What’s in a Name?

There was always something off, to me, about my name. The one my parents gifted me for my birthday, the one on my government issued ID. I didn’t know it as a child but sometime in the last fifteen or so years, I have worked out that it’s just not very musical. First and last, especially, are nothing but hard consonants strung together with short vowels.

It’s very abrasive.

Around middle school, I tried dropping my first name and just being Gabrielle—or Gabby or Elle or Brie—but that’s next to impossible in a small town where all the kids go to school in the same building. People get used to one thing and balk against change.

Did I grasp the opportunity to change it in college? Nope. I, too, had become so accustomed to introducing myself as Desiree that as much as I hated it, I couldn’t stop. And before long, the damage was done and all of my new college friends were on board with this thing I abhorred.

Out of college and starting a new job? Same song, different verse.

But when I started publishing, I took that as an opportunity to be known as something different. Because as much as I hated the sound of all those hard consonants and short vowels, I thought it looked just as bad. A pseudonym, a nomme de plume, a pen name was never about anonymity, for me. It was always about aesthetics and what I personally found attractive.

What I can’t tell you is why I opted to keep the D.

It seemed like the right choice at the time and was for more than fifteen years. But when other people started talking about me and my writing in more professional terms, I wished I had just stuck with Gabrielle.

It seems frivolous, now, to change it. If changing it were a need that would be different. But to simply change it because it makes my skin crawl to hear people say it aloud . . . that sounds like a lot of extra work I don’t need to heap upon myself.

A person can accumulate a lot of backlog in twenty years. There is a lot of work out there in the world with the name D. Gabrielle Jensen on it. I’ll stick with what I have, for now, and see how I feel in another couple of years. Maybe some notoriety and fame will change the way I feel.

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Masks and Mental Health

In Asian countries, it is not uncommon for people to wear masks. They wear them in crowded spaces because in their cities they have some very crowded spaces. And in some places they wear them because of pollutants in the air.

This is a foreign (if you’ll pardon the expression) concept for much of the western world. And because we are not used to the practice, we’ve had some adjusting to do over the last 18 months.

And some people have not adjusted well.

I am one of them.

And the stupid thing is I’m not in the anti-mask camp. I have some opinions about the state of affairs but I’m not vehemently anti-mask or pro-conspiracy or any of that. I have seen, not first hand but through the eyes of others, the worst of the worst.

But I’ve seen a lot of other ugliness in the last year and a half, too.

So, I wasn’t really sure why I was having such an averse reaction to the whole situation. I couldn’t quite pin down what it was about wearing a mask and seeing people in media wearing them that was bothering me so much.

Because my only reaction to seeing other people wearing them in real life was that person is wearing a mask.

But seeing fictional characters on the television wearing masks really gets under my skin.

And I finally put things together.

There are a couple of things happening here. The first is my own self esteem. This is the reason I struggle with the idea of wearing them personally.

I spend every day staring at myself in a mirror. For hours at a time. Before all of this started, the person I saw in that mirror was short and overweight and dressed in unflattering clothing that accentuated the short and the overweight.

But that person could smile.

See, I was bullied for a few things as a kid but one major one was a condition called strabismus.

I actually didn’t have a word for it until just a few years ago. But as a kid it was a “lazy eye.” Technically, they’re different but similar conditions but according to the one and only optometrist who took the time to really examine me, I don’t have a true lazy eye because it responds to stimulus.

ANYWHO . . . I didn’t know that until my mid-20s but even if I did know that as a kid, imagine being a kid trying to explain the medical tech to other kids. But I have spent the better part of 35 years watching people look behind them to see who I’m talking to, even when I address them by name. And I spent most of my childhood being called cross-eyed.

Because I wasn’t diagnosed, properly or at all, until my 20s, obviously nothing was done to fix the problem. Though often the fixes don’t work and have to be done again and again, especially when they are performed on adults. So I still have a weird, wonky eye that makes people look over their shoulder for the other Jim or Sally standing behind them. And I’m still a little self-conscious about it.

No, that’s not true. I’m only self-conscious about it when someone or something calls attention to it.

