I saw a YouTube video once where a guy dressed head-to-toe like a red devil with a long tail and everything was standing on the side of the freeway pointing at random cars as they passed by like they were in trouble. I don’t believe in the devil but I can’t imagine getting pointed at. I’ve always wondered if he could’ve gotten arrested for impersonating the devil and how funny that guy’s mug shot would be. Then he could argue the devil doesn’t really exist and they’d be forced to let him go.
I don’t believe there’s an evil force out there making awful shit happen for no reason. We make our own hell and our own happiness. I read Damien Echol’s book Life After Death—which was chilling, FYI—and amazing—and he actually found a way to be happy after being wrongly convicted of murdering three little boys, sentenced to death and thrown in an Alabama prison to rot away for 18 years. How? He became a Buddhist on day one.
We all have problems. Some are bigger than others. There’s pretty much always a solution.
A little over two years ago I woke up to an email from an editor that I almost didn’t open because I thought it was spam telling me she’d been looking for someone with a yoga background to write a book and did I want to talk about it. Uh, yeah I wanted to talk about it. So during a few emails back and forth about what kind of book we could do and how yoga had helped me in life, I told her how I grew up in LA and how I started drinking when I was 14 years old and had gotten sober at 22 and how I immediately developed a panic disorder after that and that I had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. Oh, and how that was the one thing I refused to write about. Between the alcoholism and the anxiety that was just going to have to be enough for one book.
Then for some reason I sent her something I had written a year earlier after I came home from the neurologist one day, something I wrote just for myself sitting in my garage, something I’d never had the guts to show to anyone.
That thing I wrote is now the introduction to Bent.
I wrote a treatment. I got a book deal. By that point I had reluctantly agreed to sorta-kinda mention what was going on with me, which was the best I could do. I figured I’d just worry about it later. And after about a million attempts at writing about anything other than the one thing I had zero desire to tell the whole world, I finally ended up saying screw it and wrote a chapter called “Sick” about what it was like to be a yoga teacher with Parkinson’s and try to hide it all the time. It was dark. My editor loved it. And that chapter ended up being the maypole the whole thing dances around. I’ve since renamed it “Freaky” because it includes this quote from JD Salinger in Franny and Zooey:
“We’re freaks, that’s all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.”
Here’s what I’ve learned about writing, or any other art form for that matter: It only means something when you reveal the truth about yourself. Yeah, it’s scary. But everyone kept telling me the same thing, that I should just keep going and I’d feel amazing once it was done. “Cathartic” was a word I heard a lot. I had that one chapter, but I needed 11 more. And there I’d be, sitting on my couch night after night, totally stuck, deadline approaching, ignoring everyone including my husband who basically had to live with Dracula because I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t go to yoga to let the light in and I couldn’t talk about any of it.
The stress was unreal. If you saw me in those months, I was probably crying. And to top it all off, the whole thing made me feel physically even worse. I have a picture of me from that time. I look like I just swallowed arsenic.
A major deadline came and went. My sanity came and went. The book wasn’t done yet and the publishing company was getting pissed. I wanted to quit and just never answer their calls or emails. They’d figure it out eventually. And then, in the beginning of April, right in the middle of all this, I decided to take the day off torturing myself and drive up to San Francisco with my friend Dante for the day to go to a book signing with Augusten Burroughs for his book Lust & Wonder.
Augusten Burroughs is my favorite writer. Forget Running With Scissors. Read Dry. All I wanted was get in front of him and ask him how he gets past the fear of writing about the horrible parts of his life which, if you know anything about Augusten Burroughs, are way more horrible than mine. If anyone ever did get pointed at by a red devil, it would be him. So I asked him. And he said once he signs a contract to write a book he doesn’t have the luxury of feeling any fear because he knows what he has to do so he just does it.
This was incredibly unhelpful. And then, in a bookstore on Van Ness, Augusten Burroughs gave me the one bit of writing advice I will never forget: Keep it ugly and real. Because if you try to make it pretty, it’ll end up sounding fake. AND NO ONE IS INTERESTED IN PRETTY AND FAKE.
There was more, but that was the important part. And that’s when everything changed.
What a generous, lovely man.
I wrote most of Bent after that. It took less than three months. I had to toss over a year of writing, but in the end everyone was right. It was cathartic. Although when it was done I didn’t even realize it until like, two weeks after I handed it in. Then they sent me the layout and I cried for a half an hour. It was just so fucking beautiful.
After it was done, I had a dream where I pulled a hideous, gutted, dead black rat out of my throat. Do with that what you will.
My husband and I have an ongoing debate about Jackson Pollock. When he looks at one of his paintings, he sees a mess. I see honesty. Thinking about it now, we’re both right. And you can’t really have one without the other, can you?
Keep it ugly and real, baby. Sometimes it’s all you need to hear ♥
Click here to order Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass
