amwriting

Essay: Sad French Movies

~ amandakusek ~ 3 Comments

Publicly sharing my non-fiction is literally what my nightmares are made up of. But in my constant fight to open myself to new possibilities and to grow as a writer I have to actually let me writing be read. I am starting a writing class next week on Narrative, taught by one of my favorite non-fiction writers, Chloe Caldwell. Since I had to submit a piece to be accepted and this one made the cut, I figured it was safe to share.

SAD FRENCH MOVIES

There is a night you take me to see a Sad French Movie. Catherine Deneuve is in it and every line of the movie is sung. It’s like a musical, but more so. It’s about falling in love and how life then pulls everything apart piece by piece, like the unraveling of a sweater by each thread. You are always taking me to movies at Film Forum, and you are always forgetting the card that gets us discounted snacks. So we never get snacks. I watch a lot of snackless movies there in those old musty seats.

The movie ends at a snowy gas station and the couple can’t be together because they’re married to other people. They’re all so sad but they’re still singing every word that leaves their mouths. Still singing in the snow. Still singing even though their love failed. The ending makes me sad too, but I guess that is the point of a Sad French Movie, to make life feel very heavy.

Though I am feeling very down, you must be feeling romantic because we walk for three avenues to find a place to have a bottle of red. We never do stuff like this, but we’ve been broke since we got together so we don’t know how to do stuff like this. As soon as the first glass hits my bloodstream, I am weepy. I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. I feel stuck. Where am I supposed to go? I forget how weepy red wine makes me. The restaurant is Argentinean and we are the only people not eating.

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Being An Ally Means You are Sometimes Wrong; How Accepting Criticism Makes You Brave

~ amandakusek ~ Leave a comment

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In the past I have shied away from writing about politics because I never feel that I know “enough” to be someone who should be putting information out there. That seems sort of silly now given the amount of news outlets that write whatever they want, ignoring truths for their own agendas. I’ve always wanted to make sure I know all the facts before putting pen to paper, or fingers to a keyboard. Silly me, right? But now, given everything happening in our country that I so vehemently disagree with, I feel that I have to take a stab at “being political”.

My platform is tiny, my voice is tiny, a drop in the endless of bucket of the opinions and voices in our country, but if I do not speak up, even here, than I am not serving my friends and family currently under attack by our own government. Of course, speaking or writing in this way opens me up to a slew of criticisms from those who disagree with me but also from those who, on a baseline, agree with me.

Let me clarify. I am in a constant state of learning. I am always open to the thoughts and ideas and facts and articles of others that will help me to understand the world at large, especially now. Though I am an ally to those who are not at all like me, that does not mean I know what it is to be them or to see things from their perspective. I can try but I will never be them. I am often careful to recognize my privilege and to be wary of using their struggle as my own platform. I am constantly vigilant to make sure I do not do this, but of course, I can mess up, and that is where I need help.

I welcome constructive criticism. That is why I am writing this post. I rely on a vast network of intelligent people to keep me informed and to educate me. With their support I feel like I can put myself out there. They can help me grow as an effective voice in the resistance of hatred.

I will be blunt. This is terrifying. It is absolutely terrifying to hear from someone you love and respect that you’ve messed up. There’s no doubt about it that checking your privilege is uncomfortable, that it sometimes hurts, that it tests friendships. But you have to be willing to work very hard to see real change and to make a real impact.

I know the fear of being proved wrong and the fear of people finding out you are not as “woke” as you seem on paper is strong. I know that it is scary. But if you allow yourself to talk it through with someone different from you, if you ASK THEM HOW YOU CAN HELP INSTEAD OF GUESSING AND ACTING ON THAT GUESS, you will find that you’re doing the real work that’s required right now.

We’re in an uncomfortable place right now. But growth comes from challenge and so if I can sit here and write something that at its core makes me so uncomfortable my stomach is doing flips, than you can be brave too. We can keep fighting alongside one another in mutual respect and love.

