Alexandra, The Dorky Writer: Chapter 9

A terrible curse had fallen in the kingdom where Alexandra, The Dorky Writer, lived. Everyone had to stay home, otherwise, people could fall ill and even die. Even though The Dorky Writer loved to stay away from adventures, she started to feel anxious because her look-alike angels started to look more like little devils who didn't know what to do with their lives while being trapped. Days passed and she received an owl-delivered letter. It was a tiny ad from her Dragon friend. A mean to escape while staying home. A new kind of adventure. She sent her answer. And that's how it began.

My beloved friend/Facebook daughter, Priscila Dragón, decided to open a writing workshop during this quarantine and invited people from everywhere. I actually didn't think about it twice and asked her if I could participate. I got in. This is one of the best decisions I've ever made.

I admit it, logging in every Tuesday and Thursday still gives me the bad chills, part of the anxiety, I suppose, but things flow in a way that is so natural, that, little by little, such anxiety goes away... until our next session, ha, or until I have to read what I wrote, of course. When sharing out loud I'm always feeling as if I'm going to be attacked somehow, and this is where it becomes magical. There are not attacks, not bad intentions. The LETRASIS group is well-intentioned, their criticism is incredibly constructive, our (I'm including myself here this time) reactions are pure and priceless. And the support! The encouragement is neverending!

I've felt braver when it comes to sharing. I've published one of the things I've enjoyed the most in here, as Sin pólvora, pero con tinta, and I also have a queue already for the other projects. 

Catharsis has been humongous, both when it comes to writing and still recent heartbreak. And, I haven't told this to them but LETRASIS is one of the things that are helping me coming back to the writing world for real, to the point I'm going to share my unfinished novel(s) for the first time (I'm dying inside a little, stupid anxiety), and thanks to them and Anny's advice, I even decided to go back to my Master's Degree classes (I feel I'm not going to finish all homework because my mind is in a bad learning state, but the point is that I'm back, bitches!)

This is where I fear I am in a maniac mood, the top of the rollercoaster, because my brain is in such fire I've been trying to to do everything at the same time: the reading, the writing, everything related to the world I'm familiar and that I love since forever. So I really hope it's not! I'm beginning to use my bullet journal properly!

I've had some trouble with the Master's, but talking about LETRASIS, my writing family, makes me not want to talk about that now.

Thank you Priscila, 313, Missael, Karla, and Juan Carlos!

End of Chapter 9.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 8

Alexandra, The Dorky Writer hadn't been able to move for months. For almost a couple of years. She hadn't fallen into a sleeping course, but that would've been so much better. She had lost herself in every way possible. Her handsome wizard boyfriend had left her with no true explanation, she had given up the encounter against the Mighty Thesis; she hurt herself in that thorny forest, she drank her feelings and then let them out to have something to drink again. Her environment was consuming her. 

She didn't understand how, but three angel-like people found her right on time. They took her to a healer, where she liked to keep flowers of all kinds: some wittered, some fully bloomed, but all of them well taken care of. The path to recovery was tricky. Even though new tools were given to her to recover her way again, she kept going back to the forest to see if she could die, if she could recover what she once thought was hers, feeling unworthy and unwanted even though those four helpers always told her she was indeed worthy, someone worth fighting for. She couldn't comprehend. The language they spoke became unnatural and there was no interpreter. There was no other remedy but to give her strength and courage potions. These made her feel sick of herself even more, not because of their effectiveness but because they made her see herself and made her ask herself how she had fallen so down.

So, yeah. My boyfriend, now ex, broke up with me with arguments that, with the passing of the months, seem weaker and weaker. Seems to me he wanted to get rid of me from a long time ago but didn't know how. I'll just say he did it in one of the most cowardly ways possible, the moment I needed him the most. But I don't want to talk about him here, I already have enough with a lot of unsent messages I have for him and all the times I have to talk about it with my therapist and psychiatrist. 

