Lately I feel that way again.  It’s part of what I love so much about this tiny first floor apartment in Iowa.  It feels like a cave, partially underground, the bottom of the windows level with the grass outside.  It’s just big enough for me and Jerod and the cats.  Stuff is cluttered in everywhere, crowding in to wrap its arms around me and make me feel safe.  I draw the blinds and sink into the couch and feel warm, unlike that apartment in Denver that was so big and wide and high, with cold hardwood floors.  It was too exposed and sunny, cold, unlike the rest of the city.

I remember the thrill when I first found Best Food’s Mayonnaise in the grocery store in Denver.  It was our first trip to King Soopers after we arrived.  I was curious to know, after reading Tom Robbins’ “Till Lunch Do Us Part” in which he describes what he would want his last meal to be if he were on deathrow (a tomato sandwich on Wonder bread, smeared with a thick layer of Best Food’s mayonnaise, known as Hellman’s mayonnaise east of the Rockies), if Denver would have Hellman’s or Best Food’s mayonnaise, since technically it’s east of the Rockies, but so close to the Rockies that it could  almost be classified as west, for regional food purposes.  The grocery store shelves , though, were filled with both, side by side.  For the longest time I bought only Best Food’s in an effort to convince myself that I was really in Denver.  This was evidence.  I held it in my hand.  I used it on my sandwiches.  It proved my existence in that beautiful mile high city even more than the teeny tiny bit of mountain that was visible outside the bedroom window if we leaned to the side just right.

Right now I long for mountains, for those black, foreboding shapes pasted against the sky that reminded me everyday that there were things in the world bigger than I am.  I thought I wanted wide open spaces, skies that stretched as far as the eye can see, and maybe I do, but I know that deep down, when I’m given too many options, I don’t seem to know what to do with them.

Oh, the angsty sentences of twenty-one.  As depressed and miserable as I was back then, it really was fun to feel like I was caught up in a spiral of fate, when every feeling felt was brand new.  It’s a strange thing when you have to squint to recognize yourself in your old thoughts.  Not bad, just strange.

After we learned about congruent objects, I became obsessed with them.  I stared at every object I saw, whether it was the kitchen table, an armchair, the television, or our cat, drawing a dotted line straight through the center of whatever the object was and mentally folding it in half.  If folding it in half in one direction didn’t work (I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, draw a line across my cat’s back and fold it in half from head to tail and call that congruent), I would try folding it in the other direction, rotating the object in my mind.  I wanted everything to be congruent, to match up nicely and neatly.

I’m sitting here at 9:30 a.m. this morning staring out the window at the bright morning light.  I woke up at 8, a couple of hours earlier than I ordinarily wake up, but I start a new job on Monday that’s going to be Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 5, so I figured I’d start transitioning to that schedule this weekend so it won’t feel so shocking Monday morning.  I like it, I think.  The morning light seems to spark creativity.  But yet, there’s something about it that’s not so different from the evening light.  The street in front of my apartment is still covered with shadows that will shrink with the tick of the clock and then reappear again this evening, although in the opposite direction.  If I could twist the day just a little at the center of it, spin its rubberiness around with a flick of my finger, fold it over and paste it on itself, it too would be almost congruent. 

Lately I feel like even my weeks are congruent, with Saturday not looking so very different from Sunday, except that it brackets a different end of the week.  Maybe even life is congruent, building to a peak in the center where you could slide your fingernail across and make a crease, except that at one end you’re heading out of the shadows and at the other, you’re heading into them.

Well, that’s pretty cool, I thought.  Finally someone to combat all those religious special interest groups.  But then I thought, well, wait, isn’t the Secular Coalition also a special interest group?  It seems that everyone has an agenda, and no two people ever have the exact same agenda, and so, each is a separate special interest group.  As long as there are interests there will be special interest groups and I’m tired of hearing people complain about them when what they’re really complaining about are special interests that aren’t in their own interest.  I’m equally tired of hearing people slam politicians for being beholden to some special interest group or other. 

Of course a politician is going to be beholden to a special interest group!  Politicians have agendas too!   No matter how a senator or president votes, it will be beneficial to some special interest group somewhere along the way.  Our politicians aren’t blank slates, no matter how much we may want them to be.

What I’d really like to see is not a politician who swears off special interest groups, because immediately you know he’s lying.  I’d like to see a politician who stands up and says, “Yes, I am influenced by special interest groups.  It’s unavoidable.”  How refreshing would that be?

My journal seems to be the only place I can write anymore. When I try to write anywhere else, I try too hard and the words come out all forced and mangled and misshapen. My journal is a freedom space.  If only I could figure out how to recreate that.  If only my ribs didn’t hurt.  If only I weren’t so lazy.  And if only I could remember that I’m better than I used to be and give myself some credit for that.

