Success

I tried to define success, in the days that have ensued since my confidence that I would be able to procure a definition for the admiring public. However, in the days that have ensued, it has become entirely clear to me that it is impossible for anybody, let alone me, to define success. You see, success as it really should be is an entirely personal affair, corresponding only to an individual’s personal and professional needs; it is related in no pure form to culture beyond the fact that some individuals achieve it and that individuals make up a culture. In fact, I will, although in no way promoting the act of self-promotion, point out the use of the word “some” in the previous sentence: I could have said, reasonably, within the bounds of my conception, that every individual achieves success, because there is always someone striving towards that way of life; because there is no actual originality in life, it would be possible to say “every individual achieves success” without lying. However, it would not be true to my sense of the word to say that every individual achieves success, because success is the most personal thing in the world. Success holds within it the promise of the end result, the hope for the achieving, and all the failures and knowledge acquired in the time when the individual strived for success. I cannot define success; I cannot reasonably apply the rule of my own life onto the life of another. I can measure for myself what I think success is, but another person looking at my definition is likely to say, “Poppycock, I’ll settle for nothing less than the presidency.” Success is a term that must be defined in the moment of success, not in the dusty archives of a library dictionary: The book is shut, and success ends.

Untitled

Once again, incredibly rough stuff--and very bad working practices, to post something like this! But I didn't want whoever does read this to think I've been unproductive.

Jienne took refuge in the warm scent of stagnant air, lying dormant for the days she had been away; undisturbed by the outside air that always destroyed this quiet equilibrium the piles of linen created. From her windows, she could see the murky blue of the skyline, which reminded her of the difference between the harsh blue of the country skies. Over the years, she had begun to appreciate the paler blue, which reached an almost golden quality on particularly smoggy days; in the days of her youth when she had listened to defiance and found meaningful poetry in everything, the blue sky over uninterrupted highways brought tears to her eyes. She had imagined, then, the creativity of routine that the daily drums might produce; like driving a car, she found that it was less interesting when done properly, and, several years after breaking out on her own, contracted a bad case of the Non-deviated, Sterile Atmosphere of Culture. It was cured, at length, by a feigned bought of physical illness—not difficult, in fact, since the lethargy of her disillusionment was heavy and noxious enough to induce symptoms of a far more dangerous disease to the visage of anyone—which allowed her to convalesce alone, at home, among the misfounded order of the passing regime of Culture. She closed her eyes and discovered that, inside the ten-minute breakfasting, two-minute, blank-minded meditations, and neatly regimented dietary plans, she liked herself. Specifically, she discovered that there is no such thing as mindless meditation.