I am being treated now for depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and, to make it more awesome, cyclothymia. I am under medication since December 2019, although the therapies started back in October. I was reluctant to take pills again, it felt like I was going back to a path I had already taken. Also, I didn't mind if I died at all. I wanted it... needed it. I had lost so much: John, my Master's Degree classes, my will.

I cannot say I feel like new now, I still feel so damn bad sometimes, as if I'm going back to the beginning but I'm actually different. The pain for everything is there, every day, not every minute of the day, though. BUT the biggest problem is there when the bad days come: I don't want to get better. This is not just make an effort, Ale, as everyone loves to say, this is about me not wanting to do it. Fortunately, if I can say it, just this month, my psychiatrist has finally found the right medication for me. That process has been so damn difficult! Apparently cyclothymia isn't as easy to identify as bipolar disorder. 

Currently, my mind is right on the top of the roller coaster. I fear this might be a maniac phase. But that's an issue for another chapter.

End of Chapter 8

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 7

Capable: [ˈkāpəb(ə)l]  1. Having the ability, fitness, or quality necessary to do or achieve a specified thing. 2. Able to achieve efficiently whatever one has to do; competent.

The Dorky Writer had already read that definition some time ago. She knew that such adjective wasn't the one that would describe her. She was aware of that, she accepted it. The bad part was that there were some that "believed" in her and this would sometimes lifted her spirits enough to make her believe that achieving things was actually possible. The Dorky Writer thought she could do it. In her way to getting out of the dark, dry path, she realized that all she needed to survive was wrong. The planning was wrong, the map was wrong, the advice she had taken before was wrong. And she was alone. There were no fairies anymore... there were no thorny trees trying to stop her; even they had realized she wasn't worth the effort. The Mighty Thesis had won even before facing it in real life. Alexandra felt disappointed and angry. Yet, this was not surprising.

I had the silly idea that this chapter was going to be way different. I had to take some time. The thesis' protocol needed my full concentration because it was the first time doing something that intense. I read as much as I could, I struggled to get some material, I had big conflicts against myself because I found projects online that looked similar to mine, but at the end I could finish this first 15 page protocol and, even though I wasn't satisfied with it, I felt relieved because I had done it! My ideas were on paper, my classmates were supportive with it, the teacher never said anything wrong about it. All was good.

And then it wasn't.

The second part of the Thesis Seminar started on the first days of September. I knew this was going to be stressful but I was only counting on me arriving late because I started to work on Saturdays again, not that my whole project would be set on fire and die.

Almost a week ago I arrived to class while one of my classmates was explaining her project. I realized I was going to explain just after one more classmate and for the first damn time I didn't feel so bad that I had to talk in a room full of people. I already knew what the problem was, I already knew what I wanted to express in my paper. Again, a couple of my classmates, like in the previous Seminar, looked interested in what I was saying. The teacher got confused. He started asking me questions and I started to get anxious of course. All that I wanted to say, the ways I wanted to do it disappeared. I now realize that I might have answered with things that I actually didn't want to say. In the eyes of everyone, because everyone were watching me, I was wrong. And while the teacher helped one of them to focus on his idea, he didn't do the same for me. I got him too confused apparently. All that time he couldn't stop saying "I still don't see how that could work; I still don't see the problem; I still don't understand."

I couldn't continue with the work that day, which consisted in the hypothesis part. I felt attacked (I know I wasn't but when you're anxious you feel everything is about you, no matter how much you wanna stop it), I felt stupid, vulnerable and unable to flee.

I understand how these papers must be done. I understand where I can be wrong now that I think about the situation again, which leads to tears, unfortunately, but what I can't understand is why previous teachers didn't tell me where I was wrong. Why they let me come to this class if the protocol wasn't correct. And that is related to the disappointment part, of course, the disappointment about myself on one side and the belief from people that love me on the other, telling me I'm capable of doing it when I feel I can't.