Like covering up the lower half of my face so all that is left are my eyes.

I think my personal aversion to wearing a mask comes from the fact that it is constantly calling attention to this traumatic thing that I hate about myself.

I also figured out that while I’m not hearing impaired (I actually have impeccable hearing, probably because my vision isn’t perfect), I have trouble hearing people talk. I think it’s a form of dyslexia, maybe, but I hear the sounds they just don’t always make it to my brain in the right order. Which is why I hate talking on the telephone.

But then I realized . . .

What do talking on the phone and wearing a mask have in common?

I can’t see your lips.

I’m not, technically, reading people’s lips, but if I can see your mouth moving I am far more likely to understand what you’re saying to me.

And I think that is part of why it bothers me so much to see fictional characters in masks on television.

The other reason is . . . it’s fiction. It’s meant to be an escape, not a reminder.

I just caught up to the abbreviated 2021 season on New Amsterdam and Daniel Dae Kim just joined the cast. In the episode I watched most recently, they were talking about the virus in the past tense because things had calmed down from the chaos they had endured in the early months. One of the other characters says to Kim’s character, “Hearken back . . . ” and he cuts them off saying, “I’d rather not hearken back to a time when thousands of people were dying every day.”

That sums up my feelings about wandering into pandemic episodes of television shows after the fact. I’m still about a season and a half behind on Wolf’s Chicago franchise so we’ll (hopefully) be well past all of this when I hit pandemic episodes of those shows.

And I don’t want to hearken back.

I want to move forward and I want my means of escape to be escaping, not reminding.

That was a lot of thoughts for very late in the evening (or early in the morning though I haven’t gone to bed yet) but I had an epiphany . . . a couple of them, and needed to get them out of my head.

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Bored

What do you do when you can’t even figure out what content to produce to keep yourself entertained?

I have lamented this on here before (which is part of the problem) but I don’t know what to share with people. I have no interest in producing MORE writing tips or editing tips; the internet is saturated with them.

I don’t feel like I get any engagement from behind the scenes content–research bits, character sketches, that sort of thing–and lack of engagement is the quickest way to reinforce my belief that I am a boring human.

I think that’s it, ultimately. I am boring. People tell me that I’m interesting, that I have a lot to say, but when I ask them for guidance, they just repeat themselves. “You’re not boring!” Okay, but I think I am so tell me what it is about me that makes you think I’m not boring? Maybe the thing that you find interesting would be interesting to other people. I might still think it’s dumb but at least having someone say it’s interesting to them gives me hope that I just think I’m boring because I have to spend all day every day listening to the same stupid stories.

I know that those same stupid stories are new to other people and I can’t accurately gauge their entertainment value. But in this case, no news is not good news. No engagement IS engagement. No engagement is rejection of my offerings from the vox populi.

Sometimes it’s an algorithm thing. But my anxiety doesn’t understand that word. My anxiety says, “No one liked this, that means it was terrible. Whatever you do, do NOT repeat this.”

If I post too many more of these, this is going to be my brand. At least in this arena. WordPress is going to start marketing me as the Debbie Downer who has nothing valid to say. Because I keep presenting myself in that light.

I have things to say. I have A LOT of things to say. I’m just not sure if anyone wants to hear them.

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I Am Part of the 97%

I have struggled to write this poem for months.

I can’t explain why, what provoked it, but a memory flooded into my brain and refused to leave. It prodded at me, urging me to talk about it, share my story.

My story is not a special one. It’s not even a particularly tragic one. It is, unfortunately, not even a unique one. But it is a story that I have had to accept and one that might help someone else find the courage to tell their own.

I thought that putting it into verse would make it more palatable to people. It would be art rather than a dissertation, entertainment instead of testimony. No matter how I have tried, the rhythm is wrong, and the words are out of place. Or the words are flattened into the beat. If I rhyme, I am writing to a child. If I don’t, I lose my grip on making it poetry.

So, I will stop trying to force what does not want to be.

