Anecdote

TWENTY-TWELVE

/ jonathanrobb / Leave a comment

The ending of a year and the commencement of a new one always struck me as a strange event. A non-event. Humans determined how long it takes the earth to fully circle the sun, gave this orbit a starting point, then decided to celebrate the anniversary of this fictitious starting point. And for a long time I couldn’t figure out why we gave such an obviously invented holiday any weight.

I remember as a kid sitting on the beach and feeling an electricity as the count down began. The tension increased until the final digit fell away and everyone along the sand exploded with a tremendous “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” Bracing hugs were shared, kisses given, and fireworks would launch into the air. But as those coloured lights faded quickly from the night sky and normal conversation resumed among the adults, I remember thinking, Is that it? I don’t feel any different. Why is everyone making such a big deal? And by all outward appearances nothing had changed. The new year looked and felt suspiciously like the last year.

The anti-climax of new years turned me off the event. It seemed to me a desperate excuse to party, to drink, and generally do stuff you wouldn’t normally do. Creating an excuse to celebrate is no bad thing, but new years always came away as shallow because so much hung on it. We were closing the door to the problems of last year. We were resolving to be different and better people come the new year. But those pesky problems always seemed to find their way into the new year regardless of the closed door, and the new people we were meant to be had a lot of the flaws of the old.

There was too much pressure on this invented holiday that it ultimately failed to live up to the hype.

But as I’ve moved into adulthood and garnered adult pressures and responsibilities, the value of new years has started to emerge.

The first value: An excuse to party.

This didn’t carry much weight for a child who came home and read books and watched television, and whose major concern was a three-hour shift behind a supermarket register. The excuse to party was every weekend, and the chance to unwind wasn’t essential. I was pretty unwound to begin with.

But as an adult the chance to gather with friends, to turn off the train of thoughts linked to job, career, and finances, is like an oasis in a storm. And in that oasis you feel like resolutions are a good thing, and are accomplishable. Which leads us to…

The second value: Resolve.

New years is traditionally a time to make resolutions. An opportunity to improve. As a child I found this pointless; why wait for a made up date on a made up calendar? If you want to change, change. And why there is some truth to this, there’s also truth to the fact that after working a stressful eight and a half hour shift without a lunch break, the resolution of not eating junk and exercising is almost laughable. High fat foods and doing nothing when you get home are compulsory.

New years gives you an opportunity to reflect away from the exhaustion of work on what it is you really want to be achieving. Because while financial stability is an accomplishment, it’s not always satisfying. It’s not all you want to be doing. The fugue of endless work days makes this hard to remember, but new years is a marked point in time to stop, think, and resolve yourself to the person you really want to be. It doesn’t matter if you don’t stick to the goals word for word, only that you remember what you’re doing and why, and bit by bit, work towards them. This action is usually accompanied by reflection. Which leads us to…

The third value: Reflect.

The idea that the problems of last year will magically evaporate in the face of a new year is still a stupid one. Young me got that one right. But what new years does offer is the opportunity to reflect on those problems, to weigh them against the successes of a year, and realise that you may have done better than you thought you did. It’s a moment to summarise what’s not working, to appreciate what you accomplished, and to take those wins and losses and decide what you’ll do with them from that point onwards. And there is definitely value in this.

For me, 2012 was a big one. A year may only be a fictitious span of man-made time, but mine was an eventful fictitious span of man-made time. 2012 saw my first published work, my first purchased home, my first published illustrations, my first promotion, and my first hospitalisation. Phew. And I only really appreciated this list when I stopped to reflect, calculate, and appreciate what I had accomplished in a year.

Here’s hoping it only gets better.

Happy new year everyone, and all the best for 2013.

THAT WON’T HAPPEN TO ME

/ jonathanrobb / 7 Comments

This post comes to you from inside a hospital.

I turned twenty-six yesterday.

This was not how I foresaw my twenty-six birthday.

As a nurse I’ve come to terms with the fragility of health. When you see a patient die from a fractured hip, or a previously healthy twenty-eight year old women yellow with jaundice, you quickly realise sickness isn’t just for the old.

Most of us, understandably, fool ourselves into the mindset of, ‘That won’t happen to me.’ We watch documentaries of people just like ourselves come down with cancer, people of the same age, gender, socio-economic status, and race, and we still tell ourselves, ‘That won’t happen to me.’ We mentally scan our body for aches and pains, and when we find nothing we relax in the knowledge that we are, at least temporarily, invincible.

