

J.S.B.: And [I am] assuming that Isabel, being Chilean and all, and that she would fit really well with her culture. I found that’s not true either. There’s something about—what is it about being a stranger, never fitting in, that has helped us to be who we are? And how is it you didn’t fit in, and what is this not-fitting-in stuff that makes such a difference?

 

A.W.: Well for me it’s been really very good, because I think that at a very early age I was separated. You know, something happened to me, as happens often to creative people: I was put outside of the family enough so that I could then watch it from a distance and start to see how it worked. And also to have a critical view. People who are just in there, who fit, never have that distance. And so it’s harder, I think, for them to be free of whatever is molding them. So even though it is very painful because you feel this incredible distance from, for instance, your family,
what finally happens is that you at least have an opinion that can be very different from their opinion, and you grow not to really care that it’s very different from their opinion because it is yours, and because it has been earned. And nothing can take it away from you. So it is also a delight to realize that you—your balloon string may have been cut, and you may not know where you’re gonna drift. But what a view, and what a great feeling, what sweeping movements in space. So there’s just also a real freedom to express however you are. I have very little sense, or fear, or concern, really, about what other people think about certain things that I do, because I feel that this early being put outside has given me the freedom to not be bound by that. If I’m not concerned about what the family thinks, there’s no reason why I should be concerned about people I don’t know.

 

J.S.B.: What put you outside?

 

A.W.: Pardon?

 

J.S.B.: What did put you outside?

 

A.W.: Oh, an act of violence, when my brother shot me when I was a child. And the subsequent refusal of my parents and my family to blame him for shooting me. Rather, I was blamed for being shot. And that sucked then, and it sucks now.

So it takes a very long time, especially when you are indoctrinated as a child that this is the reality, for you to grow into an understanding that your reality, the way you have experienced it, is absolutely valid, and that you can go on on that. And you really don’t need them, whoever it is, giving you their version as the only way that life can be perceived.

 

I.A.: I have the feeling that often, it’s not the society that puts you aside. One is just born that way. And even if in my case, for example, I should have fitted in my family, and in my country, and in the life I had, but I never did. I was just born different, or born with this weird thing in my head that maybe [I am] always an outsider, and I always felt a foreigner in my home, foreigner in my country, in my school. My parents were diplomats, so we moved a lot. And changing schools, changing friends,
saying good-bye all the time, changing languages and places, was also part of it. But I think it was much deeper, and it came genetically. It was something I had inside. And I still have it; I never fit anywhere. I feel very foreign here, and I’m glad, because it’s justified for once. But before it wasn’t, you see, because I even looked quite Chilean, but I wasn’t, I didn’t feel that I could accept the rules of the religion I was brought up in, the social class I belonged to, the family, my family; I never fitted. I was a feminist when I was like five years old. The first time that my mom said, “Sit with your legs crossed,” I became a feminist.... I was really small, and I kept that anger in me, and that the feeling that something was terribly unfair and that I had to, like, exorcize all that anger and that pain and the feeling that I was different. And then when I grew up as an adolescent, people, girls, were always in groups, and had to look like the group, and be part of the group, and talk like the group. And I could never fit in. I was always alone. And so I think that the writing is like everything that I’ve done in my life, and I’ve done crazy things. I think it’s part of that, the feeling that I am different, or I feel different, and allowed to do whatever I want. And if it’s shocking, well, too bad.

 

J.S.B.: Well, I had a very similar experience of moving around because I was in kindergarten in Southern California as the Second World War broke out, and if you were Japanese, you were supposed to go to a concentration camp. My family didn’t; my father got us out of the state . . . you could be a free American citizen once you were out of the state. But I went to something like six or seven elementary schools between the time of kindergarten and the fourth grade, and everywhere I went I was very much aware that we were at war with Japan, and I’m pure Japanese, and I had to be very careful about what kind of prejudice, what kind of experience I might have. And so there was a clear stranger in a strange land, and very often I was the only Japanese face in many of the places that I was in. And so there was that kind of being in the border world. One of the things that . . . worked for me was that it seemed like the school I had been in was ahead of the school I’d go to next. So I had my intelligence to move and ability to be successful in school even though I didn’t fit in. In a social sense I could excel in something that mattered to me and was respected. But I also learned how to make my way and not make very many waves, at least on an interpersonal level.
When I got from about junior high school or high school on, I started to get in trouble with authorities because I took them on when it felt to me that something really grossly unfair was happening. And to this day it’s much easier for me to lead a cause than to speak from myself and risk someone getting personally angry at me. And it seemed like part of my experience as a resident in psychiatry was to learn how to not be automatically disarming so that someone could have their own experience of anger at me.

 

A.W.: Aha. Automatic disarmament.

 

J.S.B.: Yes. But the point I’m making is something about if you do not fit in, that potential to start to individuate early happens.

 

I.A.: I think that most of the creative process comes from a very unhappy childhood. That’s why I’m trying to help my grandchildren have that experience. I did not succeed with my children, they are very straight kids, but I’m trying to do that with my grandchildren. My daughter is in the audience here, she’s turning green.

 

A.W.: One of the things that I often am asked is how I create and whether I do a lot of drafts. And I always say I don’t. And they say, “Why don’t you do a lot of drafts?” And I realize after years of answering this question that I don’t because when I was growing up, my circumstances were so miserable, because of my brothers and crowded conditions, that I really had to do everything in my head. I mean, I couldn’t leave anything lying around because it would be destroyed. And so I had learned to just go through drafts, drafts, drafts in my head before putting anything on paper. But just in the last five years, I realize that I have now reached a stage where I don’t always do that. And it’s such a different way of creating. I actually feel safe enough—primarily, I think, because I have my own house—that I can do like normal writers do. I scratch out stuff and throw it over my shoulder. But it’s such a different way, and it’s interesting to me that it takes so long to understand the reasons for one’s process, why you have to go away, why you need such solitude, why you feel your head is the only safe place.