I will tell you this story that leaves me numb, like I wasn’t really there as it unfolded, but I will tell you in prose. I will tell you in sentences that offer subjects, objects, verbs, and predicates and I have to hope that you will stay until the end, even though it does not have a happy ending.

When I was nineteen, I was in college. It was my first year and I had gone far enough away from home that I couldn’t go home on the weekends. It was a special trip for holidays, and I was forced to leave my comfort zone and find myself.

But then I learned a boy I had grown up with had moved to the same town. He was not in college. He had lived in that town when he was younger and his father still did, so he moved back after high school. And we made an effort to spend some time together at the house where he lived alone.

This house was in a new and undeveloped part of the city. Dirt roads, newly constructed homes, and the closest neighbor one hundred or more yards away.

It was also a twenty-minute drive from the college, and I didn’t drive.

None of this was important—I would be spending the afternoon with an old friend. We had known each other since we were nine years old. Ten years is a long time when your brain and personality is constantly under construction. None of the information about where he lived or that I didn’t drive was important—until it was.

As we sat in his living room, he in a chair and I on the sofa, another friend called. He talked to the friend, another of the kids I graduated with, without leaving the room, while I sat quietly and listened, because what choice did I have?

But as I listened, he lied.

It began by him telling the friend I was there. Which was, of course, true. Followed immediately by the announcement we were “hooking up.”

“Hooking up” has always been a strange turn of phrase for me. Perhaps it is my social awkwardness, my inability to understand nuance, but it is ambiguous, in my mind. It almost always means something that happens between people who are more than friends—I can’t think of an instance where it doesn’t but I won’t say unequivocally that it never means anything platonic—but sometimes it means becoming a couple, sometimes it means sex.

Regardless of the meaning, it was a lie.

And he knew it. He gave me a sly wink and shushed me with his finger to his lips. Don’t let on to his friend that he’s not getting lucky.

He ended the call and apologized for lying. “He would have expected it, considering . . .”

“Considering, what?” I asked. It was at this point when he, one of the most sought-after boys in my high school, an okay student but a star athlete across the state, confessed to a long-standing crush on the self-proclaimed misfit, the high school weirdo. He worked hard to overcome a learning disability and be a good student, I skipped class to smoke on the football field and graffiti bathrooms. He was adored by all; I was feared by them. But, according to his version of the story, I was too good for him.

“But maybe now, we can put all of that behind us and get together.”

I told him he was my friend, a brother, and I didn’t, couldn’t see him in that light.

He told me it was my fault for the low-cut top and tight jeans I had worn to his house.

I don’t remember what happened after that. My memory jumps from mid-afternoon sun in his living room to full night in someone else’s house, where I found someone willing to take me back to the college.

I lost hours. I don’t know what happened. He was angry. He wouldn’t answer when I called again days later. He tried “hooking up” with another girl (in the house where it was nighttime) like it would change my mind.

But that’s not even the real story.

Because that story is one that practically any woman can tell you about an encounter with a man. “He told me he liked me—romantically, physically—and I told him I didn’t feel the same way, so he got angry.” It’s almost formulaic.

The real story is hours spent on school buses or partnering for school projects. The real story is the day we spent selling advertisements for the school newspaper, when the whole staff piled into a van, but we had to partner up every time we went into a business and he was always my partner.

The real story is that Pearl Jam makes me think of sharing headphones because we rode the same bus before we could drive to school but after his brother had graduated and we lived in a rural community so the bus ride to and from school lasted thirty minutes and Pearl Jam’s Ten was fifty-three minutes long, so we’d listen to half in the morning and half in the afternoon.

The real story is how it all started when I was eleven and he was twelve and he cornered me in not-quite-public, with no more than a curtain shielding us from our fifth-grade classmates who were rehearsing for Peter Pan, and he pinned me to the bed that had been borrowed from the nurse’s office to be used for the Darling children’s bedroom scene, and pushed my legs open so he could lay between them. And he was hot and smelled of sweat and wet cloth and he was so much heavier and stronger than I was, so I closed my eyes and turned away from him. But because he held my hands above my head in both of his, he had put himself at a disadvantage, and after a few long minutes, he stood up and left me alone with something I would soon bury beneath the next eight years of friendship until another day when the only thing keeping me safe was his choice. Because he didn’t assault me but did everything to make me understand that was his choice not to.