It’s like I’ve forgotten how to write and so I’m desperately reading essay after essay to remind me how and I’m failing. It’s scary. I’m afraid I’ll never remember, or I’m afraid that maybe I’ve read myself to death, over thought it all to the point where I’ll never be able to write again.  I remember shortly after I learned how to knit a couple of years ago, I forgot how to cast on, which is how you initially get the yarn on the knitting needle and a vital step to knitting anything. I tried to remember what the woman who’d taught me to knit had shown me and I couldn’t, so I searched the Internet and stared at diagram after diagram and tried to logically and analytically peel them apart, but my brain has never been good with diagrams. I thought I would never be able to knit again, and then my roommate glanced at a diagram and quickly showed me how to cast on. My roommate. Who had never knit a day in her life.  Why can’t someone swoop in and show me how to write again?

I feel the way I feel when I try to dance-stiff, without rhythm or feeling. When I was in college I had a really awesome Nigerian professor who a few years ago tried to teach me how to dance at my school’s Cultural Festival. He pulled me onto the dance floor and shouted above the sounds of the African band. ”Follow the beat of the drum, or the bass!” he said.  I looked at him in confusion and cocked my head to the side and listened, trying to pull out the beat of the bass.  He grabbed my shoulders every time the drummer smacked his drum.  “Bounce!” he said.  “Now bounce!”  Over and over again he pressed down on my shoulders, but my version of bouncing was to stiffly bend my knees and then pop back up equally as stiffly, and always a second too late.  Finally, he shrugged, laughed, and shook his head, and I knew he’d given up on me.

“Good,” she replied.  “Except that I went to the hospital today because my feet were so swollen and they ran some tests and found out that I have diabetes.”

The news wasn’t really all that surprising to me.  With something like sixty percent of Americans suffering from the disease, it was bound to happen to my mother at some point.  She was definitely a high risk for diabetes-she was overweight, didn’t exercise at all (she leads a very sedentary lifestyle of lying on her couch and watching home shopping channels), and she loved sugar.  Cake was sometimes dinner for her, cookies and ice cream dessert. 

I remember one day when I still lived at home.  She sat at the computer desk in front of the computer, talking to someone on one of her online Internet chat programs when she declared she was hungry, got up and went into the kitchen, and returned with a large pile of cookies and a glass of milk.  I don’t think she’d eaten at all up to that point in the day.  She looked at me and said simply, “It doesn’t matter how you get your calories as long as you get them, right?”  She dunked a cookie in her glass of milk and took a bite.

It wasn’t the diabetes that surprised me.  It was the way she announced it and the way she seemed to be handling it.  My mother is a hypochondriac and for years it seemed that there was nothing she’d love more than to finally be diagnosed with a real disease.  She’d had such a slew of imaginary diseases and she was forever consulting the two volume set of medical books on our bookshelf, practically memorizing diseases and their associated symptoms.

When I was in high school, she began to come down with these headaches that wouldn’t respond to any treatment-no medications, no amount of rest, nothing she tried seemed to alleviate them at all.  She began to go to doctor after doctor in earnest, searching for something that was wrong.  Somehow or other she convinced the doctors to prescribe her all kinds of drugs-vicodin, codeine, Prozac, and Xanax for the anxiety disorder she claimed to have.  “I can’t drive,” she’d say, or “I’m going to go lay down for a bit.  I’m on narcotics,” and she would disappear up to her room for the rest of the day, shutting herself in darkness, and sleep.

She had the doctors send her to all kinds of specialists.  When the specialists in Pittsburgh didn’t say what she wanted them to say, she insisted on being sent to Erie.  “The doctors around here don’t know what they’re doing,” she’d say.  “And neither do the doctors in Pittsburgh.  You have to go to Erie to get a good doctor.”

The doctors would stick her in an MRI or order a CAT scan and she would come home and sit us down.  “Don’t panic,” she would always preface every discussion after a doctor’s visit.  “But they’re testing me for a brain tumor.  They think that’s what’s causing my headaches.”  We never panicked because in a few weeks, after the results from her most current string of tests came back negative, we would be on to a new disease.  She had everything from lupus to multiple sclerosis to migraines to brain tumors to Lyme’s disease over the years. 

My mother’s own hypochondria and hysteria carried over into the way she treated our illnesses also.  When I was twelve I contracted mono.  I remember sitting in class one day in the sixth grade, my chin in my hand, when I noticed that there was a very sore lump in my neck right below my jaw line.  I also had a sore throat.  I came home and told my mother and she felt my swollen glands and made a doctor’s appointment.  On the way there, she asked me over and over how I was feeling.

“I’m okay,” I said.  My throat was sore but I was prone to strep throat so I was used to it and I really was okay.