 

I.A.: It is important to know why?

 

A.W.: It was interesting, Isabel, really, for me. You know, it was just a very interesting thing, because it’s like you’ve had your childhood, but you spend the rest of your life understanding it. And I think of it that way now because I’m not threatened by it. I’m far enough away, I always say I have the whole Rocky range between me and Georgia. So I’m okay.

 

I.A.: What happened with this nasty brother?

 

A.W.: Oh, still nasty.

 

I.A.: He still exists?

 

A.W.: Oh yes.

 

I.A.: Oh gosh.

 

A.W.: Yes, well, you know, that’s his life. And he will have to handle his life as best he can, and I’m going on with mine.

 

J.S.B.: I think there is really something about . . . of course I’m in the business of helping people remember their childhoods, so I support the notion. However, what I have found is that as we remember pieces of our childhood, it’s like getting pieces of ourselves, even or maybe especially if it’s painful, and there is an emotional affect that goes with the memory. And you not only get your history back, and liberate some kind of energy that was used to sort of put a lid on it, but you free up some part of yourself that wasn’t free before to feel the feelings. And so you go into the world with a little more of yourself. And I do think there is something about their lives being important to some folks and not to others. I think that for me, my parents really did support and love me, and help me to feel secure in the world. So I always knew I was loved, but I never got the sense that they were interested in understanding me. And so consequently there is something about my own quest to be understood and to understand myself that is part of where I come from, I’m sure. And it is also something that people do a lot more of at a certain point in their second half of life. So your time may come.

 

I.A.: Actually, when I came to live in the United States, when people asked me, “What is amazing to you or shocking to you in this society?” I’d always say, “Therapists.” I’d never seen so many therapists for so many things, and specialized in different things. I come from a culture where you only go to a therapist if you have to go to an asylum, and there’s no way out. And the rest you go to your mom, or to your aunt, or you just talk in the family and somehow you solve it. There’s no money and no time for therapy. And I always thought also that the writing, my writing, first I thought I was [a] perfectly adjusted human being, that I had no demons, that I had functioned all my life so well that I didn’t need that. And I also thought that the writing came from unresolved emotions. If I had been in therapy, I wouldn’t need to write. And I always thought that
The House of the Spirits
was triggered by deep emotions, that if I had treated those emotions in therapy—I didn’t have money to pay a therapist at that time—I would have never written the book. The book was like a long catharsis that I needed to do because I could not let those feelings out in any other way. So I always feared therapy. And now for the first time in my life, I’m in therapy. I am actually; the circumstances, it sounds funny, but the circumstances are really dramatic. My daughter died recently, a few weeks ago. And my daughter was in a coma for a long time at home. And I thought that I was coping with the situation very well, and then when it was over and we had scattered her ashes, then I realized that I had something inside me that was like a cavern, something empty and cold, and dark, that I couldn’t live with that. And so all my friends around me started insinuating therapists, different therapists; you are the first one to be insinuated to me, Jean. And it’s really amazing how Jean and I met. She says that there’s no such a thing as a coincidence, and maybe it’s true. That day, it was a terrible day, and I was really desperate and I was going someplace, and there was a traffic jam, and I was so uncomfortable that I, instead of just waiting, I tried to turn around. I turned around; I ended up without even knowing how in Book Passage in Corte Madera bookstore. And Jean was going to have lunch with a friend in Strawberry, and she decided that she needed to buy a map. So she went to Book Passage, also I had never met Jean, and we had been there at the same moment, and the same place, but not knowing each other. And then the owner of the bookstore introduced us. She had been telling me all the time that I needed therapy and that I should go to Jean Bolen. So when I appeared in the bookstore, and
Jean did at the same time, she couldn’t believe her eyes, the wonderful chance of introducing us. And so she said, Elaine said, “Isabel, this is Jean.” There are so many Jeans in the world. And I was so upset that I didn’t realize that it was her. So I somehow said, “Hi,” and I said, “How are you doing?” And I started crying, and poor Jean thought that I was totally crazy, that I needed electroshock. That my depression couldn’t be cured with therapy, that I needed something really much, much more aggressive. So we ended up being friends.

 

J.S.B.: You have just slandered my profession.

 

I.A.: Well anyhow, I wanted to say finally that I’m going to therapy right now, I’ve been five times in therapy. And it’s like opening a Pandora’s box. All the demons are coming out. All the stuff that I think I didn’t have in my soul is there. And I just can’t—I don’t know how, what I’m going to do. But all the anger that I didn’t know I had, the pain, lots of stuff that would be wonderful if I could put it down into a book instead of paying a therapist ninety bucks an hour.

 

A.W.: It’ll just be a different kind of book, you know.

 

I.A.: Yeah, it will be a Marin County book.

 

A.W.: Isabel, you could always move.

 

J.S.B.: You know, I think there may be something to the situation of when you don’t have anyone to communicate with, when you don’t have anyone who can understand you, and you take the time to commune with yourself and words come that you want to put down on paper. I think there really may be something to what you’re saying about the abortiveness of some creative process that goes into journal writing and talking to your therapist. I think that that’s true. And there is something about needing to know the difference about when you want to give form, I think, to something and leave your therapist out of it.