Rhena Writes

Tag: Memoir

  • Are you only one?

    For about a year in my twenties, I lived and taught in Karenni Refugee Camp #3 in Mae Hong Son, Thailand near the Burmese border. I lived in a house built by hand of wood and bamboo with a thatched-leaf roof. I loved by house. In the camp, I was often asked, “are you only one?” At first, I did not understand the question. But eventually I realized that “only one” meant “alone” and I discerned that the asked was also usually asking after both my physical state and my emotional one. Are you alone, yes, but also: “do you feel lonely?” During the beginning of my stay there, I did, indeed, live by myself in my two bedroom house. As a result, I was often physically without another person in the same shared space.

    But I very rarely felt lonely.

    This was, in part, due to the nature of the space there. The next closest houses were a good distance away from me, but because the houses were all made of bamboo and wood, I could usually hear my neighbors. We were also on the edge of a jungle, in a fairly remote area and so there was little white noise. No street traffic. No air conditioners. For a few hours on some evenings, there was a generator that would run the lights so that students could study, but even that wasn’t all the time. In the cities of North America where I’d lived prior to that, the ambient noise covered over sounds of life. In the camp, the primary sounds were of life: people talking and chopping wood, roosters crowing and pigs grunting. I could hear the bamboo floors bending as my neighbors walked on them or even shifted in their sleep.

    I think that maybe a reason my students and co-workers often asked if I was “only one” and my that meant “lonely” is that I must have radiated some sort of American-ness that was unfamiliar to them. In this community — as with many around the world I assume — togetherness was central to existence. How strange and off-putting my American pseudo-independence must have been! I cannot remember specifically, but I must have inadvertently pushed away bids at connection directed at me.

    I remember hearing at some point that if you come across an injured or sick baby animal in the wild, you aren’t supposed to touch it. The theory goes that your human scent will mark the animal and frighten away the mother who will then leave the baby to die rather than care for it. I feel as though, having been raised here, I was marked by some sort of American-ness that, in a strange reversal, covered over my human-ness. Fortunately, my students and the rest of the community didn’t leave me to die. I think that they were pretty quickly able to smell through whatever it was that I carried on myself. Or perhaps the well water washed it away. Either way, eventually some students moved into my house. The “only one” questions became less frequent as I was so rarely without companions.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness and being “only one” lately. I’ve read that America is facing an epidemic of loneliness and that it’s suspected that this is maybe in part due to people more often engaging with their phones rather than connecting with humans in-person. I don’t know about all of that. For me personally, being tethered to my phone makes me feel more lonely. When I am able to step away from my phone, I feel less lonely even when I am physically alone. I suspect that having lived in a community like the one in Karenni Refugee Camp #3 inoculated me against feeling lonely even now all these many years later and in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. Such that even when I’m only one, I’m never really only one.

  • What needs to be written?

    This is a place of personal acceptance. What happened that this place became necessary?

    Many years ago I attended an MFA program in creative nonfiction writing. I won’t go into too many details about the program. I entered in bright-eyed, engaged, and optimistic. I was going to become a WRITER and this program was going to get me there. Suffice it to say, that’s not what happened. It was only years later that I realized just how cut-throat and toxic that whole setting was.

    Here, let me share with you one experience. I wrote and submitted a piece to a workshop. It was a long piece, maybe fifty pages. I was nearing the end of my access to getting feedback on my work and I wanted to get as many eyes on my writing as I could before I would be on my own writing my thesis. The comment that I received from the professor was that it was a disaster, so disorganized that she couldn’t even read it. At the time it didn’t cross my mind that if that was the case, how did she know it was a disaster. My only solace was that there was one other student in the class who received more or less the same feedback. In fact, the professor gave us the feedback simultaneously. We were both women of Asian descent.

    After workshops, we scheduled meetings with our professors to go over the work one-on-one in more detail (or something like that). To pour salt in the wound, this professor wanted to schedule our meetings at her apartment. I think that this was supposed to be some big deal: like the professor was so gracious as to welcome students into her home. But this professor lived across town. And most students lived near the university. After I scheduled the meeting with her at the end of the workshop, she turned to schedule with the other student who had received the same “this was unreadable” comment. The other student said something along the lines of, “if you weren’t able to read it, then there’s nothing to talk about and no need for a meeting.”

