In the meantime, I have assignments to complete. I may post them, or some of them, here after I've completed them. My first assignment was to write something about myself, my background, what kind of writing I like to do, and what I hope to gain from the course. Of course, I wrote about my learning difficulties and how I think they've impacted my life. But I also wrote about my desire to be a writer and what kind of writing I enjoy most and think I'm best at. I'd like to share that with you below, as I think it puts everything into pretty clear perspective.
Dear Anke:
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but desperation, more than anything else, drove me to enroll in this course. I'd never even heard of the LongRidge Writers Group until a few months ago, and I can't honestly say that when I did , I felt a rush of optimism that an obscure correspondence course could help me to become a successful writer. I'm still not sure if I've made the right decision, but my research tells me that you are on the level, you do offer and honor a money-back guarantee, and, like I said, I am desperate.
I'm desperate to find something I'm good at and go as far as I can with it. You see, ever since I was a child, I've felt inept and inferior in almost every way to the people around me. For the longest time, I didn't know what the problem was. I just knew that I couldn't do most of the things my peers could do, or it was much harder for me than it was for them.
For instance, I had great difficulty learning to play card, board, playground, and other types of games and engage in numerous other activities my schoolmates learned with ease. I had no clue as to how to fix my bicycle when even the slightest thing went wrong with it, even when my stepdad and others tried to show me, and I didn't journey to unfamiliar places because I kept getting lost and would sometimes inadvertently keep traversing the same path over and over until I accidentally discovered the way home. In junior high, shop class was torture. I couldn't read the most uncomplicated blueprints or complete even the simplest projects, and I came to feel increasingly awkward and shy in social interactions. In high school, I fell more and more out of the social mainstream, and, after being all-league in my freshman year, I quit the basketball team as a sophomore because I couldn't learn the drills or plays. I didn't date or attend social functions. I more or less hid from a world that seemed too complex and challenging for me to navigate. College was the same way, only more so. I was the proverbial loner and perpetual student, and I never earned a degree because I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I believed that whatever it might be, I was too stupid to succeed.
After I finally dropped out of college, I stayed home because I was too embarrassed, ashamed, and afraid to seek employment and expose my stupidity to the world, and the older I got, the more terrified I became of disclosing my background or lack thereof to a prospective employer or to anyone who might help me become employed. I succumbed to my fear because I could afford to. I lived with my elderly and ailing grandparents and eventually became their long-term, full-time caregiver. But after they died, my circumstances changed, and I knew that I had to change with them. I began dating a woman, got my first, full-time job--I was a baggage handler and, later, exit guard at SFO--, got married, sold the house that had been my cocoon for the past thirty years, and moved to Sacramento to begin a new life.
I didn't know what I wanted to do for a living and still believed that there was no decent job I was capable of getting, much less keeping, but I knew I had to do something. I figured it had to be in a non-technical area where my modest verbal skills could prevail. I had a longstanding interest in medicine and health-care, so I enrolled in a medical billing and coding program at a local adult vocational school. But after completing the program, I didn't know how to get a job, and I quickly discovered that it was almost impossible to break into medical coding armed only with a certificate from a less-than-mediocre school and with no work experience in the field. I trained and worked briefly as a switchboard operator for the local VA health system but felt overwhelmed by all tje rules and procedures I had to learn and by the distractions in the operator's room. I applied for a position that opened in the medical records file room where I volunteered, and accepted the job when it was offered to me, even though I had grave doubts that I could fulfill the fast-paced duties of a medical records clerk in a major, very busy university health-care system. Sure enough, I've struggled to learn the filing system and even relatively simple duties of my job, and even when I know what I'm supposed to do, I'm much slower than everyone else at doing it, just like I've always been at everything. Moreover, the job is so hard physically, consisting as it does of handling heavy medical charts eight plus hours a day, that I feel like my body is falling apart from the strain. But I don't know what else to do. I'm going to continue my study of medical coding through classes offered by the heath-care system where I work, but I have grave doubts that I can master the skills and build the speed necessary to get hired and to succeed as a medical coder.
I feel lost and often hopeless. A long time ago, I saw a neurologist who told me that my learning difficulties appeared to be the result of perinatal brain damage. More recently, I was tested by a vocational and, more recently still, a clinical neuropsychologist who confirmed what I've long known--I have a huge gap between my verbal and nonverbal abilities, and my nonverbal learning difficulties and probable ADHD make it difficult to impossible for me to do what most people can in and out of the workplace, yet my verbal facility camouflages this from the casual observer and makes it very difficult for others to understand my plight and help me deal with it. More recently still, I met with a prominent local neuroscientist who speculates that my difficulties with focusing attention and with visual-spatial processing could be caused by genetic anomalies, and he'd like to do some tests on me and, if he can secure the funding, involve me and other adults who have approached him recently with similar complaints in research into the causes and treatment of nonverbal learning disorders.