And I can’t face him. I don’t want to face him. He’s married, now, with kids, and I don’t want to face him alone, without backup of my own. Because I always wonder if those moments that mean so much to us—that stick with us or resurface without warning—if those moments mean the same thing to the other person.

No one who knows us both knows this story. People who know me have heard it but no one who knows us both. They’d never believe me. I was a weirdo. Still am. He was the high school heartthrob. He was Andrew; I was Allison. They’d never believe me.

And that’s just one of my 97% stories. Or is it two?

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Regrets

January, 2015 – I faced a pretty big fear and started a conversation with someone on whom I developed a crush over the course of our then three year friendship. It was the first real one-on-one conversation we had had in private and it was one of the most comfortable and easy conversations I had had in a long time.

January, 2017 – I still hadn’t told him how I felt and got that thrown back in my face when he became “Facebook official” with a new girl.

January, 2018 – He started the new year sharing Queen’s Somebody to Love and changing his relationship status back to “single.” I decided to give him some space to heal. Time . . . got away from me.

January, 2019 – He publicly confessed to a lifelong struggle with mental illness and shared that he was starting medication and therapy for it. He told me he’d always be there for me if I needed him. He self isolated, shutting down his social media accounts.

January, 2020 – I signed a contract to publish a book series in which he is the inspiration for one of the main characters. He doesn’t know. Maybe never will.

January, 2021 – I haven’t talked to him in two years and my heart still hurts for him every day. I worry about how he’s doing, all things considered. I worry about his health as someone who seemed to get the flu at least twice every season. I hope he’s happy. For his sake even if that means he’s happy not with me. I hope he’s still doing what he loves. I still miss his voice. I still miss his intelligence, his wisdom, and his humor.

I am still angry with myself for keeping quiet. I’m a strong person but when it comes to offering up my heart to get it broken, I am a frightened child. I’ve been betrayed, manipulated, and abused. I have been blamed for the breakdown of someone’s mental health. I have been cheated on and cheated with. When I rejected the advances of a childhood friend, I learned he was never a friend at all.

I am not harder for it. I still love with everything I have. I’m just the jerk who does it from a distance.

I know that my desire and ability to love someone is not a reason for them to love me back. And them not loving me back does not negate my feelings. I still love him. I hope I’ll see him again some day. I’m not holding my breath for it to happen but maybe I won’t run from it either.

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A Season of Gift Giving

When I was a teenager, my parents committed some horrible atrocity.

I don’t remember what it was, now, but there was a gift for some gift-giving holiday that did not meet my teenaged girl standards. Probably shoes that were the wrong color or a knock-off of some overpriced brand name thing. Anyway, I was given a gift about which I was less than thrilled and that started a law in my family.

No gifts without a wish list.

For anyone. I made a list, Mom made a list, Dad made a list. And we shopped from the list. No deviation.

Well, some deviation but as long as we shopped 90% from the list, everything was peaceful.

This is not some spoiled teen thing. Even today, if I buy something for my mother that is of my own accord, not something she specifically requested, the response is often mixed. There is some level of gratitude but there’s always some level of “why did you buy me this?” or “why did you think I wanted that?”

This applies to objects as well as even just showing up with treats. “I saw these candies I thought you might like to try.”

The thing is—and the point of this story—I make the lists, even still, but if something happens and the items requested cannot be purchased, I might get a gift card or cash instead. Which is fine, except then I have trouble buying the things that were on the list.

I don’t have an explanation for it. But, let’s look at this year’s list. I asked for charcoal pastels—charcoal, not oil; I don’t like the oil kind. If I don’t get them but get, say, a gift card to Michael’s, I will not go straight away and buy the pastels I wanted. I will put the card away until such a time when I want to make a big purchase that I wouldn’t make otherwise.

Which means the card will stay put away, indefinitely, and I’ll never get the pastels.

If someone could explain this to me—or even tell me that you can relate—I would greatly appreciate it.

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