Looking at Myself as a Character in my Own Story

I am looking at myself and thinking I should become a different character type to fulfill the needs of my personal story.  

I often look at things in life through the lens of writing.  I have been doing that to myself and my life over the past several months.  I guess long periods of isolation will direct your thoughts that way.  

When creating a story, one thing a writer needs to decide is how the main character of the story relates to his environment.  There are two types of characters in this regard.  “Doers” and “Be-ers.”  

Doers are people who look at the conditions around them and try to change them.  They are the most common type of characters seen in stories with classic heroes.  To achieve their goals, they believe the world around them needs to be changed and they work to make that change happen.  

Be-ers are people who adapt to the conditions around them.  They are found in stories where the focus in on survival.  Staying alive until the situation they find themselves in changes.  To achieve their goals, they change themselves, their habits, their patterns of living, to wait for the opportunity to achieve their goal to appear before them.  

Characters are not necessarily ALL Doer or ALL Be-er.  But their basic nature, the impulses they follow, and the manner in which they’ll go about working toward their goal will be determined by one of these perspectives as they move through a story.  

When I look at myself, I recognize that I have long been a Be-er.  I can even pick the turning point in my life when I settled into this perspective.  It happened after I graduated from college, when I went to a perform in a summer Shakespeare festival in Utah and then tried to drive across country to see my sister get married.  The trip didn’t go as planned.  My car broke down once in Colorado, and then permanently in Kansas.  I ended up losing most of my personal possessions.  When my father came to pick me up at the bus depot in Asheville he walked right past me into the depot, not recognizing me.  When he came back out, he looked around, looked at me, looked around again, then snapped his attention back at me.  

“Erick?  Is that you?”  He stared at me in disbelief.  “Goddamn boy, what happened to you?”

The trip was that bad.  

I was reminded of the trip this Thanksgiving while having dinner with a friend of mine from college.  He’s one of the few people that I’m still in contact with that knew me before that trip.  He reminded me of letters that I wrote to him while living in North Carolina for the following year.  He quoted me from those letters as saying that I had become determined to never be that helpless again.  

I remember the sentiment even if I don’t remember writing the letter.  In my friends words, I became less “fluffy” than I was in college, but also that I was less adventurous and less fun.  Listening to him tell me his perspective, as if he were describing a character in a story he’d read, I could see that the character he was talking about was a Be-er.  Someone that changed themselves to deal with the environment around them, in this case the conditions of life and living.  

Flash forward to today, that conversation has started me to wonder if I went to far back then to adapt, and that I should consider making another change.  

I did achieve my goal at the time.  I don’t worry as much about something wiping me out like that.  I have credit.  I have savings, both money set aside for short term problems, and money set aside for the future, when I can’t work any more.  I’m employed, which is a big plus these days.  I can handle a car breaking down in the middle of nowhere now.  

But there is a lot I don’t have in my life that I’ve always thought I would get at some point.  Someone else to be here with me.  A place I can say is mine and not borrowed from someone else.  

Moreover, the environment around me, around all of us these days, is a much greater impending threat.  I have been good at adapting to it, wearing masks, washing my hands, staying social distant, putting even more money away, things like that.  But I’m feeling very acutely how conditions are taking opportunity away.  The very opportunities that I, as a Be-er, have been waiting to come to me to take to get the things in life I’ve always wanted.  

It makes me wonder if it’s time to make another change.  

This relates to another decision a writer needs to make about a character.  And that is, when the hero of the story reaches the crisis point, whether they will make a Leap of Faith or decide to Keep the Faith.  

The character that makes a Leap of Faith is one that has done everything they can to achieve their ends, but has still failed.  This character looks at the situation and decides, “I’m going to do something different.  I’ve tried everything I know how to do.  I’m going to go a complete different way.”  They give up on the methods they’ve used so far and take an untried, untested way forward.  

The character that decides to Keep the Faith is one that, after reaching the crisis point, knowing that they’ve failed to achieve their ends, looks at themselves and says, “I can do this.  I know what I’m doing is right.  I just have to keep going.  I just have become stronger, smarter, faster, whatever it takes.  But I’m going to keep going.”  They rely on their determination and endurance, they dig deeper into themselves than they have before, and they push forward along the path they’ve been traveling.  

