Carrie Lamanna

Do The Next Write Thing

May 3, 2019 By Carrie Lamanna

a color photo of my tiny writing desk in the corner of my dining room.

My mantra recently has been “Do the next right thing.” I came across the phrase when reading about addiction recovery, and it has become essential in helping my manage my anxiety and OCD symptoms. It’s also become the centerpiece of my new writing practice these past few weeks.

While I am not an addict (don’t get it twisted, people), I’ve found quite a few similarities between my mental health journey and the stories of those recovering from addition. The strongest connection is the need to be in control of everything all the time—to be the smartest, in-charge one in the room. Admitting that I am not in control of the universe (or even my tiny corner of it) is terrifying and can lead to despair and depression.

The way out of that trap, for me, is to take my focus off of next month or next week or even tomorrow and put it on what I can do right now to move forward—the next right thing. For example, when I look up from my computer and look around the room I see the house is a wreck. My son’s pajamas are strewn across the couch (because the living room is where you get dressed, obviously), the side table is piled high with junk mail and school handouts, laundry that needs folding is everywhere. I could go on about the toys all over the floor and the boxes of Girl Scout supplies I’m always tripping over, but I won’t do that because that wouldn’t be the next right thing. My instinct is to curse my life, lament that I am 45 and still don’t have my shit together, and to then spend the next two hours putting together an elaborate month-long plan for how I’m going to clean and declutter the whole house. But that wouldn’t be the next right thing either. What I should do (and I will do as soon as I finish this post) is spend 15 minutes clearing the dirty breakfast dishes, picking up the toys, and throwing out the junk mail. That would be the next right thing. It’s not the sexy thing or the thing that will make me feel (temporarily) powerful and in control, but it is the right thing that will lead to the next right thing because once I have some clean surfaces, I can fold some of that damn laundry. If I keep my focus on the next right thing, in the hour before the kids get home from school I will actually accomplish things that make the house cleaner.

Writing is like this too. What I want are week-long writing retreats in the woods and a well-lit cozy home office where I can start my day with meditation and hot lemon water before I settle in for my uninterrupted morning writing session. That’s a lie. Hot lemon water is stupid (fight me). I want coffee and lots of it. Everything else I want, but it’s my fantasy, not my reality. What I actually have is my messy house and a tiny discount store desk shoved into the corner of the dining room. I could bitch and moan about how I can’t write like this (not that I would ever do such a narcissistic thing) or I could do the next write thing and sit down for an hour and finish this blog post to you. Which I’m doing. (Where’s my cookie?)

Look. Here’s the thing. Art is not something that happens separate from the rest of our lives. It’s just like clearing the table or scrubbing the toilet. It’s something we have to make a regular practice. Something we do in the midst of the chaos. These past three weeks my next write thing has been to publish a post a week. So far, each attempt has begun on Monday, been interrupted at least a dozen times, and then finished on Friday. But it’s getting done. If I’m lucky, the published post is beautiful and sexy, but the process of writing it certainly is not. Most of the time it’s pretty damn ugly. As I sit here in the dusty dining room corner, my face is unwashed, my hair is in a ponytail, and I’m still in my pajamas.

But the work is getting done.

And I want it to keep getting done, so I’m raising the stakes and inviting you to join me. Starting next Friday, May 10 at 10:00 am Mountain Time I’ll be live on my Facebook page to write in my tiny corner for 30 minutes. And I’ll be there every Friday after that. If you receive my Friday newsletter, you can use the time to respond to the weekly writing prompt or you can use the time to work on whatever writing you have been putting off. It doesn’t matter. Just do the next write thing for 30 minutes. That’s how the magic happens—unkempt, in the corner, 30- minutes at a time.

Writing is Messy, Communal, and Scary

April 22, 2019 By Carrie Lamanna

Overhead photo of a woman's hands typing on a green typewriter. To the left is an open notebook, a stack of letters, and flowers. To the right is a latte and a cookie on a blue plate. The text added to the photo reads "Writing doesn't look like this."

