Raise your hand if you didn’t know I’m an introvert.

No one? Good. You’ve all been paying attention.

Unless your entire conversation is about “Here’s what’s going through my mind about you right now,” you have no idea. And even then, they could be lying.

One of the hallmarks of introversion is the tendency to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about how others perceive and receive us. “Does he understand what I mean?” “What did she mean by that?” “I shouldn’t have said that.” “He hates me.” One of my greatest fears is being boring, so I remember things that people talk about that have bored me and I avoid those topics.

At the top of the list of boring subjects is complaints. That’s not to say that a friend or family member relating pain or privation is uninteresting to me, but you know the kind of people who can’t have a conversation without it being a litany of the injustices done to them. They hate their jobs, their friends disappoint them, their families are a misery and they have no hobbies or pursuits that bring them joy. These people think that the world is out to get them, and if you don’t participate in their view of the world, you’re against them too. I want to say “I understand that you’re going through a hard time and I wish there were something I could do about it,” but that’s where my expertise ends. I usually can’t do anything about it, and I feel horrible about that.

I’m no different than anyone else in the world in that I have problems. The most visible of my problems is my weight, which is a constant source of aggravation to me, but there are plenty of others. I hate talking about the crappy little day-to-day things that drive me crazy because I can’t imagine that anyone would find those things remotely interesting. I don’t find them interesting, and they’re my problems.

The drawback to not talking about the things that aggravate, confuse or frustrate me is that to the people I speak to most often, I come off as either never having any problems or as not caring about the ones I do have.  I’ve heard from several people I admired who’ve said “But you seem like you have everything together!” Which floors me every single time, because I tend to look at the world as though everyone in it knows something that I don’t and I’m constantly playing catch-up.

I’ve realized a common trait among the people I admire most: they’re all able to distill their own internal states and report them honestly with no fear of judgement. What does that do to people they interact with? If I say to someone “How are things?” and they say “Not great, my dog is sick and I’m distracted with worry,” I feel a few things:

• I’m grateful that my friend has shared something important with me
• I understand what tone the conversation should take and if my friend’s reactions are subdued or distracted, why
• I know not to make demands on them because they’re not themselves

What this tells me is that I need to get better at being not just more honest, but more complete in my communication with people. I need to stop pretending that I’m always fabulous and ready to give my utmost to everyone, because I’m not. I want everyone to think that I’m always available to them, but I’m doing them a disservice because the truth is that I’m not always able to give people my full attention. Sometimes, life distracts me and I am unable to look away. I’m not better than anybody else just because I don’t admit to it.

Tomorrow’s the end of my residency, and this one was entirely different than my first. Everything was a surprise my first residency, so it was hard to tell which parts of my experience were unusual and which weren’t. And, of course, since happy people are all alike and unhappy people are all different, I just assumed that all our experiences writing alone during the project period were different.

First surprise: Not everyone had such a hands-off mentor. My mentor gave very little feedback on my writing, and only talked about my annotations to the extent that they were in the expected format. At first, I was okay with it. I was very busy during this project period, and if I had been working under a mentor that required a lot of new material or a lot of rewrites  every month, a lot of things would have been difficult. My mentor was also supportive of my technological efforts. This was absolutely related to my writing, but was separate from it. But hearing the stories of my fellow students who published tons of shorter fiction, who got their novels into publication shape, who received constant feedback, I began to feel cheated. I wonder what else I could have done with a mentor who was more hands-on. My mentor for the next project period is, I have been told, the polar opposite of my last mentor. We’ll see what that means for my writing.

Second surprise: They remembered me. Last project period, I knew no one and spent a lot of time trying to work up the courage to get into conversations. I was afraid that less-new students would look down on my inexperience. This time, I knew lots of people, and they said hello and we had lots to talk about and we shared our experiences and laughed like old friends. I met the incoming cohort, and they’re all wonderful folks. I’ve spent lots of time talking to them, hoping that none of them feel the way I felt. And in December when I come back, there’ll be even more new people, and the new people from this residency will have become old friends.

Third surprise: Lots of women writing horror. I listened to a great lecture on horror from a woman who was like a female version of my friend Cliff, the ultimate horror fan (right down to her dreadlocks). I listened to another great lecture on writing “transgressive characters” (think pedophiles, serial killers, etc.) by a woman who was trying to get to the bottom of her fascination with what makes someone turn into a pedophile. And that’s just the lectures. There are so many women writing great genre fiction here, and it fills me with hope.