My heart and brain are telling me to go to school and quit. But I'm afraid of that too because I can see the face of the school's principal already, telling me to stay and then I see myself staying but not because I want to do it.

I felt better this week, because I know I don't have to go, but I have the feeling next week won't be good at all.

End of Chapter 7.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 6

The Dorky Writer took the path the fairies had suggested, but none of them told her that the bushes would have long and thorny arms that they would try to stop her. One of them grabbed her by the ankle and made her stumble:

"Grab that silly map of yours and look for answers in another damn forest. The way you move, the way you walk suggests you don't even know the final destination. A good explorer would know basic survival skills, but you know nothing." 

The Dorky Writer deserved it, she already knew she was too naïve and immature, but that was a painful reminder... or maybe that the sign she needed to forget about the Mighty Thesis. Yet, how many times hadn't she given up already and how many times she had picked up her books, quills, and ink? 

I have the feeling this will be long and about a lot of things that might not be related with the first part of this chapter. I don't know how many times I wrote and rewrote this and all of those possible chapters were completely different compared to this final result, they were about my music tastes while writing or about my inability for decision making regarding the thesis. And do you know what  made me write in a more 'coherent' way? I'm supposed to be writing something else and I'm prone to procrastinate... I'm starting to see a pattern there and that's not good, no, no, no, no, no.

We've been learning about different types of research in the last month at school. I've felt so lost and overwhelmed with new information and vocabulary, which has made me walk in circles through the dark woods. There's some soft moonlight that manages to illuminate the path, though: The teacher has been giving us some exercises that are related to them, so we can differentiate and understand them better. The first exercise was alright. It was about Grounded Theory and we had to make a comparative table that appeared in the book. I tried to apply the problem I want to write on my thesis, so it wasn't so bad (maybe I'll use that theory!), but then we learned about Biographies and Memoirs as an investigation method as well, and the low confidence I had disappeared. The teacher asked us to explain a problem through a personal perspective; it could've been about someone we knew or about ourselves. My first thought was about explain anxiety or writer's block, something I already have in here (OK, now  I'm suddenly realizing I express better about myself and my issues better in English, what's happening?) 

I couldn't stop thinking about that problem... I still can't... BUT I couldn't write about it so I ended up with this. Curious thing is that I think this could work too! I'm explaining my situation, my issue, using my 'experience.' The thing that could not work would be that they'd need background for this but maybe not for Chapter 2, for example, which explains what I wanted to write about in the first place... CAN YOU READ THE ANXIETY HERE? I'm writing this in my class... I'm anxious, I need help! I can't run away. DAMMIT!! If you can't understand this tiny part, I'm sorry! But I need to vent!

EDIT: Ok. I ended up reading my 'live' writing at class... kinda. My out loud reading is crap. My English pronunciation made it more difficult, and I CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE I DARED TO READ IN ENGLISH! It was the right idea, though. My brain is melting. We've been around 32°-34° C in the last hours and that didn't help. 

I ended up writing about The Dorky Writer Adventures (silliest name ever but the only one that's on my head right now) as the result of previous anxiety transformed into sentences and vague ideas that have meaning at the end. This time was a little different because I'm not making corrections; I'm not changing a thing. I let my anxiety speak and let it as it was: a mess. I know this isn't my best chapter (I'm not saying the others are good), but I decided to share it as a personal experiment, to reread and evaluate myself later, to see how different I am when I write in an organized way and in an anxious one. 

End of Chapter 6.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 5

The Dorky Writer already knew which path to choose, but the old fairies in the woods advised her to take the left side of the fork instead. Both of the paths looked different of course. One of them was full of fruity trees that whispered soft words to her, telling her that the answer could be there, while the other didn't look terrifying but had just some scattered and sad bushes waiting for some attention. That's where the fairies told her to go, but why? She wouldn't have enough food or water to survive.

"There will be hard moments for you, but the further you travel, the easier will be for others to follow. Keep going further, and then more dorky writers like you can pass through both paths with no problem later." 