    Damn. I wish I had thought enough of myself to do the same. But I didn’t. I think part of me still thought I would show up to the meeting and, I don’t know, she would have changed her mind? Or she would have read it in the meantime and had more, you know, helpful things to say? Needless to say, she didn’t. When I was younger, I was always giving the wrong people second chances.

    I must have trekked across town because I remember sitting in her apartment with a cup of tea which she had offered and I had accepted because I thought that was the right thing to do. She couldn’t find a saucer or small plate and I told her it was fine. And I remember she said, “isn’t the tea bag going to bump against your lips?” And it was such a weird concern to me. Like, if you’re so worried about that, then just find a fucking plate or bowl for me and let me make the decision. And also, “you’re so worried about my lip coming in contact with a fucking tea bag when what you should be thinking about is the tens of thousands of dollars in tuition that I’m paying for you to read my fucking pages and have something helpful to say.”

    But, honestly, I didn’t have those thoughts until much later.

    “Pretty hard to hear feedback like that?” she said to me.

    “Oh no. It’s fine.” I might have low enough self worth that I was willing to cross the entirety of this island city on the off-chance that this person who had already proven herself to be unable to do her job was going to redeem herself, but I wasn’t going to break down in her apartment. Somehow, part of me thought that maybe that’s what she was trying to do? I implicitly (and wrongly) trusted professors and teachers and assumed that there must be some sort of greater plan or lesson behind this whole interaction. There wasn’t.

    This whole incident was one of the most obviously toxic moments of my MFA program, but there were other ones. The cumulative effect of these small jabs is that I really struggled with my writing and, as a result, my self worth. I hate that these individuals had so much say in how I valued myself.

    I’d like to end this post with some sort of redemption arc for myself. But, also, it’s necessary to sit with these moments of pain and toxicity, allow them to move through before jumping into “light and love.” Not everything is linear, which would be boring anyway. Besides, maybe where I want to end this post is actually where I started it.

    Drop a tip here.

  • On AI, John Henry, Likes, and Views

    I have a few pages of handwritten notes for this post and yet I struggle to make the transition from drafting in pen to typing on the computer. When my older daughter was attending school virtually, she made friends with people over google docs. It is her generation’s version of passing notes. She commented once, as she sat in our basement on her computer watching her classmate type a letter to her, live, “You can learn a lot about a person from how they type.” I remembered being in school myself and how familiar I was with my classmate’s handwriting and how much it could, in fact, reveal so much about a person. It’s a different era now. And perhaps this is in part why I struggle to convert from hand to computer. 

    I also remember a song that we learned in school. “John Henry was a steal driving man, oh lord, …” I don’t remember much else from the song except that the final line was something like, “… he laid down his hammer and he died, oh Lord, yes, he laid down his hammer and he died.” I could probably look up the rest of the lyrics and listen to the song and I’d be able to give you a fuller picture of John Henry and the song and my experience with it, but somehow, that feels like it would be a lie. I’m trying to give you the truth of what I can currently recall, which isn’t much, but it’s real.

    I remember learning the song in elementary school. Maybe in the gym/lunch room. Maybe in the wood floored music room/ stage, the one with the cool storage loft with the spiral staircase we weren’t allowed to go up except for special times when we were helping retrieve props, instruments, costumes, or other flotsam and jetsam. Probably both the gym and the music room. Anyway. We were a small, mostly white school in a very white section of a very Black city. Were we taught that John Henry was a hero? I guess we were singing the song that heralded him as such. But I also remember feeling very sad that he’d died at the end. It seemed as though he had worked himself to death. And even though he was also very strong and courageous and determined, did he really defeat the machine if he ended up dead anyway? It was a lot for a kid to make sense of. Even as an adult, it’s still a lot to think about.

    Apparently, the difference between the steam digging machine and John Henry was that the drill kept getting jammed up with all of the rock and stone. In other words, the machine needed to be cleared by hand. It wasn’t just that John Henry was strong, it was that he was able to think and problem solve as he went along. He used his brain, his strength, and what he had learned digging other tunnels. 