So the patient was freed of the cancerous disease which inflicts Society. When her illness was up, she briefly considered staying out the year in the job she was working as a library aide, but the menace of the malaise was too persistent for her to do much more than hand in a letter of notice to her supervisor, a tall old lady whose face was ridged in soft, unchangeable lines carved by years inside the belly of the Beast. Her name was Mrs. Whiling. Jienne came in—and by this time, there was very little left of Jienne’s reason, which had been eaten away by her long-suppressed desire to live life visibly—and Mrs. Whiling looked at her for a moment, and took her letter. Jienne was relieved and surprised that there had not been more fuss and carrying-on, but Mrs. Whiling stopped her on her way out, because years before, she too had been a young woman and had harbored the generational desire that lives of in the lives of the descendents to make herself known, to live as liberatingly as order had promised to be in the early days of her youth. Mrs. Whiling had been, in the days of her youth, a Good Girl, and she had gone along with her reputation because she saw the desirability in being two-faced and in having a shell of irony against herself, and she had never been able to break away from her shell. She had tried, years ago, decades ago, in the water-damaged halls of the apartment where she had lived an ordered life in quiet sophisticated grey suits with a small lady-like watch and index cards of recipes, and one day she had looked at herself in the mirror and screamed—inwardly. That part of her sat down with a bump and now lived at the level of the knees of the current Mrs. Whiling; Mrs. Whiling, who had been, obliviously, though the childhoods of her son and her daughter (who grew up to fit perfectly into the shells they created for themselves after very little initial resistance on the behalf of the value of the treasure they were entailing) and the death of a husband and fifty years of work at the library, knew that living to Society and Culture were the easiest and the most practical and the best thing to do. So she stopped Jienne for a moment and felt just a moment’s pang in the reflection of herself that was passing before her; she wondered, in that instant, if she was dying, for her life was surely passing before her eyes. And then Jienne was freed from the pragmatic pull of the life that Mrs. Whiling had lived herself, since Jienne looked into Mrs. Whiling’s eyes and saw there the product of Society and Culture.
Jienne walked into the street and realized that the important thing is not how the story is told.
It was fairly easy for Jienne, in the Metropolis where she lived, to get a job. She looked around on the internet, did some poking, some phone calling, some looking up addresses in the yellow pages, and some walking, since her money was wearing thin and becoming your own person takes money, and then she was hired by an online journal, to whom she submitted Fiction and Satire whenever she wrote it. The relationship worked out well. For a great while, she was breathing out a sigh of happiness at her timely escape, but as long as she was sighing she was also on edge because the relief meant she was thinking about how great it was to get out of it all, and how horrible it would be to get back in it. The people in the Organization like Jienne’s writing, and she was paid enough for each story that she was all right, although she lived frugally. She got into a relationship with N____, who rode a motorbike and didn’t drink. N____ had been, many years ago, a crab fisherman in the Bering Strait, and for a while had lived on a houseboat, but when a new occupation had come around in the form of a motorbike, he had ridden his new form of transportation halfway across the country and stopped, penniless, in the Metropolis. It was there he had lived for the past two years, during which time he had gotten a job at a bakery. He had risen in position there, and, in between long cold rides on his motorbike, he worked with vats of bubbling, rising bread dough and massive trays of cakes sliding into the cavernous mouths of the red-hot ovens that lined the back wall of the back room and pervaded the air in the bakery with the scent of the things within. N____ came home with occasional burns, smelling like yeast and sugar. Fortunately for N____, his vast appetite for the things he baked—and bought, and bought home, and ate in the kitchen with Jienne—was matched by a fast metabolism and a lenient boss who sent him home now and again after a strenuous couple of days with a steaming paper bag on whose sides the insidious smell of the cakes it contained was marked permanently.


Some months after Jienne became newly liberated, she was walking home in the city dusk, past the playground by the school—she stopped a moment by the gate, gazing over the barren fields of abandoned dreams, and realized there were two young children playing there, twirling enthusiastically around the brightly-colored jungle-gym bars, pretending to be butterflies and princesses and space aliens—and past the library, past the big house on the corner which was home to a rambunctious, sprawling, utopian group who stayed up until the wee hours playing music until their respectable neighbors came banging on their doors in nightclothes. It was November; her coat collar was pulled up around her face, and the wind was numbing her nose. Her fingers were just warm enough to feel the bite of the handles of the plastic bags of groceries. Upon reaching home (which was an achievement realized after a prolonged fumble with clumsy fingers and the heavy felt coat pockets whose treasure, the house key, was yielded only reluctantly,) Jienne sat down at the kitchen counter for a moment to catch her breath.
The apartment was cozy after the wind of the outside, the close walls’ ambiance snug rather than claustrophobic for once. Jienne sat in silence undisturbed until her cell phone rang; from the tone, a rapid and complex series of electronic beeps aligned into the tune of “American Pie,” she could tell it was N____, and she hastily answered it.

“Hello?”

It was N____, of course, and they talked for just a moment. He said to forgive him, he’d be home in about an hour, and he loved her; she said okay and that she loved him too. The phone snapped shut and the line died. It was five o’clock. Jienne unpacked the vegetables—broccoli, carrots, mushrooms, scallions, and red peppers—and the chicken, chunks of ice sliding silently off the plastic wrapped against the soft pink meat on the counter. A can of oyster sauce followed. Jienne lamented briefly the deficit in their kitchen supplies that necessitated a finger-breaking trip to the grocery store for even the simplest recipe. At least there were frying pans, one of which Jienne placed carefully on a burner. Some time later, little browning pieces of chicken were muttering away in the pan, bathed in a puddle of oil. A pot full of Chinese noodles lurked behind the chicken like the stealthy killer in a murder mystery. It was nearly six when Jienne served the Chinese chicken up onto two of the five mismatched plates she owned, set them beside her two mismatched mugs—full of ginger ale—and lit two mismatched purple candles, one of which was a gift from a friend’s mother and one of which Jienne had found, half-burned and still tall, in the dumpster behind the church beside the grocery store. She sat down to wait for N____ with a New Yorker, and became entranced in a lengthy article extolling the virtues of the virtual world. inoculated from the world as she was, she would not have noticed that time was passing if her stomach had not begun protesting over the lengthy walk from the grocery store and the tantalizing smell of the Chinese chicken, which sat uneaten by the mugs of ginger ale; once, however, she became aware of the gradual darkening of the sky outside the window beside her which had turned the evening from dark grey to dark navy, and her first thought was of N____. She looked at the clock opposite the chair where she was sitting; it read A Quarter to Seven and No N_____.

