dearcarriefisher

[dearcarriefisher]

Mark Hamill says you are haunting him. Well, at least back in 2018 you were. Is it true? Are you haunting him? If you are, you seem to be doing a great job. He seems less frightened and more delighted to have you watching over him.

I stand in line with the many people who would love to be so haunted by the great one.

Anyways I digress. My experience of trying to talk, touch and no one feels or anything

[dearcarriefisher]

dragging behind the wagon

as i crawl back to writing, it occurs to me that not only have a fallen off the wagon, i don't even know where the wagon is.

wait, i think i remember seeing it. oh yeah, flat tires and all sitting out back with grass growing in it like a fuckin terrarium.

i grew up in the 70s and our station wagon was the bomb. it was an suv, crossover, sedan, pickup, sports car all rolled into one. and when it starting rusting out, it was like our own version of the flintmobile with until my older sister shoved my favorite hot wheels car through the hole and i punched her causing her yell and then dad swung the car around and headed back to the house where he grounded us inside while he boarded up the hole and our all of our fun.

i'm reminded of that beloved brown-paneled piece of shit because, well, it's a wagon and i've fallen off. never quite on the wagon, yet ever conscious of it sitting out back, i feel like i'm barely hanging on. i grab for it even as i want to push it away, its rusty metal edges cutting me deep and probably infecting me with fuckin tetanus. [ i don't give a shit what the cdc now says -- step on a rusty nail, you gonna get tetanus. ]

what i need is a whip. worked for indiana jones, it can sure as hell work for me.

picture this: 1936. an adventurous archeology professor searches for the ark of the lost covenant and suddenly finds himself dragging behind a wagon of nazis as they speed through the desert enroute to cairo.

sounds like writing to me, nazi assholes and all.

indy grabs onto that wagon with a flick of his whip and even with a bullet in his shoulder, he hangs on for dear life. that's about where i am. all i can do is hang on and let this one wild and precious wagon drag my ass around.

i don't know why i hang on, but i know it's life or death for me. i have no idea what's inside and why i should risk life and limb and lockjaw to hod on. indy had his ark of the covenant, but what do i have? what's rattling around the back of the wagon?

the only way to know is to hang on and let the living shit be dragged out of you.

and then i remember. i pull off my shelf Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods ... (from chapter 1 "living like weasels")

neither on the wagon nor off, let yourself be dragged behind, holding on for dear life. this is writing.

#annie dillard #mary oliver #the summer day #living like weasels #station wagon #writing #writing life #writedamnit #indiana jones #nazi assholes #wagon #fall off the wagon #whip #holding on #dad

[dearcarriefisher]

❤️

[dearcarriefisher]

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”

— Neil Gaiman

[dearcarriefisher]

throwing up scallops and percodan

i saw postcards from the edge last night. i have mixed feelings.

the book, well, the book was superb. if i compare the movie to the book, i am hopelessly disappointed. but as a standalone story, it was fine. meryl streep and shirley maclaine are legends. i particularly liked robin bartlett's character. seriously, everyone needs an aretha in their life.

but i kept looking for you. i couldn't see you in this so-called semi-autobiographical story. you of course know better than i. it's your life. i missed your playful, unhinged way of putting two thoughts together that have no business being in the same room as one another.

i was relieved to find a scene or two riffed off your opening paragraph. but really, it doesn't get much better than this:

Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway. Besides, what was I supposed to do? He came up to my room and gave me that dumb stuffed animal that looks like a thumb, and there I was lying in bed twelve hours after an overdose. I wasn't feeling my most attractive. I'd thrown up scallops and Percodan on him the night before in the emergency room. I thought that it would be impolite to refuse to give him my number. He probably won't call, anyway. No one will ever call me again. (9)

i've been thinking. it's one thing to have your book adapted into a movie. as a writer, i would be both honored and wary about how my story would be rendered. the likelihood of this quandary is minimal as i have no story of which to speak. anyways, it's another thing to see a semi-autobiographical version of yourself passed out in bed with dennis quaid.