    I read once that it’s possible that John Henry was a real person. An historian found a person with the same name on a list of incarcerated men at a prison nearby where it’s believed that John Henry took on the machine. The song that I’m familiar with suggested that he worked so hard to beat the steam drill that his heart gave out. What more likely happened is that he died some time later from the cumulative effects and exposures related to digging tunnels through mountains and hillsides. Tow-may-tow. Tow-mah-tow. I guess.  

    I am not comparing myself to John Henry, but sometimes I feel like his ghost haunts my struggles as I try to move my thoughts from pen and paper to machine. I’m not trying to out-do my computer but I am aware of the existence of AI which has made me somehow even more desperate to assert my humanity from behind this screen. 

    I wrote last week about how I deleted my social media a few months ago and how it made me feel more grounded and more connected to people and in-person community. I never had comments turned on on this blog.  And last week, I turned off email notifications for likes. I stopped checking stats, likes, and views. Prior to this, I had been checking often. And I felt myself starting to bend what I would think about and therefore what I would write towards getting more likes and views. In other words, I was thinking, “how can I get more – or any – likes and views on what I’m writing” rather than just writing. I was like the steam drill, getting jammed up in the very stones and rocks I was trying to remove. 

    The first few times I checked my email after turning off the notifications, I had forgotten that I was not longer receiving them. In my forgetting, I felt a little sad for a moment. But in the next moment, I remembered and a whole world of possibility opened up. What if I’d gotten 10,000 likes? It didn’t matter whether that was the reality or not. I could imagine it and so it was true where it mattered: in my mind. 

    When I imagine John Henry, I do not see him looking over at the machine. I see him focused on his task at hand. Part of me thinks that for him, it wasn’t really even a competition. It was that the steam drill inventors stuck their contraption next to him. It was doing its thing over there and John Henry was doing his over here. The company men were the ones who wanted to have a competition. For John Henry, it was just another day on the job. I wonder if he even thought it was something he was good at. Did he know he was going to become an American folk hero? Was he imagining songs being written about him? Probably not. I think he was just here to do the work. I hope to do the same.  

    Even though I don’t see them, I still appreciate shares, likes, and views. I also appreciate (and see!) tips. Show your appreciation for this hard working writer here at my ko-fi page. Thanks!

  • This is the post where I ask for tips…

    … beg for money but where I don’t come right out and just ask for it. Let’s start with a scene. Madison, Wisconsin. First warm day of spring. Class has just gotten out and so I cross library mall to State Street. The sound of a guitar reaches up and down the block around Gilman or maybe Gorham.  The scent of incense and patchouli and just a soupVon of weed is in the air, but this is not exceptional. This is just Madison. The outdoor seats are all full of people eager to enjoy the weather after a long Wisconsin winter cooped up inside. These are the moments that it felt like I could never take anything for granted.  

    Except for, I could and I was.

    When was the last time I lived someplace where I could encounter someone playing live music in public on just an average day? The city is too pricey and the suburbs where I do live don’t have that kind of culture. 

     A few months ago, my daughter and I were waiting for our order at our local filipino bakery when a man carrying a guitar and speaker approached us. I think he must have been performing out on the sidewalk before coming inside. But that area doesn’t really have a lot of foot traffic. He held out his cup to us and I put a few dollars in. “You want me to play you something?” We said sure and he warned us it was going to be loud, gesturing to the speaker he had just set down. Our halo-halo arrived before he could plug into his amp and we had to be on our way. That’s the last time I remember dropping a tip in a musicians jar. 

    Back in Madison, Catfish Stephenson, a musician who often played on State Street once told me that a big crowd is actually worse in terms of income. No one wants to step out of the crowd to throw money in. Or else everyone assumes someone else is going to do it. People just don’t know what the protocol was. Catfish always threw a few bills into his guitar case when he was first setting up and before he started to play. Get the ball rolling. Show them how it’s done. No one wants to be the first. 

    At the end of last year, I started taking guitar lessons. It’s fun. I enjoy it. I’m working on Let It Be. I’m not bad at it and I really enjoy it. It’s already paying off dividends. Just yesterday, I had a bit of a panic when I realized that a prescribed medicine I’d taken was counter-indicated for another prescribed medicine. I put a call into the answering service at the cancer center. “I’m going to go play guitar while I wait for the call,” I told my husband. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to focus enough to do my other calming activities like reading and it was raining too hard to go for a walk. 

