fear

things i fear:

• clowns
• bees/wasps/flying stinging things
• breaking my nose
• pain
• missed opportunities
• losing control
• being a poor leader
• stupid mistakes
• disappointing someone i admire
• hurting someone else
• being hated and not knowing it
• losing my brother
• failure

things i don't fear:

• death

Stories Can Save Us.

Today, I sang "Happy Birthday" to Tim O'Brien, Vietnam Veteran, "older father" (as he put it), and world-renowned writer of The Things They Carried, among other poignant novels. Obviously, I wasn't the only one singing--the rest of the audience crowded in the Carolina First Arena joined in to sing to him after he spent over an hour speaking to us about stories, truth, life, and war.

More than anything, I wanted to be one of the loud freshman and cautiously excited faculty members that popped from their chairs in a rush to line up in front of him for an unscheduled autograph. I can imagine how the conversation might go...

"Hi, Mr. O'Brien."

"Hey, there. What's your name?"

"H-Hillary." I would stutter here, certainly. Even being 15 feet away, I was starstruck.

"Tell me about yourself, Hillary." I think he'd be interested, or at least, would pretend to be so his signature could have a note before it. But listening to him speak and seeing how personable and humble and sincere he was, I think he would genuinely want to know a little about every person whose book he signed. And I know what I would want to say and how embarrassed I would be say it, especially to Tim O'Brien.

"Well, I want to be a writer. I'm working on a project now about a soldier's return from Afghanistan and how he and his family react to his return." Except I'm sure I would stutter much more here and fail to explain my project with any semblance of clarity.

I don't know how he would react to my admission; I'm sure he and writers of his caliber hear similar rushed confessions every time they speak. Maybe he would nod and say, "That's great, keep working at it." Maybe he'd say, "Good luck, kid." Maybe he would smile empathetically and think on his life, when he was first starting out and sign "You'll make it," above his name. I'm not sure.

But I'm willing to bet that if I sat down with Tim O'Brien and let him read my manuscript, he might tell me the same thing that my advisor, Anthony Varallo, tells me, the same thing that Bret Lott and Carol Ann Davis told me when they reviewed the first half:

"Don't be afraid."

Of what? Well, here's what I've got so far.

Don't be afraid to lie. Tim O'Brien said this tonight, and as a young writer who hasn't had the experiences that he has, I can see the necessity of this. I've always been told, ever since writing workshops as a nerdy fifth grader, to "write what you know." Because of this, I've been afraid to venture much beyond my own experiences in my writing. But as a not-quite twenty-two year old who grew up in the suburbs and tried to make as little trouble as possible, I haven't had too many experiences that readers might find striking. I shouldn't be afraid to use the imagination my parents often laughed at when I was young.

Don't be afraid to tell the truth. Just because it's fiction doesn't mean real life is off-limits. In fact, things that are close to my heart are going to be the most believable on the page. When I had my bachelor's essay committee meeting at the half-way point, I thought I was in a group therapy session instead of a formal review. The three accomplished writers reading my very rough draft could read my prose and see details of my life that I had never revealed. So this story is born out of your fear, one of them said. Reveal that; your narrator isn't you, but she is very similar to you. Just as you're afraid of what will happen if your kid brother goes to war, so she is going to be afraid of failing her brother who has returned from it.

Don't be afraid of conflict. The characters are pulled from your own life and experience, and even though they're different from those people who inspired them, you don't want to hurt them or put conflict in their lives because they are so similar to people you love. But if your characters don't fight or get in trouble or worry or make waves, no one will want to read about them.

Don't be afraid of happy endings. Just because the trend in modern fiction is to be pessimistic about everything doesn't mean your story can't end on a positive note or your characters can't get what it is they are wanting. But if they get it too easily, the end won't ring true.

It'd be great if I took a moment to revel Tim O'Brien's lessons and then, clutching my laptop to my chest, ran into my bedroom, shut the door, and churned out the rest of my book in shining, clear prose that brought my incredibly talented panel of advisors to tears. Instead, I think I'm going to sit on my couch tonight, watch a movie with my roommate, talk, laugh, and live until I go to sleep. Why?

Living is not about writing; writing is about living.

How Things Change

Over the years, I've found a constant thematic story in my own life and choices. I make plans; God waits until I think I have every detail ironed out to step in; He lets me believe I have everything under control.

I probably should have learned my lesson long ago; even as a child, I was a control-freak. Not in the sense that I was overly bossy (though my younger brother may testify differently to that) or obsessive-compulsive (unless we're talking about board games. Seriously. I do not mess around; my Monopoly money is organized into rubber-banded bundles and the property and Chance cards are inside separate plastic bags. I do not mess around.)

I was a control-freak in the fact that I was overly-independent. I wanted, even as a child, to make my own decisions, do everything by myself, go away from home as much as possible. I was way too eager to make decisions for myself and plan my life out. I was the kid looking at college websites in middle school.

But over and over again, God has taken the nice little plan I've drawn out and shaken it up and away, like an Etch-a-Sketch drawing. Poof! Gone. In high school, I just knew I was going to go to the Governor's School for the Arts and study creative writing my junior and senior year, and then go off to some artsy school in New York and write novels. Most of you know that story. :-)

So I finish up high school, and after years and years of swearing that I would never be a teacher, I find myself applying for the Teaching Fellows scholarship thanks to a wonderful woman who had an enormous influence on my life. A lady who would never have taught me if I had gone to another school like I'd originally planned.

And after that turn-around, I'm going through college, studying to be a teacher. God's plan merges with my desires, and I'm ready. I'm thinking I graduate college, go to grad school somewhere to work on my writing some more, and then start teaching.

