Category: Writing

New habit?! What’s keeping me writing this week.

I am the worst habit-former in the world.

My longest streak on the latest habits-and-routines app I am using (Fabulous is really fabulous) is a whopping TWO DAYS.

(And that’s not two days of anything ambitious; that’s two days of waking, drinking water, taking pills, and clicking in the app that I did so. Which, for the record, simply means touching with one finger the watch that’s on my wrist, which pings every morning asking me if I’d like to log that “routine” as completed.)

So, when I titled this list over at my Substack “What’s keeping me writing this week #1” I did not promise anything about when you might see #2.

Depends if I keep writing.

What it felt like to face the man who sexually abused me in court

It felt strong. It felt brave. It felt powerful.

It also felt sad. Unexpectedly, desolately sad.

I’ve always said “When I have an emotion, I’m usually last to know.” That’s not really true of me anymore, but for years I was always reacting to Big Feelings but almost never knowing which feelings, or why.

I’m sure the reasons are as mixed as any other complex human thing… autism, toughness, pride, and shame are a few… but “Coach Mike” Spiller was the biggest reason to be sure. When you’re a kid, adults are supposed to be trustworthy and take care of you, and when they don’t, it’s a sick spiral from there to complete self-alienation. From then on, I learned to ignore my feelings, no matter how big, and especially the bad ones. Those hurt!

Feelings, I learned, were confusing. Feelings would take you places you didn’t want to go. Feelings upset other people. They made people not like you, or they made you vulnerable to other people too, or both. What’s more, I learned from Coach Mike, feelings are not to be trusted. In fact, if feelings are unreliable, why not just cut them off altogether?

Here I stood, forty years later, in a courtroom, directly in front of this person who changed the course of my life. To his sad-eyed yet steely face and to the faces of strangers in the courtroom, I explained right out loud– in public and in detail!– exactly how his actions affected my life.

Having spent most of the years since his crime telling myself that it hadn’t really affected me much at all, this was all-new material. I stood there and listed problem after problem.
My personal record of fuckups and long-ways-around.
A CV of failures.
My litany of lament.

I stood and read this aloud, less than twenty feet away from this old man in prison stripes and a brand-new cheap haircut. This man who told little me I was special (the words I still most long to hear) when he really meant I was an object he would soon be using.

I’m a professor, and in my years teaching writing, I’ve learned the power of reading your writing aloud. I have students do this all the time. There’s nothing like it. This magic thing can happen when you read, audibly and straight from the page, something that you have written. When you hear your words aloud in your own embodied voice, they sound different than they did in your mind’s voice. They’re your words, written by you, and yet hearing yourself read them makes them “other” somehow. Reading your own writing aloud makes you be an audience-you along with the author-you. What’s extra weird about this is that author-you knows things that audience-you does not. Eerily, you then can hear yourself saying things to yourself that feel like new information; you realize things about your topic that you didn’t understand until you wrote them. To yourself.

Last week in the Kendall County courthouse, I heard myself saying words that I had tried so hard for so long to pretend were untrue. I heard myself counting all at once the total price, costs I have long known about and talked about but never had quite laid out in one itemized bill.

I heard myself say “I have been profoundly harmed.” That “life has been harder than it should have been.” And that I would have liked to know who I would have grown up to become otherwise.

I love me, but damn, I would have liked to know that person. And I never will. I am sad about that.

[Here’s a short recap of the day from KHOU Houston. And here’s other media from court and from before that.]

Writing hangover

I have a writing hangover. It’s that feeling I get when there’s been something I wanted to write, or needed to write, and haven’t been able to, and then I finally do. It felt SO good to complete and send it off, but MAN I feel hung over.  Do you get writing hangovers?

I do, especially with big and important pieces of writing. Some pieces of writing really fight to stay unwritten. At least mine do.