Jienne’s insides were cold; she took out her cell phone again and called N____. His cell phone rang insistently for almost a minute until there was a click and his voice greeted her ears, warm and comforting as a draft of chicken noodle soup until she realized that it was the eager, upbeat strains of his answering machine: “Hi, you’ve reached N_____’s cell phone. I’m not available right now, so please leave a message.” She was barely able to force out her inquiry over the bubble of surprise that rose in her throat, a request for him to call her as soon as he could, and then she hung up. She waited half an hour; the chicken lying on its bed of noodles with its attendant vegetables grew dry and, when she tried to eat a bit, tasteless; she threw the chicken away. Its existence disgusted and scared her. She longed to simply go to sleep, and thought for a minute of going to bed, of piling on the covers and turning out the lights in the darkening night, but she realized that the tension would be too great; besides, she had to know what was happening, and becoming unconscious would not make her more aware, would not tell her where N____ was and why he had not returned home.

It was midnight when the shrill call of the doorbell reverberated around Jienne’s head. It took her sleep-befuddled mind a moment to realize what it was and how she should respond to it, but finally she stumbled out of the living room towards the door; her hand gripped the handle with terrifying clarity, and she opened the door to reveal two men in police uniforms. “Ms. Duchene?”

“Hello? What…” They stepped past the door she held open, and something must have been working in her brain subconsciously, because, through no effort of her own, she closed the door. She was numb now, and blinked a couple times, restoring herself to the cognitive world. She opened her mouth again to ask what was going on, but the shorter policeman was already explaining.

“We’ve found the remains of one N_____ Venegas on, and the only calls to his cell phone in the last month have been from you.”

“N____? What happened to him?”

The policemen shuffled their feet, as though whatever had happened was their personal fault.
“He’s in the morgue, ma’am; it appears that he was assaulted sometime around five thirty that evening, possibly by multiple people, in an alley off North Water Street. The cause of death has been identified as a handgun.”

The first emotion Jienne felt was anger. “And you just now got around to telling me? It’s been nearly seven hours! What have you been doing since then?” She felt a fresh wave of fury at their impotence. “And…and do you know who did it?”

The policemen looked down. “No, ma’am, I’m afraid we don’t.”


In Jienne’s mind, there was no question that she would move immediately, although her landlord, a nervous, plump, middle-aged man who seemed to have no idea as to how to handle the recently bereaved, was not so happy. Nevertheless, Jienne, in her newly numb state of mind, battled her way out with the backseat of her brother’s station wagon packed tight with the cardboard boxes in which she had packed all of her things, a job that took her barely two days, since in her haste to quit the city she worked from early in the morning until late at night, powered by grief and the desire to cut her losses; she ate up the rest of the food she had, and didn’t leave the house until her brother pulled into the driveway and stood in the doorway hesitantly watching her manic energy filling the rooms of the small apartment. They stopped by N____’s funeral, held in an old stone chapel on the edge of the city; neat planning had Jienne leaving the town the day her love was interred there forever. As they pulled out of the parking lot still filled with the rattle-bang cars of the friends N_____ had made during his time in the city, the strains of an ironically happy tune ran through Jienne’s mind, and she nearly broke down and cried. She thought about what wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t become her own person: she wouldn’t have met N____; maybe, even, the course of Fate would have been altered enough that, in not meeting N____, she would have preserved his life. Distracted for a moment, she considered that possibility and decided she couldn’t tell which would have been worse. In the end, she decided that the path of Fate is unalterable, so really it wasn’t her fault: she was just redeeming a preset path, which brought up the question: was she really her own person if all she did was fulfill fate?

