Each week I listen to Write-Minded, a podcast of “Weekly Inspiration for Writers.” The episode on January 28, 2019, was “Healing through Writing” featuring Francesca Lia Block. (You can listen to it here: https://podcast.shewrites.com/healing-through-writing/.)

During the episode, one of the hosts commented that everyone has an incident from childhood that results in the “flaws” we must heal as adults. This statement seemed too broad to be true—doesn’t anyone just have a nice childhood that leads to a healthy adulthood? But at the same time, I immediately knew what my incident was.

The Backstory

Let me set the scene: I was shy and still friends only with girls. When I started middle school, school dances appeared. I decided I had no interest in them: I didn’t want to dance with a boy, so what was the point? So while all my friends went, I stayed home. Really, I was just scared of going to a dance, of moving into new territory with boys and who knew what else.

The last dance of sixth grade was on my birthday. I wanted to have a party, but I knew my friends would want to go to the dance. “Why don’t you have a party,” my encouraging friend Kelli said, “and then we’ll all go to the dance together?” That sounded manageable, plus I didn’t want to let her down, so I agreed.

And it turned out dances were fun! There was very little dancing, at least among my crowd of friends. There was a lot of giggling, talking about who was cute, and running to the girls’ bathroom when any boy looked your way. Toward the end of the two hours, a few brave souls ventured out for a “slow dance,” which looked awkward, dull, and not much like actual dancing.

After that, I was in. I was going to the dances from then on.

The Inciting Incident

I remember the boy involved. But he could be a lawyer now, so I will withhold his name. Let’s call him M. It was seventh grade, and I left the cafeteria to buy a ticket for the dance that Friday, from the ticket booth set up in the hallway. I was heading back to my table when he struck.

“Why did you buy a ticket for the dance?” M asked from his seat as I passed.

I knew he was about to be mean, but felt I had to answer. I don’t remember what I mumbled back, maybe “Just to go” or “They’re fun.”

“No one wants to dance with you,” he said, his whole face cringing in disgust.

And he was right, it seemed. No one did ask me to dance. Never mind that no one asked anyone else to dance either, or that I hadn’t wanted to dance, or that slow dancing looked pointless and stupid. No one asking me seemed to prove M right. I didn’t dance with a boy until the end of eighth grade, when Valerie decided she’d had enough of everyone standing by the bleachers and started dragging boys over to us and pairing us off. I remember that boy’s name, too. The song was “Open Arms” by Journey. Slow dancing was just as unpleasant as I’d expected.

The Aftermath

I think of my cross-country bicycle trip as the major event that began my healed life, but probably writing about the trip was what actually did it. The memoir of the trip, Somewhere and Nowhere, explores a few themes, but the general idea is that getting away from the noise and busyness of regular life enabled me to see my patterns more clearly, the first step in overcoming them.

A few scenes come to mind when I remember the middle school dance incident:

• Becoming extremely self-conscious because of the cute barista in the coffee shop in Powell, Wyoming. While writing this scene, and struggling to figure out what “becoming self-conscious” actually meant, I realized all the thoughts I’d had during the moment, such as thinking the barista would be repulsed if he knew I thought he was cute (because I was so romantically repulsive—thanks, M!).
  
• Talking to Ryan at the Jackson Hot Springs in Montana, and how I’d been acting confident, but felt sure that I could never pull off a whole day in his company.
  
• Making up elaborate daydreams about Scott, the ranger on Lolo Pass. I was prone to daydreams because they helped me avoid any real-world actual dating, which was sure to fail because of my flaws.

Writing these scenes helped me realize the negative patterns I had internalized. (One of my early beta readers called Somewhere and Nowhere my “search for Ranger McDreamy,” which made me laugh. But the book has other themes as well, I promise!)

What I’m Writing Now

Since I’ve been writing fiction, I haven’t settled on one genre, but I have identified my mission as a writer: to show characters overcoming beliefs about themselves like the ones I harbored for so long. Even if the story begins with an adult character, it’s helpful to identify the inciting incidents that led to her being the way she is in the story. So maybe I should thank M for giving me such a clear example of how an incident can be internalized, festering for years before it’s exposed and overcome.