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The Saving Graces of Social Media

IMG_1136It’s all about perceptive when discussing the pros and cons of social networking. True, there are quirks about Twitter and Facebook and their internet compatriots. Used poorly, they can appear narcissistic or snarky or just plain cruel.

But this week, I read an excellent article in Salon by Julia Fierro, where she highlights a redeeming side to social media. Read it if you haven’t already (especially if you’re a doubter). These are only a few of my favorite quotes:

If you ask the people who know me in real life…they’ll call me friendly, outgoing, maybe even gregarious. A charming conversationalist. The kind of person who can be warm with friends and strangers alike. And I can be, but only in two- to three-hour bursts. After the time limit expires, so does my social-emotional tolerance.

. . .

I’m a closeted introvert. I crave daily social interaction, but I feel so much for, from and around people, that it quickly depletes me.

. . . 

But it quickly became clear that my particular situation (I work from home) and personality (obsessive introvert) made social media my blessing in disguise. It is socializing on my own terms. I feel genuinely close to my online friends, but I can slip into a conversation, and slip out. I can log on, and log off. And, in my busy midlife years, when I am “having it all” — balancing professional success, a writing life and family — these are the only relationships I have time for.

I am an introvert just the same; it takes me a long time to warm up to a crowd. Ask my own family. There are moments–even at a simple dinner–when I am more comfortable in front of the sink washing coffee cups than sitting around the table talking. And, it isn’t necessarily because I love doing dishes.

DSCN5673But Fierro brings up another reason that attests to why I love social media: the time factor. For me, it isn’t only how much or little time I have to visit with friends (online or in person), but the time I don’t have to read all the great essays and articles published by writers, about writers, on the craft of writing. I depend on my Twitter and Facebook friends to keep me updated and to connect me to links I have missed in rush of my daily routine.

Like this interview with Lorrie Moore (found via Longreads), which was my true saving grace yesterday. Moore says:

From the time I first started writing, the trick for me has always been to construct a life in which writing could occur. I have never been blocked, never lost faith (or never lost it for longer than necessary, shall we say) never not had ideas and scraps sitting around in notebooks or on Post-its adhered to the desk edge, but I have always been slow and have never had a protracted run of free time.

And later, when asked directly if she was saying she had no other choice but to be a writer, she responds:

Well, that’s all very romantic, and I can be as romantic as the next person. (I swear.) But the more crucial point is the moment you give yourself permission to do it, which is a decision that is both romantic and bloody-minded—it involves desire and foolish hope, but also a deep involvement with one’s art, some sort of useful self-confidence, and some kind of economic plan.

. . .

I wasn’t at all sure whether I would be able to survive as a writer for the rest of my life. But I decided to keep going for as long as I could and let someone else lock me up for incurable insanity.

Uncertainty (and insanity) about my journey as a writer invades my thinking daily. It’s through online finds like this one–through social media–that remind me 1) I am not alone and 2) it’s worth the fight.

What saved you this week?

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For Your Wednesday Listening: The Videos are Up.

I’m nearing the end of a two-week vacation, and while I brought notebooks and pens and laptop, little writing has been put to paper. So, today’s post is short and sweet: an invitation.

April 26th feels like ages ago, when I took the stage for the Listen to Your Mother Milwaukee show and shared my story. Today, the LTYM 2014 videos have gone live. Even if you couldn’t make the show in Milwaukee–or in any of the other 31 cities–you can still listen. Here’s the link to mine, “Little Legacies:”

But, don’t stop there. Click HERE to watch all the amazing women in the 2014 LTYM collective.

Thank you again to Alexandra Rosas and Jennifer Gaskell for including me in such a wonderful group.

 

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#AmReading: Megan Stielstra’s Once I Was Cool

The healing of the body begins with words.
~ Megan Stielstra in Once I Was Cool

I first heard about Megan Stielstra through another author I admire and loved her first book, Everyone Remain Calm, from the minute I opened the cover. We spoke a while back on the blog (read her Q&A part 1 and part 2) about Everyone Remain Calm, where she said, “all of these things that I see or read or live…get stuck in my head, and what do you do with all of it?—You give it to characters. You find the story.” 

Once I Was Cool front panel copyStielstra has written a new collection of stories, essays in Once I Was Cool about what it means to be a grown up and a mother and a teacher and the truth we find in looking back on those moments that get us from there to here.

I love this quote from “My Daughter Can Read Just Fine:”

I write stories because I love reading, and I love reading because my mother put books in my hands, read them with me, asked me what I thought about them, listened as I told her….

But it’s in this excerpt from “Stop Reading and Listen” where Stielstra hits on the importance of stories: how they affect us and why we share them:

9.

Yelling and fighting at 2 a.m., immediately followed by gunshots. My husband called 9-1-1, and we watched out the window ‘til the sirens came; first police, then fire trucks, then an ambulance. Our bedroom was filled with red and blue light. A small crowd collected on the sidewalk next to the Aragon, and later, we’d find out a teenage boy had died. I wish I could say it was the first time it had happened. I wish I could say it was the last.

An hour later—quiet now, and dark—I got back into bed and began the tricky, foggy work of talking myself back into sleep. I don’t know how long I was out before the crying started. No, not crying, that word’s too weak; this was a wail.  A male voice, wailing. Low and desperate and destroyed, deep at the base of his throat. Maybe at first, I dreamt it, but soon I was sitting up, fully awake, and back to the window.

Three stories below, the boy’s father stood where his son had been shot. He stood there all morning—3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m.—and the whole time, he wailed. A single, raw sob; a few of beats of silence; then another. It made me think of contractions—the pause between the pain. My husband and I sat on the bed, wide awake and listening. We sat there in all of our privilege: our newborn son alive and healthy and asleep in his tiny turret bedroom; our safe, warm home; our middle class upbringings and middle class lives, our education and jobs and insurance; our families; our skin color; our faith; all of it so enormous and so puny in the face of all that pain. I considered reaching into the nightstand to grab the little foam earplugs I used sometimes when the Aragon opens its windows because sometimes the noise is too much, the music and the traffic and the violence and the loss. It’s easier to drown it out, to change the channel, to read something else, to believe the same old story, to stick my fingers in my ears and say Lalalalala instead of listening to a grief I couldn’t fathom and the truths in the world that I don’t want to see.

I sat there, listening.

I imagined people awake, listening, up and down the block. Awake, listening, all across Uptown. Awake, listening, across the city, maybe the country.

Are you awake? Can you hear it?

Stop reading and listen.

photo of my faceYou can listen to Megan Stielstra read the beginning of this essay online at Poets&Writers HERE (and everyone should hear her read).

Then, check out her website or find out how to purchase a copy of Once I Was Cool.

[Reading] starts the dialogue. It opens my eyes to things I haven’t seen before. ~ from “My Daughter Can Read Just Fine”