After neglecting it for months, I promised myself I would start posting to my blog once a week. My first post was just over a week ago on Saturday, so I haven’t exactly achieved my goal yet. At least it’s progress. (I’ve been told I need to focus more on small wins instead of focusing on how I fuck everything up. Not sure I’m doing it right, but I’ll keep trying.) The thing is, I don’t have a plan for what I want to say to you today. I just know I promised to write, so I’m writing.

Maybe that’s how it has to start. You sit your ass in a chair and write even when you don’t have anything it say. Of course that’s how it has to start. I know this. I have a damn Ph.D. in writing studies. Writing is a process of discovering what we have to say, not a delivery method. The final published work might be about delivering our completed message, but the process of creating that message—the actual work of writing—is knowledge production. We know more after we have written, even for just five minutes, than we did before we started. Even when we sit down with a clear plan for what we want to write, the process changes things. It’s fascinating to watch this process unfold with an author who’s working on a novel. Characters they thought were villains unexpectedly reveal themselves to be heroes. A coward turns out to be the bravest one in the story. No matter how much they plan and storyboard, fiction writers can never be sure how a story will end until they write the last word.

Fiction writers don’t invent their characters—they get to know them through the writing process. When we write about a nonfiction topic, we learn as much through the act of writing as we do through the research process. When we write about ourselves, we get to learn who we are. But that process is unsettling to say the least. We aren’t fictional characters after all, and realizing that maybe we don’t know everything about ourselves is downright scary. And the fact that we are sharing our recent self-discoveries with a public audience brings the fear level from “damn scary” to “fucking terrifying.” When I hit publish on my previous post about my struggle with anxiety and OCD, I felt like I was standing naked in the middle of the busiest street in town with TV cameras and cellphones pointed at me. In reality, maybe 100 people even bothered to look twice at that post, and most of them were friends and family (hi mom!), so my fears might have been a bit exaggerated. But it doesn’t matter. In my head the fear is real. It makes me feel alone in this world, and more often than not, it stops me from writing.

I don’t want to be alone in this process. I want you to come along with me so it doesn’t seem so scary. The romantic notion of the writer alone in her ivory tower is a myth that holds us back. Writing happens in communion with others. Sure, you have to sit down with pen or keyboard each day and put words on a page, and that has to be done alone. But what happens before, after, and in-between the writing requires people.

I would never have finished my dissertation if it weren’t for a friend who invited me to her house in Michigan for a weekend. She provided another friend who was struggling to finish and me with rooms of our own. We spent the morning writing with our doors closed. At lunchtime we came downstairs to a wonderful meal she had prepared for us. We ate and got some exercise while she read our drafts and provided feedback. We then went back upstairs to revise before heading out to dinner together. We did this for two days. I wrote about a third of my dissertation that weekend after struggling for almost a year to write more than a few good pages. At the time it seemed like magic, but the magic was simply doing the work in the company of other writers and friends who supported and believed in me. When I quit my academic job and decided to start writing memoir and creative nonfiction, I knew I would need that sort of support again, which is why I jumped at the chance to join Janelle Hanchett’s first Renegade Writers group. We’ve had two face-to-face retreats now, and both have been magical.

Obviously, it’s not possible to go on a writing retreat every weekend. (Who would do that laundry I’m always bitching about?) But it doesn’t mean we are doomed to struggle alone either. I’ve found that something amazing happens when we share our writing process with others. We realize we are not alone. Friends and family I would never have suspected of having any interest in writing confess that they too want to write a novel, a memoir, or start a blog. They too thought they were alone, that sitting down to write was scary because they didn’t know what to say and were afraid to show it to anyone, that everything they tried to write turned out a hot mess, and what difference did it make anyway because they would never have the time to be a “real” writer. This is the bullshit we say to ourselves when we try to write in secret. I wouldn’t be writing at all if I didn’t know I had you to read it—even if “you” is sometimes only my friend Jill and my fellow Renegade writers.

