The Anarchic* Psyche of Michael A Leavy

Rated WP-MA: language, self-esteem issues, potentially fatal car crashes

So far as we can recall, we’ve never drawn a stick figure homage to a Brian De Palma film before and are pleased to have found an opportunity to finally do so. In case you don’t recognize which film, it’s The Fury, and we’ll leave you to look it up if you don’t know it. The Enforcers named in the title of this post thought a tribute to the film’s final scene would make a fun illustration for this tale of the latest in the long, long line of defensive migraines of the sort described in our previous post. Speaking of which, this one will make a lot more sense if that one is relatively fresh in your mind.

What Happened (to get the Giant and the Girl to do what they did)

So I’m a writer, yeah? And a few weeks ago, I did something that writers do, but that I’d never done: sign up for a 3-day Writers’ Retreat. This is one of the many things (blogging is another) that I’ve lately been attempting in an effort to make the shift from being a writer, which I’ve been since before puberty, to being a professional writer, which I’ve not been but would like to become before puberty finally ends and I reach obsolescence.

Even though this Writers’ Retreat – a “Transformational” Retreat, no less – is in Santa Fe, where I live, I only found out about it because I follow Julia Cameron on Instagram, and she was promoting it there. She also lives in Santa Fe and was promoting it on her Instagram account because she was doing a workshop at the Retreat, plus a full day intensive the day before it. All in all, signing up for both seemed absolutely the thing for me to do, in spite of some trepidation, because it is very much the kind of thing that wannabe and wannastay professional writers routinely do. Plus: Julia Cameron.

I’m going to assume (perhaps without warrant) that you know Julia Cameron to be the author of the justifiably monstrously bestselling The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. This was a book that I read very closely, back when it was new and Ms. Cameron and I were 30 years younger and residents of LA instead of Santa Fe.1 I did all of the work assigned in the book and benefitted greatly from having done so. One practice advocated by the book stands out in particular: Morning Pages. These proved in time to be fundamental to the memoir that I’m getting ready (so I tell myself) to shop to agents

Morning Pages, which gets mentioned on Ms. Cameron’s Instagram every couple of days and which I’ve mentioned at least once, in the post about from where most of this blog’s stick figures come, are this (basically): the person doing them starts each and every day with three pages of freewriting (stick figure drawing not required, or perhaps even encouraged).

We did the pages every morning for 2 years and 7 months before we began to falter in the practice; many people do it for much, much longer before faltering, perhaps even go to the grave without faltering. At any rate, many, many writing projects are reputed to have had their beginning in the  pages, and it turns out that our manuscript is – after quite the gestation – one of them.

Transcribed passages from our Morning Pages help trace the evolution of the inner landscape variant of inner child work which we developed to enable recovery from childhood trauma. Among the transcriptions is one where some of my inner kids and I consider writing a book like the one in which that passage now appears; another expresses gratitude that no one will ever read what we’ve written in our Morning Pages (which is supposed to be the case).

In Case You Were Wondering About the Giant and the Little Girl

These two Enforcers entered the picture a couple of days after we signed up for the retreat and the intensive. While our main purpose in attending is to meet other writers and, ideally, to find some with whom we could exchange work and thereby get feedback on our manuscript and our proposal, at the far end of our hopes is getting a chance to talk about our manuscript with Julia Cameron, or share some of it with her, because the possibility of a blurb or – better! – a forward from her would be like a guaranteed book sale, wouldn’t it?

(By the way, between “our main purpose” and “the far end of our hopes,” there is the middle prospect of learning something in the workshops. One can hope; I’ve lived too long to actually expect it.)

Anyway: time to tell you why ARG and Nameless Little Girl threw a serious migraine at the rest of us, that showed no signs of flagging after stretching well into its second day.

The day after I signed up for the writer’s retreat, I went to see my therapist. I told her proudly about that – no time here to explain just how difficult it was for us to have blithely dropped a grand in order to spend a weekend claiming to be a writer in the company of strangers claiming the same and at least some of them being able to offer more proof of it than I – and she suggested that I take the next step: get in touch with Julia Cameron to see if I could set up a private meeting.

Player that I am, I immediately recognized this as exactly the sort of thing that would be done by just the sort of people I am willing to acknowledge as successful.(Among whose number I am not accustomed to counting myself, by the way, even though I know there are those who would, and who are qualified to make the call… what was I saying? Oh, yeah: no fucking way.)

