Day 76: Tongue-Tied

There was a fair amount in the news (okay, The New York Post) last week about a blogger dubbed the “Skank Crank”, an anonymous woman who was spewing vitriol on her site “Skanks of New York”. I guess she had a lot to get off her chest. I have a lot to get off my brain.

I was cleaning out some files the other day and came across a parent’s statement I wrote about A when she was applying to some program or other. One particular line stood out: “She has always tried to make sense of her world through the arts.” And then today I was replying to an e-mail from my nephew about my blog (I have a male reader!) and I wrote, “The whole idea is for me to get some of the stuff that’s floating around in there out, to try to make some sense of what I’m thinking and feeling.” And that’s true, but it’s not the whole story.

I’m not an articulate speaker. I trip over my words, I often can’t come up with the word I want, and my brain races ahead so that I completely lose my train of thought. I wish I could blame it on my aging ass-brain, but the truth is that it’s nothing new. I’ve been a mumbling fool for as long as I can remember. My older brothers and sisters (well, two in particular – you know who you are, A and D) used to tease that they were smarter than me and always would be; when I tried to point out that I’d be as smart as them when I got to be their age, they’d flat out deny it. No way. I’d always be stupid. I think I started to believe them, because I was at a total loss for words. Rarely am I at a loss for words – it’s just that the ones I come up with don’t begin to express what I’m really thinking. Had I been able to defend myself in writing, I might have been able to persuade them of my superior intelligence.

I remember well my process, my lack of process actually, for writing papers in college. I always pulled all-nighters. I was the queen of procrastination. At the time I thought I was just too busy having fun, but I wonder now whether it also had something to do with the fact that I never knew what I really thought about the topic: I had no thesis, no topic sentence, no outline, no arguments. It was hard to be organized, to go about writing a paper in a logical way, when I was completely clueless!

When I did finally sit down to write, accompanied by Diet Coke, William Strunk and E.B.White, I’d think I was brain dead. Hours later, as the sun was rising, I’d turn off my IBM Selectric, gather together my sheets of onion skin paper and, bleary eyed and dumbfounded, read my conclusions. So that’s what I think! Exhausted as I was, it was always a moment of great discovery and pride. It sounds inane, but that’s really how it happened.

Years later, I came across a quotation attributed to Flannery O’Connor, but which I’ve since seen credited in slightly different form to William Faulkner as well: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Exactly! I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Skank Crank could learn a thing or two from these great Southern writers. And she needs to hold her tongue.