In my life I can remember making both decisions at times.  But making decisions to Keep the Faith have been far more common than taking leaps.  And, right now, in these times, something is telling me that I should, or maybe more accurately, I want to take a leap.  Or maybe, I just want to fly, for once.  

I’m not at my crisis point.  Not yet, anyway.  I have time to consider.  The Be-er in me has time to prepare.  And when it comes, instead of looking at wall that I have to get through, I think it’ll be like standing on a limb, feeling my untested wings twitch, looking to fly over it.   

A Changing Relationship with Thanksgiving

 Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday after becoming an adult.  Cancer and Covid have worked to change my relationship with the holiday.  

Of all the holidays we get in this country, Thanksgiving has struck me as the most honest and incorruptible.  Christmas, which follows a month later, is too commercialized. The “Days” holidays, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Veterans’ Day, are merely extended weekends, with one or two items on the news trying mightily to remind us the original reason for creating the holiday.  

Thanksgiving though is what it is because what it presumes to celebrate is bound in the manner in which it is usually celebrated.  Getting together with family and friends, enjoying a meal together, being happy and, yes, thankful, that you have food on the table, loved ones to share it with, and a place of shelter in which to enjoy both.  

For years after I began living on my own, I looked forward to Thanksgiving.  The chance to travel to either Arkansas, where my parents live, and where one sister and her boys are close by in Oklahoma, or North Carolina, where another sister, her kids, and cousins lived, where would gather, eat, play games, and enjoy each others’ company.  

I love my family.  And the holiday was the time I reminded myself just how much I did.  It was an unadulterated joy.  

The relationship with the holiday started to get rocky, I guess it was about eight or nine years ago now, when the eldest of my two sisters got lung cancer.  

A pattern was born out of that first Thanksgiving after I had been told that she had a lump the size of a baseball in one of her lungs.  I got the news several weeks earlier, in September or October.  I flew out to North Carolina to stay with her that week.  Mom and Day, Kathleen, my youngest sister, plus either both or one of her sons would drive out to join us.  We went shopping, watched movies, ate a lot of food, played with her dogs.  And, we talked about what has going on with Virginia.  What the doctors were telling her.  How she felt.  The issues she was having with the insurance.  

My family didn’t shy away from talking about it.  We didn’t pretend nothing was going on.  We’ve never been like that.  We had questions.  We were concerned.  We addressed our questions and concerns openly.  Cancer may have been an uninvited, unwelcome guest, but he didn’t ignore it nor pretend it wasn’t there.  I remember that first Thanksgiving my sister being very positive about her prognosis.  She was going to beat it, she told us.  Even though it was a type of cancer so rare that the hospital treating her had only see one previous instance of it in the previous ten years.  She was certain.  She was going to have surgery followed by radiation treatments in a few weeks.  She was going to beat it after that.  

That was the pattern that the holiday followed for the next five or six years.  My sister had her surgery and/or treatment.  For months after we would get encouraging news about her progress.  Around August or September we’d start making plans to visit at Thanksgiving, to celebrate her recovery.  Then, around October, there’d be a set-back.  The first October after that first Thanksgiving with Cancer as a guest it was the discovery that her cancer had metastasized into her lymph nodes, into her left hip, as well as a small lump on her aorta.  It was decided that she’d need to go on chemo-therapy since the tumors, particularly the one on the aorta, were inoperable.

We got together that year as we had before.  We did not welcome Cancer, who had decided to show up again, uninvited and unwelcome, but we didn’t shun it either.  We talked about it.  We gave my sister support.  She was going to beat it, she told us.  We gave her our love.

And so it went for the next several years.  A reminder of Cancer’s persistence.  A Thanksgiving where we gathered close to her.  A new therapy being chosen and tried.  Signs of promise.  An October where that promise was broken and a fresh reminder of Cancer’s intractable nature.  A Thanksgiving together, talking, eating, support, love.  

As time went on my sister ceased to declare that she would beat it.  More time was spent trying to figure out what the next treatment would be as they were chosen and found to be ineffective.  And fewer and fewer news of promising results were received.  