I stopped writing when I stopped reaching out and sharing with my writing community. Once I started getting outside my own head, my writing fears didn’t go away, but they stopped controlling my process. My fears became something I could lift and set aside for a precious moment instead of a crushing weight on my chest. Over the next month I’ll be sharing more of my writing process here and on social media. It’s going to be a weird ride, but I’m ready for it. It’s time.

Learning to Let Go and Live

April 13, 2019 By Carrie Lamanna

color photo of a woman's feet. She si wearing pink ballet flats and there is a white fluffy dandelion in the foreground.

I’ve been in hiding. From my friends, my family, my clients, and my readers—so essentially from my life. I tried to do too much (too much for me) and it broke me. This has been a pattern my whole life. I look around and see how productive other people seem to be and I convince myself I should be doing at least as much, probably more. But I’m also a perfectionist, and that’s led me down a path to true, diagnosable disfunction. In the beginning I just looked like your standard, type-A overachiever—dean’s list, grad school, tenure track academic job, husband, kids, house. I made sure my life checked all the right boxes, but behind the scenes I was a wreck. Lots of crying, panic attacks, feelings of worthlessness. When your standards for success are god-like perfection on one side of the bar and total failure on the other, you always end up a failure. In my mind, I could never be perfect so maybe it was best for me to just give up.

Recently, I started working with a therapist who specializes in anxiety and OCD. I have known for years that anxiety was an issue for me, but I had begun to suspect that my responses to that anxiety had escalated into OCD territory. When I went into my first session part of me was convinced I was overreacting, that I didn’t have OCD, that I just needed to light some candles and spend more time meditating. I mean, it’s not like I spent all day washing my hands or something, and that’s what all the people with OCD on TV do, so clearly I was fine. After one session it was clear that I was most definitely not fine. My brain turns everything—cooking dinner, weeding the garden, organizing a bookshelf—into a project with a complex, multi-step set of procedures that must be followed exactly or its not “right,” and if its not right something terrible will happen. What terrible thing? I don’t know, but I’m sure as fuck not going to risk finding out, and this is why a task that should take thirty minutes takes me three hours.

I know I’m lucky that I’m what our culture calls “high-functioning.” I can leave the house, take care of my kids, run the scout troops I volunteered for, but the effort I have to spend to make everyday life happen means I’m overwhelmed and exhausted all the time. I’ve been told it’s painful to watch me fold laundry because of the way I smooth the wrinkles out of every spot and make sure every towel or shirt is the same size and shape so they fit evenly in the closet. Nothing is simple or enjoyable. Everything poses a threat and must be neutralized through precise order and control.

I read an article in the NYT about a week ago that said procrastination is not about laziness or lack of motivation, but the inability to regulate negative emotions. In short, we procrastinate whenever the task produces negative, anxiety-producing feelings. In order to ease the anxiety, we do something else that makes us feel confident, productive, calm, etc. Worried your boss will criticize the report you have to write? Clean the kitchen instead. OCD is that same behavior, but all the time with almost everything, and the task being avoided is life and all its uncertainty. I can’t really be in control of everything and insure nothing ever goes wrong, so my brain tricks me into thinking that if I can just fold all the towels according to my absurd set of rules, I am actually in control of the universe. Problem is, that anxiety relief is always temporary. The anxiety returns until you write the damn report and face your boss’s criticism. However, when it’s the uncertainty of all of life that causes the anxiety, you are stuck in an endless procrastination loop. In my case, I can never really control everything—people will get sick, accidents will happen—and the fear that produces is just too great, so I am stuck folding the towels forever in order to calm myself.

I am telling you all this not because I am looking for sympathy or forgiveness for not following through on my responsibilities, but because it is a pattern so many of us repeat over and over even if it doesn’t rise to the level of a mental illness. And we need to talk about it. In the beginning, I thought if I could get straight As, earn Ph.D., land the right job, everyone would love me and I’d be happy. When that didn’t work I doubled-down on my perfectionism and applied it to every area of my life. Did you know you can take a shower incorrectly by washing your body parts in the wrong order? Not really, but I’m working on explaining that to my brain.