My therapist might just as well have suggested that I drive my car at a high speed into a large tree. Or drive my car at a high speed off a cliff. Or both. I’m not completely helpless: I could find a cliff with a large tree at the bottom and contrive to drive at a high speed off that cliff and into that tree. At least I think I could: I know that we have a lot of trees in and around Santa Fe, but I can’t say for sure about cliffs… let’s pretend that you interrupted me right about there, okay? What I meant to say after the first “cliff” was:

No way are we bold enough to: a) write an email to Ms. Cameron, asking to meet with her in Santa Fe (where, by the way, we not only both will be that weekend, but frequently are, anyway); b) find out who her agent is2 ; c) send said email to her agent for forwarding to her; then d) dodge the assassin that she, or her assistant, or perhaps her agent – just to save everyone the time – sends to terminate me  for having the goddam nerve… sorry, I meant to say: then d) having to actually take the next, next step and meet with her if she were to actually say something like, sure, it’ll be fun.

Migraine Kink

We told you in the last post about Existential Kink and how it helped us deal with our migraines. Once this one got rolling, we stretched out in bed, entered our inner landscape and got comfy in the park near where most of the Enforcers live (around the lower back, if you were wondering). We asked to see whoever was pulling the levers and ARG, and <nameless> came over and admitted that it might have something to do with them.

This, actually, was a bit of a delicate matter: <nameless> was literally that and faceless, too – in the relatively short time since she’d begun communicating openly she had stayed both invisible and in hiding. If you’ve read the post, “About Our Work,” you’ll understand how this made any serious conversation untenable.3 ARG, too, needed to adjust her self-presentation, which is most often as a giant as generalized as her name.

For this meditation, ARG scaled down to regular person-sized and went with an approximation of what we might have looked like as a 17-year-old girl. <nameless> tried that, too, but couldn’t bring herself into focus until she presented as a girl of around 5. I presented as 24 or so, when we had hair and looked good in a French-cut suit.

We sat together on a beach, NLG on my lap, ARG leaning on my side. We ask you to forgive us for the beach setting – such a cliché: everyone uses beaches in meditations, and we wish we could use a junkyard, say, or a derelict park, but places like that have trauma attached, whereas beaches just carry a sense of profound embarrassment. In our defense, our beaches do resemble Tom and Jerry cartoons.

The two of them4 felt very badly about causing the migraine – none of the Enforcers enjoyed that kind of pain anymore – but they were not apologetic. At the moment they’re the only remaining Enforcers willing to do the job, so they felt a real obligation to not back down.

At first, they refused to release the pressure unless I promised not to try to contact Julia Cameron; I countered with the promise to not insist on it. It wasn’t until I acknowledged that I wasn’t actually planning on it, simply wasn’t yet ruling it out, that they relented enough for aspirin and a lie-down to have an effect (‘cuz they knew what “not ruling it out” was a euphemism for).

The Moral

The moral of the story, I suppose, is: listen to your migraine, not your therapist. Or some version of that… we can only do what we can do, and since I’m in a 12-step program I get to say: we’ll have to trust our Higher Power to get us to where we need to go.

I wrote a 120, 000 word memoir without the invaluable help of a writer’s group, or anyone else to mention in the Acknowledgments, which is doubly dumb when it’s a memoir about recovery from trauma; did a complete revision, still without any comments from anyone outside of my head; wrote a full proposal to send to agents in just the same way; started submitting to agents with a query letter that… yeah.5

It’s what I can manage so far. A Writer’s Retreat is next, and the effort will reap what it reaps

We do what we can do, and the outcome is out of our hands.

1. Actually I have no idea where she lived 3o years ago. ↩︎
2. Actually, I know who her agent is: I’m paralyzed by some things, but like I said, I’m not helpless.  ↩︎
3. As I’m writing, that post doesn’t actually exist – for which, please forgive. ↩︎
4. ARG and NLG, not Tom and Jerry. ↩︎
5. And you’re thinking: got 7 or 8 posts into a blog to which you have even tried to attract readers. (Or maybe not, if we’ve reached the point where you’re actually not a figment of my imagination.) ↩︎

Gratuitous Photo