Jienne moved farther across the country this time, making her way to the farthest North-West corner of the United States, nearly Canada. She was entirely unsure of what she would do from there; the soles of her feet itched constantly, pointing her further away from wherever she was whenever she stopped. In this state, therefore, Jienne came to Mrs. Robinson’s boardinghouse: a tall house on the edge of town that looked like it hadn’t had much outside business in the past few years, although from the plaque by the front door she could see that it had endured a hundred years on its bluff above the sea where the sky was nearly always an indeterminate grey and the sea provided most of the color and sound. The first time Jienne recognized the boardinghouse as home was the day when she came back to it—opening the door to the bedroom Mrs. Robinson had assigned to her, the smell of the room registered unconsciously as Home, and she felt as comforted as she had when, as a young girl, she had hidden herself away in the piles of linen in the upstairs closet of her childhood home—after a day in the town, sitting in the coffeehouse that she used as her base of operation because it had the free wireless that allowed her to send her work off to the website that still provided for her room and board in its paychecks, which arrived in her bank account on a monthly basis. Eventually, though, her reserves of money dwindling, Jienne was forced to take a job—at the coffeehouse, which seemed appropriate—to supplement her income.

Working at the coffeehouse was comforting insofar as it provided hours of physical labor that took her mind off everything except the best way to load dishes into the industrial-size dishwasher and the total on the bill of the next customer; on the other hand, she was surrounded daily by the smells N___ had brought home on a regular basis. Every now and then, they struck her with fresh potency, but she was relieved, two months into the job, to realize that the impact wasn’t as strong; she was able to go weeks without going out the back door, on break, to cry. Soon she became close to a young man who worked her shift (which was to say, nearly all the time; it was remarkable to her that she was able to keep up both of her jobs, although, working so many hours she rarely had time to reflect on the day’s events before she fell asleep in Mrs. Robinson’s boarding house, this fact rarely had time to sink in) and one evening in February, a week after Valentine’s day, he invited her to the ice cream parlor, which was just down the street from the coffeehouse. After work on that night, they got into similarly thick jackets designed for the cold of almost-Canada in winter and walked down the icy sidewalk, slowly and, at first, solemnly; but soon they were talking more and more about what had brought them to that moment in time. Over coconut ice cream they discussed fate and the intricacies of working at the coffeehouse; their exchanges over the affairs of their coworkers verged into the dubious realm of Gossip, but they were both grateful for the innocuous human contact: Ben, as he was called, was living in isolation with a couple of nocturnal roommates at the other end of town from where Jienne ate, quietly and demurely, dinner with Mrs. Robinson, night after night, which was a good deal, since Mrs. Robinson was a good cook, but not very interesting, since neither she or Mrs. Robinson was very apt at making small talk. The young woman at the counter—a high-school student fretting over lost study time for a Physics test the next day—was forced to turn them out onto the sidewalk (where she joined them for just a moment after a couple minutes before getting into her Volvo, the last one in the parking lot) at midnight. Jienne, in a moment of clarity, realized that she hadn’t thought about N____ all day and that it was too late for her to return to Mrs. Robinson’s house without disrupting the lady’s sleep. She inquired if coming to Ben’s apartment was a viable option; it was, and, although the night was spent in unbroken chastity, a romance was in the making, a romance that would tempt Jienne from the erstwhile side of Mrs. Robinson early in March under the duress of walking halfway across the admittedly small town to work and then to Ben’s house and, from there, back to Mrs. Robinson’s for a change of clothes and a shower.

Ben was five years younger than Jienne; in the subsequent fall, he would leave her and the coffeehouse and the only corner of the world he’d ever called home and go to Dartmouth. This was declared early on in the relationship—in fact, several weeks before he received a thick letter from New Hampshire inviting him to go there, he was telling Jienne that in exactly eight months and ten days he would leave her (forever, perhaps, but he didn’t say that.) Jienne, who was at that moment 24, decided to make the most of their time together. As the snow began melting in April, they trod around the issue; in fact, they largely ignored it. They were, their coworkers remarked, very well behaved at work; since many of their coworkers were female students at the local high school from which Ben had graduated the previous June, there was a certain amount of bite to their comments.

Rocks

There was something about the evening air, moist from the rain that had drenched the area earlier in the afternoon, that made Natasha feel like stopping the car. The CD faded to a stop, and Natasha was left in silence by the shore of a little lake—more of a pond, really. The beach was really very rocky; from the size of the tiny parking lot in which Natasha was now wedged it was pretty apparent that it was not a popular destination. Even after the clearing of the rain, there was nobody there. Natasha opened her door, startled at the noise it produced, and stepped out onto the sand. She crossed the grass and sat down on one of the rocks.