And despite my apparent insight into the illusion of health, I was still shocked when three days ago I stood over the toilet and watched as brown urine trickled out from me. I did the right thing and saw a doctor who took samples of my bloods, but I felt confident the results would be minor; that I would be fine.

Because that sort of thing wouldn’t happen to me.

And even when I got a call from the pathology clinic testing my bloods at eleven forty-five on a Sunday night telling me to go to emergency immediately, I still couldn’t shake the notion that it was no big thing. Sure, I’d go to hospital, and maybe they’d keep me for a few hours, but then they’ll send me home telling me to keep my fluids up and to take it easy.

Because that sort of thing wouldn’t happen to me.

This was three days ago and I’m still tucked away in my little corner of the hospital.

Let me back up and tell you how this happened.

A week ago I was talking with my brother who was telling me of an exercise boot camp he had enrolled into. Five weeks, three hours a week, improved fitness at the other end. It sounded good, and I signed on. Thursday afternoon found me grunting and swearing as I worked through push ups, sit ups, pull ups, planking, tyre lifting, squats, and a light jog. The workout was hard, my arms shook, my stomach tightened, and I felt a little sick. But you’re meant to, aren’t you? That’s how you know you’ve pushed yourself.

I wasn’t concerned despite the fact that for the next two days my upper arms and chest ached. I struggled to lift my arms higher than my head, groaned when I had to reposition myself in bed, and trembled when attempting to take off my jumper. I figured this was the repercussions of a very thorough workout.

Consternation came when urine the colour of cola-flavoured cordial streamed from my body. I opened my laptop and typed ‘brown urine, excessive exercise’, into Google, and quickly learnt a new term. Rhabdomyolysis.

Essentially what I had done was damaged the muscle fibres in my arms and chest to the point that the muscle cells died. Upon the destruction of these cells, proteins are released into the bloodstream. This is not where they’re supposed to go. What I was seeing when I looked down into the toilet bowl was the dead matter of my muscles.

The risk of rhabdomyolysis is that the kidneys are not used to filtering these proteins, and one, creatinine, can build up in the kidneys. Potential consequences: decreased urine output, kidney damage, renal failure.

Let me reassure you that at this point it doesn’t look like I will suffer from any of these afflictions. Although, for the record, the specialist told me he had never seen creatinine levels so high. I’m marking this as an accomplishment; you have to take wins where you find them.

So here I am, on the other side of the looking glass. From nurse to patient. From the lands of the invincible healthy to the wards of the acutely sick. From twenty-five to twenty-six.

And they say exercise is good for you.

DEALING IN DEATH

/ jonathanrobb / 2 Comments

I’ve been reflecting recently that a lot of my writing contains death. This is not a conscious decision. Death seems to worm its way into my stories like a recurring character in want of a cameo. And I’ve been trying to decide why I’m drawn to exploring this phenomenon. And I think I know.

The first reason is a rather simple one: I think about death a lot. This is not for any morbid reason. I don’t run fingertips over blades or stand on the edges of buildings rolling a foot over the corner. I’m a nurse. Death refuses to be ignored in my profession. Every time I interact with a patient who is wasting away I’m aware of death waiting in the background. Patients want to talk about it. Family members need to be consoled. Co-workers joke about it. This results in reflection on the nature of death, which in turn works its way into my writing.

The second reason is also rather simple: Death is dramatic. It’s an organic occurrence that shakes things up. It’s a way to test characters, to see their world view when confronted with loss. Death is a catalyst.

The reason I’m writing about death today is that I saw a patient recently who was thick in the absolute and utter realisation of her own mortality. This patient, let’s call her Pat, is a sixty-one year old woman with chronic leg ulcers. She has been in and out of hospitals for the past ten years of her life. She had been ill, recovered, and fallen ill again. And yet none of this was what triggered her sudden confrontation with the idea of death. It was seeing it in someone else that forced the truth of it into her mind.

Pat attended a doctor’s clinic for a regular review and saw another patient whom she had seen in the waiting room during previous appointments. At first she didn’t recognise the man. She though the woman with him was his daughter rather than his wife. It was when she went into the doctor’s room and found the doctor wiping away tears in an effort to compose herself that the connection clicked, and Pat realised that the healthy man from months ago had shrunk into the sickly old man she now saw in the waiting room.

Pat went home shocked. She sat in her empty house over the weekend chewing on the image of the man’s rapid decline. And when I arrived the following Monday she was scared, and desperate to talk to me about death.