I’m barely working and haven’t been writing at all, but I’m trying to change both of those things. Even though I’m flat broke, I’m prioritizing the writing. I need to get some of this out of my head before I can take on more paid work. Maybe that’s backwards according to our culture’s capitalist standards, but that’s the way it is for me. Getting better requires me to develop new criteria for measuring success. My brain thinks the list of criteria for everything is 100 items long. I have to reduce that list and let my brain scream an cry until it learns that the world won’t end if I throw the towels into the closet half folded. I have to figure out that life in all its messiness and uncertainty is worth living.

It’s ridiculous that I can’t do the simplest things without tricking myself, but maybe that’s how it always is. We have to trick ourselves into living. We get stuck at the base of Maslow’s pyramid desperate for sleep, food, safety, and love. We spend our days working for food and shelter. Then at night we go home and clean bathrooms, fold laundry, and make dinner, all to collapse into bed, and if we’re lucky there’s someone there to curl up with as we lay our exhausted body down for a few short hours. But that’s not living. That’s existing. And trying to do all those things perfectly sure as hell won’t turn our endless quest for security into a life where art, creativity, and beauty are possible.

Embracing My Righteous Rage

October 4, 2018 By Carrie Lamanna

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about my experience of sexual assault at age 15. My objective in sharing my story was to lend credibility to Christine Blasey Ford’s, to help people understand that assaults do happen the way she described and that they do have lasting effects on survivor’s lives. My account was emotional but steady. I wanted to convey what it felt like for me to live with that trauma, but I wanted to appear logical, reasonable. And the next week I watched Dr. Ford make similar rhetorical choices during her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And then I watched the angry mob of men take the room and erase her as if she had never been there at all. I watched as they sent a message to survivors all across the country that said, “Our anger and entitlement is worth more than your pain.” I watched and I cried.

And then I got angry too. Those who know me will tell you that I am pretty good at being angry. But my anger has typically been the kind that lives stuffed deep inside where I can keep it controlled and hidden. It rises to the surface at unexpected moments when I find myself yelling about the dirty laundry on bathroom floor or at the guy who cut me off in traffic. My anger in those moments seems misplaced and out of proportion. I look irrational, hysterical even, because my anger is misplaced. I’m not angry about the dirty laundry on the floor (well, maybe I’m a little pissed about that). I’m really angry at

the boys who tried to rape me.

the high school boyfriend who used gas lighting to emotionally and sexually abuse me.

the culture that told me none of that should matter, that it was no big deal, and really probably my fault anyway.

my government that upholds the power of rich white men while stripping women of reproductive rights, oppressing the LGBTQ community, putting children in cages, defending police officers who kill Black children, and turning a blind eye to income inequality and environmental disasters that make the average citizen poorer and sicker.

The anger I have been suppressing is a righteous rage. A rage that I will use to fuel my writing and my activism. It’s not going to be easy. The Senate will likely vote to confirm Kavanaugh tomorrow, and then there are the midterm elections to get through. I’m going to write through it all. I’m going to use my writing practice to hone my rage until it is sharp and targeted, and I hope you’ll join me.

I’m preparing a four-week online writing class for women who are feeling their anger and want a community where they can express it through writing and discussion. If this is you, join me in the Righteous Rage writing class starting October 22. Each Monday you will receive an email with a short reading and writing prompt. You can also share your thoughts and writing in our private Facebook group. If you are looking for a greater level of engagement and support, in addition to the weekly prompts you can register for a weekly live online discussion group. I will cap the discussion group at eight participants to create an intimate space for in-depth conversation. Sign up now to be notified when registration opens and to receive special early bird pricing.

Notify Me About Righteous Rage

« Previous Page