my sense is that this is not your first rodeo. you have lived with other people's versions of yourself your whole life. hell, george lucas even stole your likeness. maybe you've come to peace with it, maybe not.

i get the movie adaptation thing, but it's the ghosts of all these other versions that anger me. in my life, these ghosts are legion. and they won't shut up. every version that someone creates of me has a knack for sticking around. like scallops and percodan rumbling around deep in my entrails.

i have my own doris mann. famous, no, but always the star of her own show and flagrantly inserting herself into everyone else's show too. when i was four or five, i was sick to my stomach with the flu. i remember kneeling in front of the toilet puking my guts out, alone. my mother eventually came to the bathroom just long enough to express her disapproval with my total disregard for her feelings. she left. i wiped the scallops and percodan from my face and cleaned up the mess.

i wanted her to be there, to hold my hair back and to tell me i was going to be okay and that we'd clean up and go downstairs for a glass of ginger ale to settle my stomach. but she didn't even know i was there. another sad case of wishful thinking.

i was ashamed to want her there ... and ashamed to not want her there.

hers were the first versions of myself that i had to live with. many more would follow. so many that i forgot for most of my life what the original even was.

i had no name of my own, known only by the frankenstein who created me. once someone created a version of me, i was doomed to carry that with me forever. now i was someone who had total disregard for my mother's feelings. what a monster.

through the years, i've also been adapted into some who is too loud, too sensitive, too big, too needy, too unpredictable, too crazy, too smart, too good, too bad. just existing seemed to be too much for the world.

i share this with you not to compare or vilify our mothers, but to say that i get it. i know what it's like to live everyone else's version of myself instead of the original. "but the trouble is", as suzanne says to lowell in their final scene together, "i can't feel my life".

this is an amazing scene. not so much the counseling session by lowell, but earlier in the scene when suzanne has to redo lines that she had previously flubbed up. it's a glimpse into suzanne's own story, her realization of where she's been and who she is.

she knows it. and her voice commands the room.

scallops and percodan, yes. but don't walk out just yet. waking up to one's own life is worth the messy process of vomiting out the warped versions that we've internalized.

for me it's time to redo the narrative. and frankly (which is an improvement over frankensteinly) i rather like the intensity of being me. it's time to redo the "too much" narrative.

Sometimes, though, I'll be driving, listening to loud music with the day spreading out all over, and I'll feel something so big and great—a feeling as loud as the music. It's as though my skin is the only thing that keeps me from going everywhere all at once. If this doesn't tell you exactly what I'm doing, it should tell you how I'm feeling when I'm doing whatever it is. (226)

Quotes from Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1987; reprinted May 2010)

#percodan #scallops #postcards from the edge #carrie fisher #wishful thinking #semi-autobiographical #likeness #version #vomiting #frankenstein #adapted from a novel #my story #my life

[dearcarriefisher]

a different sort of real

i told my psychologist recently that my dsm-worthy tendency toward derealization is actually a very handy skill. sure, it's not the among the more healthy of skills but it does allow me, when i manage to conjure it forth, to protect myself in hostile environments, which also happens to be nearly all the time.

i remember walking down the hallway of my grade school while everyone else was in class. i must have been returning from the principal's office for either commendation or condemnation. i could swing wildly either way. as i walked down the hall, i became conscious of myself in the hall. it was me, walking. on this floor. between these walls. in this school. it was surreal to me. i hadn't ever realized that i was actually part of the reality that i was experiencing. there has always been some kind of distance between me and reality. the momentary "real-ization" was both shocking and fascinating to me.

and then, just as quickly as i became real, i unrealized myself.

the memory of that moment has stuck with me lo these many years, but reality? well reality proved to be much more elusive.

i both knew and didn't know that my so-called reality was different from pretty much everyone around me. they all got it. why couldn't i? and so i had to live two different lives. one in my solitary reality, and the other in "normal" reality.

and so i get when you say that your life was a bit surreal. yeah, i know you were talking about your life as a celebrity. but from your other writings, it seems that your adventures in mental health also had a surreal affect on you. in any case, that is, in my own version of reality, i like to think that this assumption is accurate. wishful thinking, perhaps, but i do take comfort in finding a bit of myself in you even if it's only in my imagination.

imagination is the realest thing i have.

so as i'm listening to you read from your book Wishful Drinking, i'm less listening and more writing my life along with you. i don't pretend to know you or have your gift of writing, but like you i do have a psychological acuity that won't quit. it lights up almost constantly when i am reading or listening to your writing. hence this humble tumblr blog, a notebook of sorts to let my thoughts tumble forth recklessly and at will.