So we talked. We discussed the obvious things first; the fate awaiting us all, the loss to ourselves and our families, and the misery of such a loss. And eventually we got to what really was bothering her: What was the point of it all? What surprised me most wasn’t the question, but that a woman almost thirty years my senior was looking to me for answers. And that I had something to say on the matter.

I told Pat that being aware of mortality isn’t a bad thing. It invigorates. It’s not a pleasurable notion to consider, but it forces you to acknowledge that you are alive now, and that that time is limited. It pushes you to make more of your time, and to appreciate the joys you get. I told Pat that I didn’t know what the point of it all was, or whether, in the face of death, our lives held a particular meaning at all. I told her what I knew: that in the face of no meaning, all you can work towards is contentment. That if you spend what time you have happy then you come away on top.

I had some form of an answer for Pat because I had thought about death. My profession meant that I couldn’t ignore the inevitable reality of it like most of us do, and I certainly did before nursing. We, as a race, are too skilled at pushing the knowledge that one day we won’t be on the earth anymore to the back of our minds. We cram it down into the crevasses of our brain and pile trivialities and day-to-day details on top until we can’t see it anymore. And we smile and think we’ve beaten it. But it doesn’t do any good down there. And for Pat, when the truth wiggled its way free and sprung to the forefront of her mind, she had no way to accept it.

Pat listened to my answers like an eager student. She smiled at my closing statement and seemed mollified. The haunted look wasn’t gone from her eyes, but she appeared to be in more control. She was contemplative rather than scared. And I felt shocked and proud that I had been the one to comfort her.

Thinking about death, and writing about it, had given me an answer. I don’t know if it was the right one, but it is better than staring into the void without a form of comprehension.

And reflecting on this, I think I’ll continue to write about death.

FRAMING REALITY

/ jonathanrobb / 2 Comments

Once when I was having a short story of mine work-shopped my lecturer stated that I had written an anecdote, not a story. This irked me at the time; I felt he was being pedantic and finding fault to complete his role as educator. This was perhaps a bit arrogant because after giving it some space, I looked back on this particular story and saw that he was absolutely correct. I had written an anecdote.

The difference between an anecdote and a short story is one of framing. An anecdote, as my lecturer explained, is a situation, an occurrence that lacks the correct framing of a story. This framing is a familiar one we’re all taught from primary school: beginning, middle, and end.

My anecdote had characterisation, dialogue, imagery. It had things happening. What it didn’t have was a point.

After realising the truth behind my lecturer’s advice, I gave the problem a lot of thought. I attempted to create a story that had correct framing. Unfortunately, being not yet twenty at the time and having spent a lot of my childhood in front of the television left me reaching for clichés to structure my stories. I used episodic formats and overused ideas. In other words, my stories weren’t very good. I became frustrated.

After months of frustration I pinpointed the cause of my irritation; life is messy.

I wanted to capture reality in my writing. I wanted to take the chaos of my experiences and display them in my text as they had felt. Even if what I was writing was fantasy, I wanted in to feel real. And life is messy. It lacks format, and at times it even lacks a point. I was frustrated because I felt my anecdotes more accurately represented reality than a neatly framed story. Granted, they were basically a description of events, but then so is life.

I didn’t write for a while after that realisation. I decided I’d wait until I thought of a story that had the correct framing, but at the same time allowed me to express my version of reality. And for a long time I didn’t think I could do it. I thought that any attempt to reshape ideas and events into a neat package was sacrificing my representation of a messy reality.

It took me a while to realise that I was looking at it from the wrong side. I had a story line and was trying to squeeze reality into that shape. But that’s not a writer’s job. What I actually had was reality, and what I should have been doing was looking for the story within it. Because even though life is messy, it’s a writer’s job to take that mess and search for a meaning. To find the point.

A well written story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has motifs, and loaded dialogue. It has subtext. It has a point. It’s a writer’s job to scroll through the mess of reality and find these elements in life. By writing an anecdote I was simply being lazy. I was failing to cut away the excess to find the structure buried inside.

By writing a story you’re finding the point amongst the mess. You’re pulling out the meaning from the chaos of events and structuring it so that meaning is more evident for the reader. An anecdote may capture a messy reality, but then so too does a diary entry. Or, god forbid, a blog. And while these types of writing have their purpose, they aren’t a story.

A story isn’t simply about photocopying reality; it’s about finding the meaning in the mess.

Thanks to my lecturer for pointing this out to me by criticising my work. It was the best thing he could have done.