Yes, well, that wasn't the whole plan either. The next big detour from my carefully (if altered) plans occurred at a place that I've come to love more than most any other: Camp Longridge. And that wasn't in the original plan either. I applied to another camp...and got rejected. But some time later, I get an email from the guy who interviewed me, wondering if he could pass my info onto the director of another camp that I'd never heard of. I think, why not? But then, the rest is history. After one summer working there, one summer wishing I was working there, and another summer working there, the world started to look at bit different. Not so simple.

CLR, combined with an eye-opening trip to the jungles of Peru on mission, took the nice little diagram of my life and turned it on its head. If you had asked me at this point three years ago what I was going to do after college, I would have said, "USC for graduate school, and then move to Charleston to start teaching."

Ask me now? I don't have all the answers (which drives a person like me to distraction) but more and more, I think that, along with teaching high school, I have something new in my future that I hadn't planned on--seminary. Years at Longridge teaching children made me so aware of exactly how much more I could learn myself. A week in the jungle trying to teach Old Testament stories made me that much more aware of how little I know.

So, the saga continues. Hillary thinks that she knows where she's going; God comes in and turns the map around. After all, you all know about my sense of direction.

Just Give Me Jesus.

Part of me is annoyed every year that my spring break is nowhere near Easter. This weekend, I went home, ate way too much, sang loud at church, laughed with my family, but the entire time, the obligations of school never left my mind. I wished that school didn't hover over me on the happiest day of the year, when all I wanted to do is eat candy and hang out with my brother.

We all let this happen. We let the concerns of the world, the worries of this life that seem so important take away from what really matters. But, honestly, school is not as important as Christ. If I had to choose between goals that I have (like keeping my scholarships, getting a degree, going to graduate school, becoming a teacher, and owning my own house) and Jesus, all the other crap goes. There is so much more to life than a checklist. Just give me Jesus.

This week, I'm going to my cousin's wedding in Minnesota. And contrary to popular belief, not all girls freak out over weddings. I'm not a fan for mostly selfish reasons. Weddings remind me of what I don't have; they make me less content with where I am in my life. But I have everything I could ever need and more.

Also, on a tangent, weddings are filled with ridiculous etiquette and polite mumbo jumbo that I just find tedious. I'd probably be the bride that skips the reception. Or as I keep telling my family, I'll just elope. ;-)

(They'd kill me.)

Whether or not you want to drain your life savings into a Cinderella wedding or not, I'd say most girls (and guys) do spend a lot of time thinking about dating, getting married, settling down, etc. Especially at this age, which I like to call The Bridesmaid Era. But honestly, these thoughts are nice if you can't fall asleep at night, but really fantasies are just another distraction, just like school or work. I want to find that special someone as much as any other person, but if it comes down to loving a man or loving the Son of Man...Just give me Jesus.

How to Remember

Last semester, I took a course about the Psychology of Terror and Terrorism. My professors showed the film United 93 on September 11th and 13th. I never want to see that film again. I felt sick watching the first half, the build up to the shot of second plane crashing into the second Tower, that makes me weep even seven years later.

My reaction to the film was visceral, emotional, physical. And seven years ago, I was safe with my family on the other end of the East Coast. After watching it, I experienced many of the things we'd talked about in class: flashbulb memories (remembering clearly where I was that morning) and intrustive thoughts (found myself remembering that day long after the credits for United 93 rolled).

As Americans, we were all traumatized by September 11th, to some degree. And we don't want to talk about it any more. We want to hide behind conspiracy theories, we want to sling political mud, we want to ridicule insincere patriotism... we want to forget.

We can't forget.

I'm not too far away from believing in the idea of a collective consciousness; the idea that we all as a nation are still traumatized. Similar things have been written about the Irish and the Great Famine--even centuries later, scholars contend that because no one wants to talk about the Famine and haven't wanted to since it happened, that the Irish haven't coped. Some scholars go as far as to point to the Famine when looking at Ireland's higher than usual alcoholism and domestic violence rates.

Certainly September 11th and the Great Famine are not comparable events; though both tragic, the nature of these tragedies are radically different. But I'm not so sure I can discount the idea that as a nation, we might all be headed for collective psychological side effects because we won't cope, we won't deal with 9/11. We laugh when Family Guy makes fun of how politicians use 9/11 in thier campaigns, we avoid looking at the pictures and video footage from that day. We want to blame all our problems on the Bush administration and we just want to forget.

Forgetting is not healing. Asking any trauma psychologist. And whether or not one of your friends or family members was on those planes or in those buildings, we were all victims, violated and terrified and completely helpless. The world could only watch as the world's only superpower shuddered.

But we can't. We can't forget because it isn't fair to those who died, to those who fought back, to those who attempted rescue. We can't forget because the world is changing, whether we want to keep up or not. We can't forget and become forever cynical. We can't forget because it isn't possible, no matter how hard we try.

Watching United 93 was traumatic because we try to bury the images. We want flee from the fear we felt, from the horror. It's the most basic of human instincts: fight or flight. Flee from what hurts, fight to survive. Writing this paper on the movie is tough; I don't want to revisit it, but in the case of these memories, which each of share, it is better to fight, to cope and heal, than to flee and forget.

I don't know if anything I've written here makes a lick of sense to a single soul out there. But I couldn't focus on my paper until I collected these thoughts. Perhaps you remember now where you were; perhaps you regret reading this since your smile disappeared; maybe you will try to forget.

Don't. You can't, anyway.