I remember the day when talking to my sister over the phone and hearing that one of her doctors had recommended she go on “palliative care.”  She didn’t know what type of treatment that was.  When I told her, she replied, “Well, I don’t think I like that.”  I told her that I didn’t like it either.  

The end was ugly.  Featuring a husband that forgot the meaning of his marriage vows.  My parents moving in with my niece taking my sister with them.  A late night argument ending with my sister leaving with that husband.  And finally, an afternoon phone call from the hospital telling my parents that Virginia had died a couple of hours before after being brought there early that morning.  

This all happened two weeks before Thanksgiving.  The day before my uncle, my mom’s older brother and last surviving sibling, passed away from kidney failure.  I attended his memorial the week before flying out to North Carolina to join my family.  The day before Thanksgiving we drove to the sea to cast my sister’s ashes into the ocean, her final wish.  

We didn’t get together for Thanksgiving the next year.  In October, while speaking to my dad over the phone, he declared that they weren’t going to do anything for Thanksgiving that year.  Maybe Christmas.  Not Thanksgiving.  I said, “Ok.”  I got it.  We’d had enough.  Thanksgiving was…  Tainted, in a way.  We needed a break from it.  

But we did get together the year after.  And the year after that.  We gathered at my niece’s house.  We played games, watched movies, ate a lot of food, we talked a lot, about my sister and about other things.  I am weeping now, remembering how happy I was to be with my family.  It was almost, almost the same as it had always been.  Thanksgiving was back.  And I was grateful.  

This year, it’s not.  Not for me, anyway.  Not the way it’s “supposed” to be.  Another visitor with a “C” name, this time “Covid” has come to visit.  My parents called me before the end of October to ask me if I could join them in Arkansas this year.  I told them I’d think about it and let them know.  That weekend I started coughing.  I got a runny nose.  It was just a winter cold, I thought.  I’d had them before.  I didn’t have a temperature.  I could still taste my food.  It was just a cough and a runny nose.  Nothing else. 

But, I didn’t want to take a chance.  The thought of going through airports, with people from all over, maybe even places where they thought it was all a hoax, didn’t wear masks, or stay socially distant…  I didn’t want to chance it.  I told my parents the following week I wouldn’t be coming out.  They were understanding.  I still felt bad.  

Every Thanksgiving I do spend some time, usually in my journal, writing about things I am glad to have in my life, things I am thankful for even if, in an objective way, I’m not sure if anyone is out there to thank for them.  Even if it’s just an accident of birth and circumstances that I have them.  This year, because of what I now associate with Thanksgiving from my experience over the recent years, my thankfulness seems more…  Relative.  More conditional.  

For instance, I am thankful to have a job, ESPECIALLY since so many people have lost theirs due to Covid.  I am happy to have good health, BUT wonder if what appears to be good health is simply being asymptomatic.  I have a sheltering place to sleep and food in the kitchen for when I’m hungry, but if things get worse they could be gone as well.  

And, I’m thankful for the family I have.  Even if I can’t be with them this year because I want to make sure I don’t bring them more than my love and support.  I won’t be alone.  I have friends I’ll be seeing, in a very small gathering at their home.  I’m thankful for that invitation, even though it would be quite the same as what Thanksgiving usually is for me.  

But that is what Thanksgiving is right now.  Not quite the same as before.  But still is special for me.

No More Holding My Breath

 Over a week has gone by since I wrote about taking a breath after the election.  I was hoping that something approximating what I remember as “normal” would start to take hold and we would begin the ending of the Trump era in American politics. 

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be happening.  The opposite, in fact, as Trump continues to tweet lies and mistruths about what happened on November 3rd, and his supporters are becoming more vocal and strident about how the election was stolen from them.  The high point for me from last week’s trend was when Secretary of State Pompeo answered a question about the transition saying it would be a smooth transition to a second Trump term.  

He laughed when he said it.  The reporters in the room were silent.  They weren’t sure if he was trying to make a joke or not.  I’m sure, though.  He wasn’t joking.  