"That sounds wonderful and everything, but that would let me weak for the moment I face The Mighty Thesis," The Dorky Writer said after she put her notes, some ink and quills in her bag.

"And that's where you'll know if you're worthy to win or not."

I was very afraid to tell a teacher about the idea I had for the thesis, because saying something about it would make it more real. The thing is that way before we discussed about it, another idea came up, an idea I also liked and that I hadn't considered it. So when the real moment to discuss the subject of investigation arrived, I had two ideas instead of one but with no problem to start.

Every thesis is born because of the need to know something or to answer a question related to the subject of investigation, and this need is called a problem. My problem was that that problem wasn't actually clear, of course. I doubt it, but if you read the first chapters of this insanity, I was kinda sure to talk about women's memoirs and how different they are from one to another. Hell, I already had an idea of what to read but I stopped because of my lack of money to get the books (a downfall of not having good libraries here). The thing is that in another class, before taking the first Thesis Seminar, I mentioned something related to fan fiction. I don't really remember how and why I mentioned it, but my teacher said that investigating about that would be very awesome and different because it was related to my specialization, which is Creative Culture. I have to remind you that this teacher, who is the principal of the school too by the way, didn't know about the idea I already had in mind.

So, the weeks went by, I couldn't write a thing in here again but book reviews, another kind of writer's block I suppose, and then the first Seminar arrived. I mentioned that I had two ideas and between the teacher-principal, who was acting as a substitute for that session, and my classmates, advised me to take the fan fiction subject and find a problem, find a reason why I should defend it, because there are a lot of similar works related to comparative texts (women's memoirs in my case) as written final works. 

After that session, ok, why, oh God, why do we have to share these thoughts out loud? My anxiety kicked me out right on my head! my mind was so crowded I had to hide my school notebooks and books under the bed and I better started to clean so I could keep my mind focused on something else. I couldn't even tell my boyfriend or my mom about it, no matter how much I needed to talk about it with anyone because I wasn't really sure what was going on. Had I really chosen an unexplored and almost empty path? I know it's not completely empty, I mean, there are a lot of trails inside that are full of wonderful written fics but I'm going to go beyond that. And I'm more than scared.

This work has changed and it has changed completely... and I haven't actually really started! I think I have a tiny question that demands to be answered, but it won't become real until I talk with the actual teacher of the Seminar. Until then...

End of Chapter 5.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 4

Alexandra, The Dorky Writer, thought this time she'd succeed with the delivery of her tasks on time and in perfect conditions, but she was wrong -what a shock. She had a lot of enemies, but this time she didn't face a writer's block but drowsiness. It was like fighting to stay awake against the curse that was cast on the Sleeping Beauty. The problem was that she was no Beauty and there was no member of a royal family near to help her waking up, so... double trouble.

The Dorky Writer was defeated, but it was a sleeping curse and not a death one, so she woke up years later, drank a potion, and then stayed awake for almost 24 hours... which wasn't so good either.

I decided to stop drinking coffee months ago because caffeine makes me more anxious than normal, but yesterday... damn. I had to stop at a convenience store and buy one of those drinks that give you energy. I didn't take the one that has taurine or similar in them but the one that only has caffeine. I have to admit that I felt nervous about it, but it was that or having a car accident on my way to the other place where I work.

I had been trying to read for my homework in the last days and had been failing miserably. I've been tired and in a sad mood, which doesn't help. Anyway, I drank that thing, I didn't have any anxious episode, which was more than perfect, and I could continue with my daily work. But when I got home I had problems again. I grabbed the ebook and tried to reread all I had previously "read", I felt I was going to sleep on it and then BOOM. That beverage made its effect way later and I took advantage of it, I started to read the way I like, fast and making important notes. I felt I was finally going to deliver a good paper, because the last one had been crap. And then... "the following pages aren't available due to copyright." WHAT WAS I EXPECTING? 