_____

See you next week when I introduce you to the regular people being affected by the hiring freeze…

 

 

6 Books To Make You Feel Strong

~ amandakusek ~ Leave a comment

Can you hear that? That’s me sighing so deeply that the roof is rattling. The past two weeks have been trying, tiring, and… good for my character. Two weeks ago I received a promotion at my day job. This was a position that I had been chasing for two years relentlessly. And now it’s here. And now it’s mine. And now I am hella tired.

Adjusting to my new role has, on the surface, been alright, I feel like I am where I need to be finally… however, I come home exhausted, I work later, and my balance of life has been thrown for a loop. It’s amazing how small changes affect our entire being.

At the same time as my promotion I really hurt a tendon in my left leg and had to stop training for my half marathon. I am unable to run. Running is my main source of stress relief so not only have I found myself coping with new issues but I do not have my usual coping tools available to me. It’s been a weird September.

I found myself going back to my bookshelf for comfort. Reading books I read a decade ago for the first time, to help relax me. I wanted to find a center and I hoped it would be in those pages. I read Kerouac’s On The Road, Hornby’s High Fidelity, and I’ve been eyeing my Fitzgerald collection (I own all of his books) with a hunger I usually reserve for pizza.

As a result of using texts to soothe me, where I would normally use my body, I’ve put together a list of books that have made me feel strong in the past and that deserve a re-read. I’m hoping you too will pick up on of these books and feel strong and centered.

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Love as Self Discovery

~ amandakusek ~ Leave a comment

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I can’t believe it, but somehow in the past 5 years I’ve become a champion for relationships. I have gone from being, let’s admit it, a bit of an ice queen, to someone who genuinely believes in the value of love. That doesn’t mean I’ve completely gone off the deep end… I am still very much on the fence about the institution of marriage… but I’ve become a believer in the value of loving someone very deeply and for loving when you can.

I am someone who gets afraid of caring about people very easily. It gives them control and since I am controlling, that makes me nervous. Trusting someone with your heart, your past, and your present is a big deal that shouldn’t be taken lightly. But it is also not something to avoid. Meeting someone, loving someone, and even losing someone are self-defining moments. They help to mold us in areas that we can’t mold alone.

Just as traveling alone, sitting in a restaurant alone, and living alone are great markers of being at peace with yourself (you enjoy your own company as much as anyone else’s), sharing your precious time with another soul is a great marker of how giving you are. And balancing the two? Well, you’ve hit the self discovery jackpot, my friend.

Loving someone requires you to let your guard down and share flaws while at the same time accepting another person with all of their flaws. Love is really a great equalizer when it’s done right. It can put your arrogance in check (holy crap I AM flawed) but also open your eyes to just how patient you can be (holy crap I CAN listen to country music). Yes, I realize I just used country music as a flaw there, but stick with me.

It is for these reasons that I am such an advocate for dating, trying some people out, and seeing where it all goes. Does it absolutely suck when it falls apart? Yep, it does. Have I gone through that many times in my life? Yep, I have. Am I better for it? I like to think so. Failed relationships are great to learn from and also put you in a hyper aware state of who you are, what your actions mean, and where you are going. It’s painful but does wonders for pulling you back into the moment.

This all seems obvious to my readers who come from pre-Millennial generations. Of course loving someone helps you to grow, you say. Of course building relationships is good for you, you laugh. I know but take a minute to view it from a perspective of a group of people who were not only raised during the peak divorce years but also an insane technology boom where we grew attached to devices because, in many ways, they were easier to understand and get along with than our peers. That is some isolating stuff.

I also know that being young in general, no matter what year you were born, is a very selfish time. So as I emerge from my selfish years and simultaneously remove my Millennial-colored glasses, I am finding the importance of making relationships (both romantic and platonic) a priority in my life. Like creating a home, they require more than just a weekly clean. They require, design, thought, care and they need to be lived in.

PS – Why is it so scary to press publish on a blog about love?

Create a New Story & Live It

~ amandakusek ~ Leave a comment

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I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about meditation, mantras, and visualizing goals. I keep reading about mental blocks and holding yourself back from the things that you want and the things you deserve because of patterned thoughts and “stories”– the things we tell ourselves to keep us from going for something. We tell ourselves that we will never have money because we’ve always been broke or we’ll never find love because we’ve never been worthy or never had it before. We take the same paths over and over again because we don’t believe we can take another. It isn’t always about blazing a trail but simply taking a left instead of a right.