By the time the week ended, though, I was feeling…  I don’t know if “better” is the right word to choose, but I was handling it better.  It was because I had come to understand that what I was waiting for, the departure of Trump from the scene, was simply not going to happen.

Trump isn’t going anywhere.  

This is not to say that I think he’ll somehow find a way to invalidate the election results.  That, thank goodness, doesn’t seem to be going his way.  Very few of his lawsuits are gaining any traction for the obvious reason that there is no proof to back up his claims.  And at least one of the law firms hired to pursue his commands have quit their efforts and stopped working to further his claims.  Eventually, I think these efforts will reach their logical conclusion and come to an end.  At which point in time Trump will give his version of a “concession speech” where he’ll admit that the election was stolen from him due to a rigged conspiracy of forces and that he’s moving on to other things.  

But that won’t be the end of the era that he started.  

My clarity in this came from an interview I heard on Fresh Air last week.  Terry Gross interviewed a journalist named Garrett Graff, who writes for Politico, about an article he’d previously written days before the election about the mischief Trump could commit in the last days before he leaves office.  The link to the interview his here: 

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/12/934117807/journalist-details-potential-mischief-of-trumps-remaining-weeks-in-office

The gist of Mr. Graff’s article is that, previously, Presidents would wait to make their most outrageous actions for their final days in office.  After they were termed out or had lost and they had no expectation of facing the electorate again.  This is when they would sign executive actions or give pardons that might have gotten them skewered in public discourse had they done such things earlier in the their terms.  

But Graff points out that President Trump has made a point of creating mischief, and doing all sorts of “norm-busting” things.  So how would such a president conduct himself in the final days of his term?  

We’re seeing some of that already.  Not conceding the election.  Refusing to start the transition.  Preventing the Biden and his staff from receiving the money, office space, and security briefings they need in order to be ready to take control of the government in January.  But as bad as it’s been so far, it could get worse.  

We’ve already seen something of what Graff was referring to.  Not conceding the election.  Refusing to start the transition.  Preventing Biden and his staff from receiving the money, office space, and security briefings they are entitled to.  But as bad and unprecedented as this has been, it could get worse.  

I suggest that you listen to the program to get the complete picture, but here were two possibilities that I found particularly disturbing.  The both take place after the transition and Biden has taken office.  That moment I’ve been waiting for.  

One is that Trump could start plans to create his own presidential library.  Every modern president does this.  That wouldn’t be such a surprising thing.  But what would be surprising is how Trump might go about doing it.  The presidential libraries established so far have been non-profit organizations meant to be museum like places designed to memorialize the issues that faced the president and his achievements in dealing with them.  

Trump could build something very different.  First off, knowing how far in debt he’ll be when he leaves office, an amount measured in the billions of dollars, Trump could make his “library” a money making venture.  Charging for admission from his loyal followers more than willing to pay to see exhibits “proving” his conspiracy theories on how he was illegally ousted from power.  He could create something like a theme park, even put it near Disney World in Florida, his adopted state, making money off of the thousand of fans and supporters that would flock to its gates during summer vacation to praise him.  Imagine the line to get into the “Mail In Ballot Fraud” roller coaster that dips and rolls as “boxes of ballots” are dragged out of the dark to be counted.  

It would be ridiculous and funny except that one can see him doing something just like that.  Imagine such an ugly, garish display spewing out his lies to catchy melodies as people walk about the place.  But instead of “It’s a Small World,” you’re listening to “It’s a Rigged Election” on an infinite loop.  

More disturbing is amount of Top Secret information Trump has been exposed to while president.  What would there be to stop him from monetizing that information.  Using such secrets to force a leader of another country, for instance, to accept some deal to build a Trump Tower in their capital.  Or maybe even something more sinister, like using the information to make some politician or judge vote or rule on an issue in his favor to keep a Top Secret secret.  

Yes, this is speculation.  But given the track record of the man through the four years leading up to his time, where every week seemed to bring some “unprecedented” statement or behavior, what restraint does he have now, especially after it becomes clear that he has to move out of his current residence in January. 