    But it’s been two months that I’ve been working on Let It Be. Give me another month and I’ll be confident enough that I’ll be able to take it out to the sidewalk and open my guitar case for some dollar bills. But, well, it will be the only song I’ll be playing. I’m more likely to earn tips to make me stop. 

    The point being that I have an appreciation for the work, time, energy, and effort that goes into performing on the street. And I wish I had taken the time to appreciate it more when I was living in places where it was more commonplace, like Madison. 

    I hear that tipping culture has gotten out of hand these days. At least, that’s what people say. And to be honest, if my mother knew I was out here busking on these internet streets, she’d probably be pretty embarrassed. I don’t know. I don’t mind the opportunity to show my appreciation for the hard work that people are putting in. And I’ve never felt like I have to tip. It’s just a nice thing to do. 

  • Untethering from Social Media

    I deleted Facebook years ago and Twitter a few after that. A few weeks ago, I the last of my social media apps: the mostly image-based Instagram and their partner text-based Threads. Social media, the whole of the internet, is, I believe, mostly a gift to the world. But my brain, my whole person was formed before the internet, much less social media, existed. In other words, I’m not equipped for handling it. My mind simply doesn’t move fast enough to keep up and, in attempting to, I was doing damage. It was as if I was lining up on the track next to Florence Griffith Joyner each and every day and expecting myself to keep up. My hamstrings – nay my whole body would have taken a beating if I ever even dreams of going up against Flo Jo but, more importantly, my self-esteem would have been obliterated. And it was. 

    I wasn’t too keen on the idea of deleting social media. The other day, my six-year-old son was staring out of the car window into the massive sky above. “Mom,” he said, “I don’t like to think about the universe.” I told him I get that. He confirmed that it’s the vastness that makes him feel small. It’s dark and lonely out there in the universe. I was so used to having and being on social media that I thought that deleting it would untether me from the earth and send me out there into the universe, alone, cold, and in the dark. 

    When I first came across posts on social media by patients in cancer treatment, it made me feel less alone.  Somehow, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t really looking for it, I’d come across people posting about their experiences with cancer. There was even a woman preparing for her mastectomy at around the same time that I was. I wasn’t alone. 

    Perhaps you can see where this is going. As soon as I clicked on a couple of cancer posts, the algorithm latched on. Soon, a good portion of my feed was cancer. And I couldn’t help myself but read and click. I’d try to close the app and just the c-word alone would catch my eye. I felt an obligation to consume it all. 

    One of the prayers that I had when I was going through treatment was this: that my suffering makes someone else’s a little less. There are certain aspects of Catholicism that are engrained in me and that’s one of them: offer it up. Offer up your suffering so that it has meaning if not for you, then at least for someone else. For the most part, I was thinking about my daughters in those moments, praying that somehow me going through all of these trials would save them from a similar fate. In the early days of my treatment, the genocide in Palestine was dire and so my prayers were also for mothers there. In my moments of pain rooted in my own body attacking my breasts, all mothers and children and their bonds and their bodies and suffering all became mixed together. 

    And some of that responsibility and connection carried over to my fellow cancer patients on social media. Somehow, it was my duty to keep reading all of these threads. But reading, engaging them seemed to created more until everything was cancer content. It’s about as much fun as it sounds. 

    This was all in the midst of me, in-person, going with some regularity to a literal cancer center where I would sit in waiting rooms nearly full with other people who possibly also had cancer. And at one appointment, my doctor mentioned (without violating HIPPA) that he’d been recently seeing more of the type of cancer that I have. Later, as I moved into the recurrence prevention phase, he mentioned that he had a patient in a very similar situation to me. At the very least, it’s possible that the doctor was able to use some of what he learned treating me to better care for the other woman. 

    These are connections that I couldn’t get on social media. 

    And so it was that I had it all wrong. When I finally cut the tether, I didn’t float out into the vast, cold universe. Rather, I floated back down to very real, solid, warm earth. 

    Visit my Ko-fi page to drop a tip in my cup.