I was reading it from the Google Books page. I'd never read a book from there, but one of my classmates said almost the entire book was available, so I decided to give it a shoot instead of looking for it online to order it and wait a lot to get it. I looked for it in a PDF format, on another site, nothing. My last resort was buying the e-book, but my debit card wasn't accepted for a reason I still don't understand. So... no completed homework. It's terrible, because I'm going to go to class and feel like an irresponsible student, even if it wasn't completely my fault... or maybe it is, I don't know. What made me real angry was that I was there, with no book anymore... and completely awake.

I think I felt asleep around 3 am. At least I slept wonderfully because I didn't have to go to work the next day.

The Dorky Writer never drank that potion again.

End of Chapter 4.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 3

I've discovered a very funny thing: writing inspiration strikes when I need to do homework. And, if I really think about it, I used to do that at the University... I could be doing a translation exercise and BOOM! Ale had to write. And she did! Mostly in the last pages of her notebook, and rarely on a second Word document.

So, in what am I thinking about now?

The Dorky Writer had a job: she was also a Jedi Master [insert disc scratch]. OK, OK, not a Jedi Master, but still a teacher. An English teacher, if I want to be more specific. A pretty average one. Nothing special. Anyway... After months, and months, and months of wanting to go to a dragon's hoard, maybe not to steal some money but to politely ask for a loan, the Dorky Writer could finally get paid and feel some silver coins in her pocket. Her first stop? THE BOOK SHOP [insert another annoying disc scratch]. OK, I didn't go there, I had to pay school, and gas, BUT the idea of going is still there. 

Some months ago, I made a TBR list featuring female writers. But I can't lie: I know I still need to narrow my idea for The Mighty Thesis. Should I compare them according to their age? Should I go through a political path? An educational one? What about feminism? Or cultural differences? THE HELL I KNOW! But I think I've selected a good bunch for either case:

• Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir (born in France, 1908)
• Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (born in Germany, 1929)
• Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (born in Iran, 1948)
• Geisha, A Life by Mineko Iwasaki (born in Japan, 1949)
• Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang (born in China, 1952)
• Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir (born in Morocco, 1953)  
• Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (born in UK, 1955) 
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (born in Iran, 1969)
• First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung (born in Cambodia, 1970)
• Daring to Drive by Manal al-Sharif (born in Saudi Arabia, 1979) 
• I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai (born in Pakistan, 1997) 

With the exception of Beard's book, all of these are memoirs (the ones in bold are the only ones I've read, but definitely need to visit again). IMPORTANT NOTE:

I have the idea that when I finish with another two books, I'll get closer to what I want. And I know it seems I hadn't started at all, but I realized something: I started to read Amy Poehler's Yes, Please, and even though her story is interesting and funny (I mean, have you ever seen Parks and Recreation? That woman is fun indeed!), getting to know how an artist of any category became a celebrity isn't what I want to write about.

POINT FOR THE DORKY WRITER! 

It will depend of its availability, but I feel I need to read Women & Power first. It's the only one that has historical references and it might even mention some other women's stories that can help. 

End of Chapter 3.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 2

This entry was originally posted on my Goodreads blog on February 2nd.

One evening, the Dorky Writer went to a book presentation of a very good friend of hers, The Dragon Writer. Apart from being absolutely proud of seeing her friend flying up to reach out the stars and come back with not one but two of them, she couldn't help herself to feel nostalgic about writing.

Unfortunately, that nostalgia transformed into a heavy, yet invisible monster: Anxiety.

Some years ago, when I was in high school, one of my teachers asked my class to write a story based on the insecurity the city had in that time. I wrote about a girl that had lost her father because of a confrontation between a drug cartel and police. Very cheesy, very Mexican soap opera.

But the teacher loved it and I got a 100 for that month. He even believed that that story had happened to me, but my dad still lives, and breathes, and works... and not as a policeman.