And finally, there is the fact that Trump has made the Republican Party his.  The supporters that he brought into the process, and their votes, are coveted by members trying to run for or stay in office.  To go against Trump is to have them turn on them.  Only those who are not running for office, or someone who has a set of principles they go by, like Mitt Romney of Utah, are willing to speak out against him.  

Trump could run again in four years.  It usually doesn’t happen with the modern presidency, but could and probably will try to run again.  A modern day Grover Cleveland.  

So…  I am not convinced that however convulsive the transition might be, it will only be the beginning of the next political cycle.  Unless something happens to him to take him out of the picture, we will be dealing with him for years.  

As a result, I’m done with waiting.  There’s no more holding my breath.  

Because I’ll need that breath to say something if I hear or see something I need to speak out on.  

Time to Take a Breath, Not Relax

I was able to relax a little by the end of this week.  Basically take a quick breath.  But I don’t think it’s over.  

The election results were close to what I wanted.  There was no “Blue Wave,” but I wasn’t expecting one.  I suspected that the pollsters still hadn’t figured out what they got so wrong last time, and that turned out to be true.  Something about Trump supporters defy information gathering.  Perhaps its a penchant for concealing the truth.  

That last sentence was my one and only political shot in this.  I promise.  

But the ticket I picked, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, won.  It’s not official yet.  There is still the need to complete the count, certify the vote, send delegates to the Electoral College, all the normal steps that take place at the end of each election.  

And another process that is becoming a common feature of the process: the lawsuits that are getting filed to change proscribed process into one more favorable to the side bringing the lawsuit.  And this is the part that makes me feel that I can only expect a brief respite.  

What has encouraged me is the news about how the election was handled.  Every state seems to have taken steps to make sure the votes that were supposed to get counted did, and that it was done fair and openly.  Several states, Pennsylvania being the most notable, even put video of their ballot counting rooms online so that anyone that wanted to go to the state’s website site and see how the votes were being handled.  Unlike the infamous Florida situation from years ago, the quality and condition of the process has been well documented.  It gives me hope that when these lawsuits come to court they will be, or should be, quickly dealt with and determined.  

Also an encouragement is the margin of victory in these states.  Numbers in the thousands or tens of thousands.  I heard one person interviewed on the radio who makes a career out of studying these things say that the average change in votes after a recount is somewhere around 200 hundred votes.  That was for all the elections going back for decades where the results were reviewed and a recount was called for.  The final number may change, but it’s outside of the margin of change that normally takes place.  

“Normally.”  That is a word that gives me pause.  Normal is no longer normal.  Normally, were it not for one of the candidates in this year’s contest, results like this would have one candidate conceding the election, calling the other to congratulate them, and promising for a smooth transition, a praised hallmark of our election process up until now.  

But that’s not going to happen. At best, and this came to me from one of the news shows I watch on Sunday morning, where a supporter of the current president said that they thought, “in a few days,” after Trump’s inner circle talk with him and calm him down, he’ll give a speech conceding that the election results would indicate that the presidency was stolen from him.  

Not a concession speech by any stretch of the definition.  Not one meant to heal at all.  Not one to get us past what we’ve been going through because the man who would give it doesn’t want us to get over it.  His political rise was born from chaos and it is in chaos it thrives.  

And supporting his efforts beyond his campaign are those politicians who have gotten used to doing so over the last four years.  The ones going on the radio and TV to say it’s not over.  That the nation gave Al Gore 37 days to contest that election and Trump should be granted the same consideration.  Never mind that the Gore campaign was contesting a difference of 500 votes in one state, not thousands and thousands in five or six.  The politicians that refuse to say that Biden has won the election, something they would have under those fondly remembered “normal” times.  

I heard one commentator, talking about how the number of Republican leaders actively supporting the President efforts vocally were relatively few, say that Trump has always motivated with fear, not affection.  And being fearful is a hard habit to break.  

But it can be.  And hopefully will be.  And as the reality of the situation starts to sink in, the objective reality of what actually happened and not the personal reality of what we want that drives the thinking of too many people in our country these days, I’m expecting, hoping, wishing, even praying in my heart, that the fear will lift and a more…  Yeah, I’ll say it…  normal and peaceful transition of power will commence. 

And when I see that happening, I’ll take another breath.