"I understood that my life was unusual", you write, "a different sort of real".

It was the only reality I knew, but compared to other folks ... it eventually struck me as a little surreal, too. And eventually, too, I understood that my version of reality had a tendency to set me apart from others. (5)

at 51 years of age, i am nearly ready to accept that my version of reality will never align with actual reality. i think we now have a mutual respect for one another and for the distance we keep.

it was indeed wishful thinking -- on my part and on the part of others around me who didn't get me -- to believe that i could overcome the wildly tattered mess that constituted my reality and finally become velveteen real.

as it turns out, a wildly tattered mess of a life suits me. being unhinged is everyday life for me. i rather like it. it is both freeing and surprisingly verdant. i regret not owning this life sooner, and yet, to have done so would not be who i am.

#imagination #derealization #wishful thinkiing #wishful drinking #carrie fisher #mental health #dsm #unrealization #realization #reality #surreal #tumblr #why i write #verdant #velveteen #wildly tattered mess of a life #unhinged #school

[dearcarriefisher]

certainties

i better start off with certainties. i have two indoor cats and a feral cat that for some unknown reason has chosen me to get her daily breakfast, nap on my porch, drink my scotch and do her dirty laundry on weekends. i also live with a clandestine network of spiders, crickets and dust bunnies that simultaneously terrorize and amuse me.

i ride a motorcycle and, as of yet, have not found a gang that prefers to ride in solitude.

i fancy myself something of a badass although my vegan doc martens 1460s with gel inserts suggest otherwise.

i don’t remember much of my life but i do have a social security card, driver's license and passport that suggest that at least i exist to the government. either that or it proves i'm good at faking. maybe that's why the memories never stay around long enough for a second date.

like you, my mental health has never really resembled health at all, at least in the way the majority of people would understand it. i can say that now. for most of my life though, i faked my way through depression, anxiety and adhd pasting my photo over the social, academic, and professional accomplishments of actual successful people.

i'm always surprised when someone recognizes me or remembers my name, but that's usually only when something has gone terribly wrong.

but this is my life and even outcasts belong somewhere even if it's on the edges. i'll take that and no one can take it away from me.

life on the edges of reality is a strange existence. it's a constant struggle to find balance as i grasp for branches that cut my hands and rocks that shift uneasily beneath my feet, a few tumbling over the edge to the dark abyss below. at the same time there is a sweet companionship in knowing that though i face death at each pass, i might find a tiny wildflower here or a curious raven there. and, once in a while, i even find people like you walking the edges with me. across the abyss, each on our own cliff. we nod at one another and, in seeing one another, know we are home.

#wishful drinking #mental health #carrie fisher #depression #anxiety #adhd #living on the edge #write damn it

[dearcarriefisher]

wishful thinking

so i am 51 years old and it's high time i found my voice. apparently it's never too old to start. it just so happens that that voice -- loud and persistent -- is also passionately shy. a loaded arrow with no bow to let it loose. all action and no talk.

it's unlikely that any one will particularly care about my condition -- i'm not even sure that i do. but i don't have much choice in the matter. shadows and flickers of light, landscapes treacherous and peaceful, sinister voices and rivers of calm have made their home in me. unbidden.

you of all people would understand this.

and if you don't, well, i'm just glad to have you along for the ride. you seem like the kind of person who without a second thought would toss your own baggage in the back seat, hop in front and howl into the wind with me as we set off without seatbelts or sense to hold us back.

buckle up fuckos. here we go.

#wishful drinking #fuckos #carrie fisher #write damn it