There were tons of surprises every day – it’s always a treat to be in the midst of smart people busy thinking up cool things. At one point, I was in a lecture given by Aimee Bender, and the woman next to me said that she had graduated a year ago and she was still coming to lectures, because alumni are allowed to attend all the lectures they want forever. I was blown away at the thought that I could keep coming back, keep hearing all this amazing stuff – forever. I think that was the best surprise. I may never come back once I’ve been graduated, but I could.

I just finished reading Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman‘s book Why We Broke Up. I’m a long way from being a high school girl (and my husband, who only got through the first couple of chapters is an even longer way away) but it brought so many things back to me.

After I finished it, I turned to my husband and asked him what he had thought about it. He said that he wondered why Min, the protagonist telling the story, dated Ed, the popular co-captain of the school’s basketball team in the first place. I told him that even though I’m happy in my life now, even though I like the person I am and I’ve surrounded myself with people whose friendship makes sense to me, when I was a kid, if one of the super-popular boys had asked me out, I would have said yes in a heartbeat. Sure, my conscious mind would have said “He’s just setting you up for some humiliating practical joke!” but my mouth would have said “Yes.”

Back when I first moved to the Bay Area, the popular guy did ask me out. He was a body builder and programmer (remember, this was back in the late 90s, the height of the bubble, when programmers were all gods) and he approached me at a coffee place. When I met his friends, he told them that he loved me. He would take baths with me so that he could brush my hair, and he would sing me to sleep. Even though I was also bodybuilding and regularly carried two full 5-gallon water jugs (that’s 40 pounds in each hand) the five blocks from the Safeway to my house, he would take heavy things out of my hands. “I can carry it!” I would protest. “I know,” he’d say, and gently take them anyway.

But after four idyllic weeks together, it all fell apart quickly and completely. He disappeared without explanation for three days and then seemed surprised that I was angry about it. He began behaving erratically – coming to my place late at night, picking fights, spending whole evenings at my place not even speaking to me. It wasn’t so much the fights. It was that he went from hanging on my every word to forgetting that I was in the room with him.

And then came the day that he told me he’d been taking steroids. My genetics mean that I was able to build up muscle easily, but it wasn’t quite as easy for this guy, so he cheated. I told him I wanted to see him, and when he came over, I had this few things all ready in a paper bag by the door. The actual breakup took about 30 seconds.

It took me years to get over missing the fact that someone knew I was capable of skipping up 3 flights of stairs with 100 pounds of groceries in my arms and insisting that he would do it for me. Of missing being sung to sleep. Of missing having my hair brushed. On the other hand, what I have now, I’ve had for 12 years. There’s something to be said for that. The Pirate may not have been the popular guy back when we were kids, but nowadays, he’s the most popular guy in the house.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m participating in Borderlands Boot Camp in January. The fine folks at Borderlands, in an effort not to overwhelm its participants with the enormity of their task, have already forwarded all the materials that we’ll be asked to critique over the course of the weekend in late January and I, being the non-procrastinator that I am (sometimes, when I don’t put it off) have already finished going through nearly all of it

I’m not going to talk about that process just yet. What I’m going to say is that I have NOT received my stuff from grad school yet. I won’t receive it until sometime around November 11, giving me just less than a month in which to read and critique it, along with all the other stuff I’ll have to wade through. Given the ratio of the caliber of material to the cost of the program, I would expect the stuff in the grad school packet to be four times better than anything I read for Borderlands. That’s a tall order, because some of the Borderlands stuff was pretty good.

I feel like I’m at the end of a long line of people waiting to jump off a cliff. I can look up ahead and see what’s in store for me, but I can’t jump just yet. I’m nervous. I’ve spoken to quite a few folks who have all said “I’d like do to grad school, but I just don’t know where I’d find the time.”

But here’s a thing that I’ve found: wading through the stories I’ve got to read for Borderlands was a little tough the first time. Every story is new, and it’s like going to a new place. Slow going, not sure that the place I start out from is where I’m going to end up. I read every story through the first time without making any marks or comments. Most of the stories needed work. A couple were really good, a few I thought were beyond redemption. The second time I read them, it was to make notes. And the second time, every story I read was better than I remembered it. The good ones had sparks of incredible genius. The so-so ones were almost there, just a few patches over the rough spots. The worst ones had something redeeming about them, nothing that couldn’t be brought out. It turned out that the very worst one just wasn’t finished yet. Another couple hundred words and it really would be something worthwhile.

Now I’m curious to see how the rest of the gang judges my submission.