Yet, at age fifty-four, I am still faced with the daunting challenge of finding and succeeding at a satisfying career that can pay well enough to live on. The late, great mythologist Joseph Campbell famously said, "Follow your bliss," and my bliss, or the closest thing to it, has always been writing. As a child in grade school, I loved to write stories about starships and aliens. Later, I preferred to write non-fiction. I always did well in my academic writing assignments and received praise from my teachers, fellow students, and friends for my writing. It was what I enjoyed most, did best, and about the only thing I could do even moderately well. Yet, I never believed that I could earn money doing it, and so I never learned about publishing or tried to get anything published for pay. I confined myself to writing letters to the editors of local newspapers and debating religion and philosophy on the Internet. For the past several years, I have also kept a blog titled Naked Reflections that I describe as "relatively uninhibited philosophizings on self and Kosmos whenever the mood strikes." To give you a taste of the kinds of things I write there, here are two recent entries:
A BEAUTIFUL SMILE
I deposited a check at my bank this morning. The teller was a very pretty young woman who smiled as though she meant it. She always does that. She couldn't have been smiling like that because she saw me as a handsome young man she wanted to attract. I'm several decades older than her and not at all handsome. And, besides, she smiles at everyone the same way: with a kind of bashfully warmhearted radiance . She smiles as though it comes from the depths of her soul.
I wonder if it's all a marvelous act and nothing more. I hope not. I hope she does it because she sees and loves what Eknath Easwaran calls the "original goodness" in everyone.
Wherever it comes from, I hope she never loses that smile or that life's hardships and betrayals don't steal it from her. There are few things that can warm the heart and brighten a person's day as much as that teller's beautiful smile. How I wish we could all smile like that. It would bring us all closer to heaven on earth.
WISE DISCRIMINATION
[Eknath] Easwaran has written that he loves great symphonies, novels, and other works of art but that what he loves most is the "perfectly crafted life." That to him, and to me, is the supreme work of art, more beautiful and inspiring even than Michelangelo's David. Indeed, it seems to me, we can look at how we live our lives as a process of sculpting. Every choice we make chips away a piece of the precious stone we've been given. Every bad choice makes it that much harder to craft a great work of living art; every good choice fosters our effort. Sooner or later, we will run out of stone, and the potential we once had to sculpt a moving, breathing David will have crumbled into dust. Why waste time when we don't know how much we have left? Why make bad choices that undermine the most important project of a lifetime?
I have made countless bad choices, and I'll be fifty-five in March. I don't know how much stone I have left, and I have many, many mistakes to overcome to forge my modest masterpiece from what raw material remains.
Anke, just as I doubt everything else about myself, I doubt that I'm good enough or can ever get good enough to earn money writing, and I think it would be miraculous if I could actually make a decent living from it. But I feel as though I've reached a point in my life where I have to find out how good a writer I can be and make the most of it. Maybe I can't make a career out if it, but maybe I can earn some money on the side from writing, reach more people with it than I have so far, and feel the satisfaction of knowing that I finally took it to the limit instead of letting self-doubt and fear of failure hold me back. I chose LongRidge because I like the fact that it's one-on-one instruction and self-paced, and that it teaches us not only how to write our best but also how to market our best writing.
What kind of writing would I like to do? As I implied earlier, I prefer writing non-fiction. I believe that the same disability that impacts so many other areas of my life also impacts my writing. I can't visualize scenes and people and describe them worth a darn, and I don't "get" a lot of what goes on between people in the way of the subtleties of social interaction. So, I think I'd be lousy at trying to write fiction. What I do like to write is essays and articles about religion, philosophy, science, politics, and whatever else interests me. I'm particularly inspired by the philosopher-sage Ken Wilber, who has dedicated his life to developing a philosophy or worldview that integrates the essential knowledge and wisdom of many fields or disciplines. And my favorite writers are the late Alan Watts, whom I consider to have been a master of philosophical prose, and Eknath Easwaran, a model of clarity and spiritual wisdom in writing.
I fantasize about writing three successful books. One would outline my perspective of what constitutes a plausible religious or spiritual path that draws upon and integrates many fields of knowledge and spiritual practices. Another would explain why I'm not Christian by addressing all of the essential teachings of Christianity and rebutting the best defenses for those teachings. And another would advance my deterministic view of human mentation and behavior and explore its implications for philosophy, religion, criminology, and so forth. Whether or not I'm ever able to write such books, much less get them published, perhaps I could have articles published that touch upon some of these themes. Moreover, perhaps I could succeed at getting articles published about the latest developments in science, medicine, philosophy, and so forth. It has just occurred to me that I could also write articles, based as much on vivid personal experience as on theoretical knowledge, about childhood and adult learning disabilities and their psychological fallout and, in so doing, help so-called "neurotypicals" to understand us better and work with us more harmoniously.
I'm hoping that you can help me to find my calling, if I have one, as a writer and to answer it to the best of my potential. I confess that I feel a little anxious about losing my "voice" in pursuit of what you and the course textbooks teach as proper or effective writing technique. But I'm sure my writing leaves much room for improvement, and I have faith that you aim not only at helping us to find and develop our own voice as we improve our skills, but that you are also adept at hitting that target.
I realize that I've shared a lot with you--perhaps too much--about myself and my struggles to find my path through life. But maybe it will help you to help me become the best writer I can be. That is, the more you know about who I am, where I've been, and where I want to go, the more capably you can help me to get there.
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