“Jill,” she said, “I’m taking you to the doctor.  You can’t be feeling okay.  When we get there I want you to play it up.  Make it sound like you’re in a lot more pain than you actually are if you have to or else he won’t take it seriously.”

Over the next few months, I suffered from strep throat nearly every other week, extreme exhaustion, and a swelling of my glands that just would not go down.  When my first mono test came back negative, my mother began to panic.  “You probably have leukemia,” she said.  “Or Hodgkin’s Disease or some other cancer.”  Eventually, after I started to get better, a mono test came back positive.  I survived.

You would think that, after her experience with me and my mono, when my younger sister Carrie contracted the disease a few years later she would have been a little bit wiser.  But no.  When Carrie’s initial mono tests came back negative, she pulled her out of school entirely and somehow or other convinced the doctor to write a note saying that Carrie would need to be tutored at home.  She told everyone that Carrie probably had cancer, leukemia or bone cancer.  She convinced Carrie of that as well, and Carrie began limping around the house, mumbling over and over, “Ow, my bones, my bones, my bones.  My bones hurt.”  My mother even went so far as to write a poem about it for her poetry class (she’d gone back to college just prior to Carrie’s illness) that began, “Leukemia, lymphoma, the monster that I dread.”

When Carrie’s mono tests finally came back positive and my mother told people, “She doesn’t just have regular mono.  She has severe lymphatic mono,” I began to tell people that my mother was crazy.  “She’s nuts,” I would say.  “She’s a terrible mother.  She wants us all to be sick.  It’s some kind of crazy attention thing.”  I strove to be the exact opposite of everything she was.

So when she told me about her diabetes I sighed and braced myself for the onslaught of medical testing I just knew was coming.  I waited to hear that hers was an extra difficult case that would require three times as much monitoring as anyone else’s would and that she was going to have to be put on some strict diet where she could only eat, say, cucumbers and peppers.   But I didn’t.  She calmly told me that they’d tested her and she would find out the next day if she was going to need to give herself insulin shots.  And she left it at that.  She changed the subject and moved on to asking me about the weather in Denver.

A few days later I actually had to call her to find out what the results of her test were.  “I don’t have to take insulin,” she said.  “I just have to test my blood sugar twice a day and watch what I eat.”  I waited to hear that she’d made an appointment with a specialist in Erie to get a second opinion and some more tests but I didn’t hear that either.  The worst thing she said was, “I don’t know what I’m going to do without ice cream and cake.”  She left it at that. 

When my sister Megan called me a few days later and said sarcastically, “I’m calling to see how you’re handling the news that our mother has this terrible disease.  God knows Mom’s been searching for a real disease for years.  Finally she has one,” I pretended to laugh along with her, but really, I was kind of proud of my mother.  I’d never seen her handle anything with as much grace as she was handling the diabetes diagnosis. 

But still, I told my boyfriend Jerod, “I’m giving up sugar.  I don’t want to end up like my mother.”

 It’s not the first time I’ve doubted myself as an artist.  I’ve often wondered how creative I actually am.  I’ve felt like a fake and a phony, like writing anything besides fiction made me unworthy of calling myself a writer.  How creative do you actually have to be to write life?  That’s what journalists do and they’re not necessarily classified as “creative writers,” nor are grant writers, pamphlet writers, flyer writers, instruction manual writers, and a whole slew of other writers who write facts.  Then I thought that maybe the difference was that creative nonfiction writers use metaphor and poetic words, and many of the same elements as fiction writers.  I write the facts but make them pretty.

 But that still didn’t feel artistic enough to me.  To create something is to make something that wasn’t there previously.  That’s what fiction writers do.  They spin lives out of thin air.  They name people and imagine their favorite ice cream flavors and who they chased around on the playground when they were kids.  They dress them and give them hair and eyes, a dislike of chocolate and a love of canned sardines.  It was the complete opposite, it seemed to me, of what I did.  I take a life that already exists and put it on the page.  Where’s the imagination there?  What is it that I’m creating?

 But then I started thinking about visual art.  A painter who paints a landscape the way it actually looks is no less creative than Van Gogh painting “Starry Starry Night,” or Picasso painting any number of his cubist works. The sculptures of Michelangelo are no less creative than those of modern artists.  In fact, sometimes those things are harder to create.  It’s not easy to pin life down and make it stand still and be able to do it justice. 

 In creative nonfiction writing, everything is already there, yes, but it’s up to the writer to decide what to do with it.  How should it be spaced?  What should be left out?  What should be emphasized?  Emphasizing one detail even slightly differently can sometimes cause an entirely other truth to be illuminated from the same events.  It is indeed a creative craft.  The writer has to play up certain details in order to make them glisten on the page the way they do in real life.  You have to poke and prod the words, nudging them in, smoothing them and rounding the corners, putting indents here and creating bulges there.  It’s not easy.  It’s not uncreative.  I am a writer.