Authors, not books.

There is nothing like a good book, I will agree. However, when you find an author you love, it is like hitting this gold mind of stories you are bound to love. When I was a kid, I hated reading. I used to make my mother read to me for as long as I can remember, until I was given  a Lurlene McDaniel book. For those of you who don't know, Lurlene McDaniel writes young adult novels about teenagers with medical conditions. I averaged one of her books almost every other day for a while, and could not get enough of her stories, until I chipped away at her entire collection.  I was so intrigued by her characters and their situations I honestly believed I would become a doctor.

Then I came across Robin Jones Gunn, Francine Rivers, Ted Dekker, Philippa Gregory, and on down the line. I gobbled up each and every single last one of their books. Typically because they had a series, and by the time the series was devoured I was in the habit and craving more. There are a few authors I've had the pleasure of reading whose books have impacted me, yet I've never braved more than one or two. When I was in Ecuador, I happened to read books by a few authors that I am just now beginning to read more of their other works. Ironic? Perhaps.

Sylvia Plath is one of those authors. I bought her novel "The Bell Jar" from Urban Outfitters in Birmingham before I left for Guayaquil. It sounded interesting, and unique, and sort of hipster as portrayed by the summary on the back. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Sylvia Plath, she is a phenomenal poet and author from the 1930's. I have pages of her quotes scribbled down, as I often feel as if she could narrate my life. Sylvia suffered from depression, and tragically killed herself at age 30. She left behind some incredible stories that I feel blessed to have known. I am sure you will see her quotes often amidst my entries. Until then, let me start you off with a few that relate to me:

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."

Here's another I love:

"I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then comes back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it's the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.."

One last one, and this one I believe really relates to me and my story...

"Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors, and soldiers, barroom regulars-- to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--- all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night..."

 I could not have said the previous better myself. Oh the woes of being a woman! The truth of the matter is, I really was not safe in Ecuador after a while. Not just because I was a female, but a "gringa," a blonde-haired, blue eyed girl from the United States in a port city without a lot of international tourism-- because it's not the safest place for people like me. I realized this while I was there after a few months, if not before. Yet I was numb to my fear, and feeling like I couldn't leave these already abandoned girls in my orphanage, and everyone telling me to go home caused me to want to stay even more.

At the same time, I must defend Guayaquil. It is a beautiful place, and most people really, honestly, and truly mean well. They just want to meet you, they appreciate your work, they want to stare at you or touch you. I never felt that my life was endangered. No, just my things. However, I hope that people will learn from my mistakes. I'll let you decide just what those mistakes were, as I am still trying to decipher the good from the bad.

Life can be a funny thing. I went on this insane trip and lived a life I'd never imagined and SURVIVED. What do you do? You write about it on a blog and let the world know, or just let it sit there and forget. So here I am, trying to piece it together as I create each post, sifting through what I have and trying to make something of it. If for nothing else, this may just be my therapy.

Because I love her works, and I have nothing to lose, I have decided to follow Sylvia Plath's advice when she said,

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy is self doubt."

I wrote about my life then, and I am sharing it with you now. This blog is my improvisation, and I am learning to use my imagination. The self doubt part is the hardest to kick. But here I am, exploiting myself on a blog that I don't even know if people read. I am telling the part of my conscious that makes me feel that this is vain, naive, improbable and a task greater than I ever tried to complete on my own initiative in my life, to just sit still for a while. Because maybe, just maybe, this story is worth writing about.

We shall see!

More to come...

DJP