The sky was the color of the grey primer that had overtaken Natasha’s afternoons. It had started out innocently enough, another Project by her husband—once completed it would probably sell for hundreds of dollars. Vast, billowing wooden shapes had begun congregating around the house, and eventually they were swathed in buckets and buckets of the grey primer that Greg brought home almost every day. Natasha had not been happy when the structures began moving into the house, but when she had gone to visit her sister (alone, since Greg was too busy wielding his roller) and returned to find that the Shapes had invaded the bedroom in her absence, she returned to the car.

She had thought she’d known, five years ago when she had married Greg, what she was getting into: when they had first met he had been working constantly on a series of telescoping green giraffes, except for the evenings he spent with her. Since then, however, Greg’s sculptures had burst onto the popular art scene and he became obsessed, always out in the garage with the tools of his trade, which he arrayed on an immense workbench surrounded by samples and shavings of differently colored wood: his chisels and the small chainsaw he used for particularly monolithic projects, like this one was turning out to be. That Greg would have even considered putting his sculptures in the bedroom was the very last straw.

The rocks reminded her of the time they had gone hiking, some six years ago now. Although that day could not have been more different than this day, the rocks had the same even coolness as they did today, although they weren’t as wet. At the summit, they had eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The sky was a clear hard blue and the sun shone down. Remembering happier times brought tears to Natasha’s eyes for the first time in years. For the first time that day, she thought about getting back in the car and turning around. She wavered for a moment, weighing the virtues of the past against the disadvantages of the present. The disadvantages of the present won out; she got back into the car, angrier than she had been before.

I thought I'd post the rough drafts of some things I've been working on before I go away.

Peanut Butter

The last thing Orrin Openmeyer bought in his lifetime was a jar of peanut butter. It was an 18-ounce jar of organic extra-chunky salted, so maybe his death—crossing between the barely visible white paint lines on his way back from the store, an old green Ford had plowed through his neatly arrayed body—was justified. Still, his death, like many things he had done, launched a wave of public wonder at the Openmeyers, and an investigation into the affairs of the road agent, whose job it was to keep the crosswalks of sunny Burgandese in top condition. Maybe, his friends mused, if the crosswalk had been more clearly marked, the car would have seen it and stopped. However, the driver of the car was a notably unstable local tough guy who might have committed the accident on purpose. A trial was scheduled for July.

It was somewhat ironic to Orrin Openmeyer’s family and close friends that a jar of peanut butter, bought for sandwiches for the lunch his eleven-year son would eat the next day at his exclusive soccer camp, had been his last purchase; that Openmeyer, a high-profile stock trader and notoriously not a family man, should die in the act of purchasing something so petty, so familiar, as a jar of peanut butter was so uncharacteristic. Indeed, his parents noted, Orrin had never really been “at home” unless he was at work.

He was a restless child until he was allowed to go to school; he arranged the toys on his shelves neatly to one side when he was nearly eighteen months old, preferring instead to flip the pages of an upside-down volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His parents noted an especial abundance of wear on page 252 of the eighth volume, and, when his choice of career was made, wondered if it had been a premonition, a foreshadowing of what was to come. In any event, young Openmeyer was proficient in school. It was not so much that he was brilliant as that he was diligent, but, by the time graduation rolled around, he was first in his class. His valediction was short and to the point; it wished his classmates well on the paths they chose to follow. He attended university; once again, he graduated first in his class. It was generally known among his peers that Openmeyer was too focused to have time for lady friends, and in fact he never even joined a fraternity. The salutatorian, a jovial, stout, brilliant young woman whose major was marine studies, was a bit put off by Orrin, and was held as honorary valedictorian by the majority of their classmates, who were more often graced by her company.

Orrin Openmeyer surprised many when he got married, seven years after graduating and working his way up the hierarchy of stock traders. The ceremony was brief and formal, little more than a meeting of family in the town clerk’s office. He and his wife settled down in a rich part of town, and lived indulgently but not flagrantly. The community was shocked once again to find that Openmeyer spent just as many long overtime hours at his downtown office after he got married as before, but two years after—and one before his promotion—his marriage, his wife had a son, whom they named Oscar. There was little question in Orrin’s mind that he loved his son deeply, but the rest of the town wasn’t sure. Although they were the spitting image of each other, there was little sign of affection between the young son and the father. That Orrin’s final act would be in performing a service, however slight, for his son, was the subject of discussion in the town for about a year. And then, like the paint of the fateful crosswalk barely visible on the steaming hot pavement the hot June day, the public memory began to fade away, until Orrin Openmeyer became just another businessman in the town, successful, with a wife and a young son.