I get asked a lot where all my energy comes from. How do I get up early, how do I write at night after work, how do I have a dog… etc. etc. And while I sometimes thought I was just a high energy person by nature, I realized it’s really because I believe I am a high energy person.

Did I lose you right there? Wait! Stay with me.

I know this stuff can sound weird and can scare the living hell out of you but listen… just stop and think about the things you have always just assumed about yourself “I am just a nice person”, “I am just a lazy person”, “I am a math person”. Where did those things come from? You made them up! Or someone told you were good (or bad) at something and you believed them and created your story from it. We naturally want to do the things we are good at and avoid the things we are “bad” at, I get it. Life is easier that way. But what if the you you are now, is based on a series of stories that you wrote for yourself?

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To prove my point I’m going to break down a couple of my stories, both good and bad.

I Am Not A Math Person. Numbers bore me.
This is a story I started telling myself in the 7th grade. What’s funny is that I was in the “gifted” math group in the 5th grade, but it took just a couple of years of consistently being told I was a great writer, that I’d publish a book one day, and that math was my weakest subject, to reject the whole thing all together. No one explained to me that though it was my “weakest” subject, I was still very much “good” at it. I believed what I was told and leaned into my writing and let my math muscle deteriorate. Combined with two unhelpful middle school math teachers who laughed at wrong answers, and of course, puberty, I rejected the whole notion that I could ever be good at math or science and by the time I hit the 9th grade I lived in perpetual fear of it.

And then I had a wonderful Chemistry teacher who was TOUGH on everyone. She was this way because she believed we could do anything we worked for. I spent hours after class with her going over formulas again and again until I could do the most difficult problems she wrote. I worked my ass off and got an A. Because she believed in me, because she made me focus, and because she made me work as hard as she knew I could.

It still took me some time after that, years and years of undoing the bad story, but here I am, working at a company, doing math, handling my own finances, figuring shit out. The stories we tell ourselves are sticky but they can be unstuck if we focus and move past our setbacks.

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I am high energy. I don’t require sleep.
When I got to be about 16 years old and was forced to work my ass off at boarding school (a school that I was getting a free ride to and thus was in perpetual fear of getting tossed out) I told myself that I required little sleep. I worked a part-time job, I stayed up late doing homework, I had a boyfriend, friends, extracurricular activities, started playing sports…I jam packed my days and found that if I pushed outside of myself, the energy was there. The same went for college, I pushed my limits, always feeling a heightened awareness that college was going to end and that I needed to soak up as many experiences as I could. I went to parties, I took lots of weird classes, I worked as an RA, I said “I can do it all” because I truly believed I was that type of person. If I pushed, I found the energy for it all just outside my comfort zone.

Flash forward to me as an adult trying to do as much as I did in college but adding in new responsibilities: rent, a dog, full-time job, bills, navigating NYC, cleaning my apartment… At times I would come to a screeching hault all of a sudden and realize “Maybe I can’t do it all.” But I had always been that person, I had always told myself I could do it all. And the moment that belief faltered, so did my ability to do the things I wanted to do.

It took me a few years (yes, years) to right this ship. It took learning a new way of doing things and getting things done to get there. I went through months and months of stress and of simply doing it all wrong. I tried to apply what I knew in college to my new life and that failed miserably. And now I do believe I can do it all, just in a different way.

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I absolutely know what you’re thinking right now. Really! You’re thinking that this can’t possibly be true, that there are things standing in your way but just remember, someone who was born with more than you has fallen and someone born with less than you has risen. It’s all a matter of perspective and of creating stories for yourself that fit. If you secretly wish you were “A Morning Person”… Tell yourself you are, set your alarm like you are, GET OUT OF BED like you are. If you wish you were kinder. Tell yourself you are, do kind things, enjoy the feeling that comes from doing kind things!

I’m not saying this cut and dry and I am not saying it is easy. It actually kind of sucks most of the time. Re-writing your story is HARD. But like… what else are you doing with your time here?