Maybe this happens because I’m swamped with life maintenance activities, which I am terrible at and get overwhelmed by, so even sitting to write at all is hard. Maybe it’s because I am distracted, distractible. Really distractible. I distract myself from most of my ideas by having more ideas! And while I haven’t finished the important thing, I also want to dive into the new thing, and sometimes I do. This means that for every big-ish piece of writing I complete, I have usually started at least three other pieces along the way. (How do people sometimes find themselves without ideas? This has never happened to me.) Or, even more frustratingly, even when I am strong and responsible and stop myself—dodge another rabbit hole!—I still am basically fried now by the interruption anyway. What kind of victory is it if fighting for it renders me unable to enjoy the spoils?

So that was happening, has been happening, much more than usual for the last couple of months. During the past two months, I have been needing to write the “victim impact statement” I will give in court next Thursday at the sentencing hearing of the person who sexually abused me in childhood. (More on that soon!)  It was hard to write, so very hard. Of course it would be—what one statement could ever summarize the effect of any one event, a traumatic event in this case, especially forty years after it happened? It has had lots of time to stew. Or for a less yummy metaphor, it has been festering and oozing for four decades, its putrescence seeping and spreading along all my inner cracks and crannies. While regular cleaning and occasional blasts of strong disinfectant can do a lot, there’s still a real buildup after forty years.

So the statement was hard to write, and I kept writing parts of it in my head and on paper and in computers, rehearsing it and reframing it. While I was doing this, of course time outside of the writing continued to elapse, and life went right on life-ing. So, while I was not-writing the statement I was also returning to work, caring for children, handling medical needs for multiple people, fighting insurance companies, cooking, cleaning, dealing with money, making appointments, going to meetings, filling out forms, doing all my side gigs, home repairing… I know that only some of these things are unusually taxing for most people. For me, even getting the mail, opening it, and dealing with anything needed within it can sometimes take me a week—and all the while, more mail comes every day. My whole life feels like that now.

But now I have written it!! It exists! I have written it and it exists, and I have sent it to the DA’s office, and I shall read it in court. After sending it I shut my laptop, greeted my son who was just getting off the school bus, and immediately set out to buy a disco ball and mount it on a pole (long story), purchase food from a drive-through against my better judgment (received all the wrong food), contend with boss-level traffic and parking issues (these are of the devil!) and delivered my son to a parade float. And had a full-on meltdown which I spilled right onto a loved one. And watched a three-hour parade and was literally pelted by three pounds of candy. And ate candy.

And this is why today I have a hangover, without drinking or drugs or anything. It is in fact a writing hangover.

(but hey! I am writing!)

Suppose it’s a Saturday

It’s April Fools Day, and I can’t take a joke. Like, at all. Every time I’ve been fooled or pranked or tricked, the way I feel is not amused, but ashamed. It feels like everyone set against me, like I‘ve brought shame upon myself by falling for it. I know, party pooper, right? I blame long-undiagnosed autism and the aftershocks of trauma…. But other than that, I’m super fun!

No joke, I can have fun, but often when I’m doing it, I feel bad for not doing some other thing I should be doing. And I also spend a lot of time doing neither what I think I should be doing NOR what I want to do, but anxiously hovering between them, or rediscovering emails I forgot about with things that I was told to do or promised to do but have not done. So, not as fun as I could be.

Today was different. Better! It is possible that I am actually learning how better to do being human than I have done before. It was a very good Saturday, even though all my problems are still problems and all my things I’m behind on are still things.

And it’s day one of Verselove. A poem a day, or some days, all April. Here is my poem today. May you have a day like this sometime. Or even every day.

Only with this inspiration from VerseLove and Sarah Donovan of Ethical ELA would I have written a poem today. You can too!

A story about telling my story

When I decided in spring 2022 to make sure that the man who had sexually abused me in 1983 had actually been officially reported to law enforcement, I did so for my own peace of mind if nothing else. I had no real sense of the places it would lead. Now Mike Spiller, a gymnastics coach who sexually abused me and who is accused by many others, has been arrested, and Danielle Lerner of the Houston Chronicle has written this loving and precisely researched story. With more to come.

Here’s a quote from the top of the full story, as it’s most personal to me:

Anne Elrod Whitney had only recently joined a girls gymnastics team at Rowland’s Northwest when she was invited to attend a team sleepover at the gym’s building in northwest Houston. It was 1983. She was 10.

What should have been a safe, fun-filled event in a familiar space instead became corrupted. 