The thing is that that encouraged me a lot when he asked us again to write another thing. I dared and I wrote an even more stupid thing: a play. He didn't like it, by the way. I don't even remember exactly what the story was about, but I do remember the characters' names because they haunted me long enough to the point I decided to write an original story with them. The story had a lot of changes and turns throughout the years. It started as a contemporary young adult story and at the end it became a fantasy one. And the characters' names? Their personality? Still there.

I wrote snippets of that story, edited them, read, rewrote, for around 7 years. It all ended, as a cataclysm though, when I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix. I discovered that the idea that I thought was original actually had some similar parts in that magnificent show. I couldn't continue. For God's sake! I'd even divided my book series (of course it was a book series) in 5 parts! Water, Earth, Fire, Air, and a still-not-named-book. I thought if someone read it sometime, they would accuse me of plagiarism or would tell me that the story, which didn't have an Aang or a Toph precisely there, wasn't original.

Time passed and I started to rewrite for the 1,000,000,000th time. I had to get rid of a lot of things that reminded me of ATLA. And the story changed completely again. This time, the story was actually getting somewhere and I didn't even think about it as a book series, just a single story, so that was good. The bad part is that it just started to happen in my head and couldn't reach a piece of paper, a Scrivener or Word document.

BOOM: WRITER'S BLOCK.

And it hasn't really left my side.

You could say: "Eh, YOU'RE WRITTING NOW!" But I'm a very stubborn person, so I would say: "I'm not writing what I really want and need to."

All of these memories collided and I ended up having a crisis. I told my boyfriend about this and he gave me very good reasons why I could have this problem: "You're holding down, basically, a full time job, going to school yourself, taking care of the house... none of that is gonna be inspirational, so is not gonna flow and you're not gonna have anything to write because you're busy thinking about the other things you do in life." The thing is that, ok, I do have to worry about all of that now, but back then? And then, of course, he said: "You're one of the most self-critical people I've ever met in my life." Good thing you don't live with me yet, handsome ;)

I didn't take that as bad criticism. It was actually a reminder of what a therapist told me years ago. I NEED TO GET MY SH*T TOGETHER AND DO NOT AIM FOR PERFECTION.

"Don't write a book, write effectively a comic but without the pictures. Write other things and just get your creative juices flowing from something else and maybe that will help you with what you actually want to write about," said the handsome wizard. Of course I'm having a handsome wizard as a boyfriend instead of a prince! Once a Potterhead, forever a Potterhead.

Well, I'm not writing a comic, but I've come back to a blog. Y A Y !

And now I need to stop procrastinating and do my homework.

End of Chapter 2.

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Alexandra, The Dorky Writer - Chapter 1

This entry was originally posted on my Goodreads blog on January 19th.

Hey, everyone! I normally don't post ANYTHING here, but that's something I intend to change because I don't want to be alone in this, because the Goodreads community seems to be extraordinary, and because it's time for my social anxiety to get out of the way... for now... I don't know how much this is gonna last, to be completely honest! (I have the feeling no one's gonna read this, so this might work as a diary).

Let me tell you a sad story:

Once upon a time, this dorky and amateur writer collided with the biggest writer's block in existence, so in a way to defeat this ferocious evil, she decided to return to school and get a Master's Degree in Writing Culture. This ferocious evil, whose name she's still searching, proved to be the biggest challenge, academically speaking, for this angsty translator, and even though she faced great monsters, she was acceptably victorious and started to write a tiny bit again, nothing extraordinary, but enough to keep her sane...

But no one had prepared her at all for the biggest obstacle of all: The Mighty Thesis.

Obviously the story hasn't reached its end.

So, the real adventure begins. Even though I can't take the thesis seminars yet, I need to dive in and read a lot. The thesis' main route right now is the study of women's memoirs and their differences in different cultures (The Complete Persepolis inspired me). The problem is that I don't know what would be good to read next, so if you are reading, by any chance, and know about a good memoir, please recommend it to me and I'll give it a look at its Goodreads page and users' comments too!

End of Chapter 1.

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