No Man's Woman

This is going to be a non-fiction entry.

I was thinking about why my Theme Song (No Man’s Woman, by Sinéad O’Connor) is my Theme Song. The song deals with the narrator’s desire not to be “no man’s woman,” and in the end she makes a reference to Jimi Hendrix and it ends up being an allusion to how music is helpful. You would think, from listening to the song, that I have had really bad experiences with romance. But this is really not true at all. I do have a boyfriend, but he’s one of the nicest people I know and one of the least domineering.

Now, writing this essay has made me think about what else I might like about the song’s message (I know what I like about the music itself.) Writing this essay, in such tight constraints, about something I don’t want to write about, doesn’t give the feeling I love in writing. When I write, I want my writing to express how I feel, and, in general, writing makes me feel like I have flair. Like this picture, but personified. My mental image is of someone—not that I particularly like dancing, but it’s a good image— dancing a flamenco. In writing, I wouldn’t say “I’m able to express myself,” because that’s not the point. Expression is secondary. The important thing is that I get that feeling of independence.

This essay, coming back to the point, is as restrictive as anything I’ve ever had to write before. It makes me long for English 9 again. There were several virtues of that class compared to this essay: One, if the prompt wasn’t perfect, it was too lenient, too…easy. That allowed me to expand; for instance, there was never a really well-set word-limit, like 800 words. So we can conclude that I’m being lazy. Two, there is a difference in arguing for your piece in a public school system with a teacher you actually know and arguing for it in a course your parents are paying for through the nose with a teacher you don’t actually know very much at all. English 9 granted me, even in my least favorite papers, significant leeway.

So how does this come back to No Man’s Woman by Sinéad O’Connor? Well, I decided, in the course of my realization that I don’t like this essay because it’s too restrictive, that this song is my Theme Song because it represents Freedom and Independence.

Now you know why I don’t usually write non-fiction.

Working Up to the Send Button: A Rant

While we are on the subject of ranting (those of you who are reading online will need some background: I have been writing a very acidic rant about my writing course this summer, but it’s too biased to be really suitable for anyone to read without taking away the entire substance of the thing.) I should like to express my feelings on emailing.

Communication is a very daunting task for me. In real life, this is understandable, since I have a very quiet voice and I am very shy. However, it takes watching me work up to hitting the send button on a casual email to realize how at home I actually am in conversation. I think this is because, when face to face with someone, you can use facial posture and expressions to show exactly how you feel. Furthermore, sometimes you don’t even have to talk at all—you can shrug, or nod your head yes or no. This sometimes causes amusement among the adults who watch me, but that’s all right. I can live with people realizing I’m shy. People realizing I am shy is a good thing, because it proves how brave I am.

Now, the reason this topic comes up is that I just emailed two people, both about as supportive as you can get without being really personally close. One is my music teacher, one is a past music teacher. Anyone else would dash off the two-line emails I just wrote and hit the Send button without thinking twice about it. I can’t do that. I couldn’t even do that if I just thought twice. I think I thought about twelve times about hitting the Send button, but I could be wrong. It was a scary thing for me; by the time the little emails had left the nest of Juno for the sky of cyberspace, my palms were so sweaty it was difficult to believe I was actually capable of handling a mouse at all.

It’s a weird thing. Writing as a form of communication for me has always been—still is—akin to the experiences of those people who are clumsy on land, but who, when they slip into the water, are as graceful as the fishes. Writing has always been effortless, or relatively so. But making something as casual as a two-line email permanent, communicating with such little effort that it's easy to misword your thoughts and end up with a result opposite of the intended, that's scary.

Is there a redeeming feature to my fear of communication? I suppose you could say that; perhaps, since words are so difficult for me to send out into the atmosphere, I think proportionally harder about them than do other people. But I don’t think this is true. You see, although I take longer to write and send my email, a lot of that time is taken up with worrying about how the email will be received and working myself up to hit the Send button. I think longer, but not necessarily harder, about my emailing. I think that my fear of emailing is just a fear of emailing, and that I will have to work over it in time.