The sleepover had the atmosphere of a school lock-in with loosely organized games, sleeping bags splayed across the floor and pizza ordered in for dinner. Kids played on the gym equipment normally reserved for rigorous instruction. Some people propped blue vinyl gym mats up against the wall to construct lean-to forts. 

At some point Whitney found herself alone in one of the forts with Mike Spiller, who she knew as a charismatic man and one of the gym’s primary coaches, out of sight between the mats and the wall. 

There, she says, Spiller snuggled with her on top of sleeping bags and began massaging her thighs and hip while commenting on her muscles. Then Spiller put his hand inside Whitney’s underwear and massaged the outside of her vagina. 

“I actually, at that time, didn’t know anything bad had happened,” says Whitney, who is now 49 and resides in Pennsylvania. “I think I liked to be somebody’s favorite, you know? And I know now, that’s the thing that happens to a lot of kids where, you know, there’s (seeking) approval in a relationship, and even affection, from somebody that you care about.” 

Nearly 40 years later, on Nov. 18 of this year, Spiller turned himself in after police in Boerne, Texas, put out a warrant for his arrest. He was booked into the Kendall County jail, where he remains on a bond of $150,000, on a charge of indecency with a child.

Read it in one of these forms:

Full investigation (for Chronicle subscribers, 99 cent paywall): https://www.houstonchronicle.com/texas-sports-nation/general/article/texas-gymnastics-coach-arrest-sexual-abuse-17618101.php

Free version of need-to-know info: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/texas-sports-nation/general/article/Mike-Spiller-gymnastics-coach-sexual-abuse-Texas-17618279.php

Timeline of the allegations: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/texas-sports-nation/general/article/Gymnastics-coach-timeline-17618424.php

I’m not the first to say we’re made of stories. In fact, I have sometimes heard that kind of statement and thought, “blah, I’m sure that’s true, but how trite!” And on a slightly more articulate (but equally grumpy) day, I might have thought, “Stories are meaningful and good, BUT stories don’t get someone more money or medicine or a job or a loving advocate when hard times come. Or at least, they don’t work anywhere NEARLY as well as actual materials, resources, and actions do.

And yet. AND YET! Time after time, in my own life and in so many lives and spaces and communities, I keep seeing how it is true. Stories make shape out of the messy and incomprehensible flow of experiences and ideas. Stories make lives, they make communities, and they make selves.

It’s a beautiful idea and one that I’ve built a life’s work around. Even when I haven’t been aware of it, this idea about the meaning and power available in acts of in storying, storytelling, revising, etc. has threaded through all of my work in writing, research, teaching, teacher education, parenting, and faith.

We don’t make all the components of these stories. We don’t get to pick where and when we are born. Whether our ancestors or our current selves were or are oppressed and/or oppressing. What our bodies look like and the histories of how are bodies are seen in the places we find ourselves. The movements of populations, celestial bodies, revolutions. Diseases. So little is under our control.

And yet. We are always making and remaking the stories from which and into which these components flow. We string together events and feelings and wonderings and all the other bits and pieces into narratives. And as we grow, as we acquire additional story elements, or as our vision changes, we get to change the stories.

What a gift of power.

Doing Hard Things

In conversation today, I heard myself use a line I’ve used about myself many times, a line that feels truer every time I say it:

I am great at big things; I’m terrible at little things.

I make no claims about the originality of this line, but I have been saying it since my twenties and it’s truer than ever (and improved upon only by the great Glennon Doyle, who has said on We Can Do Hard Things and elsewhere that she can do hard things, but not easy things. I so get this!)

I can do, and have done, some big things. Like, things some people see as forever unreachable: I’ve written books! I’ve moved cross-country (too many times)! I’ve handled a lot of misfortunes from child sexual abuse to mental health issues. I’ve done some big things! Or at least moderately big.

But little things? I am the worst, and I am worsening. The list of things I can’t do ranges from remembering your birthday to paying bills on time to answering email to keeping the kitchen clean to taking daily medications. I am terrible at establishing or maintaining habits or systems of any kind, from exercise to filing to putting away laundry. (Literally. I am so unable to put away laundry, since forever, that in August and September alone I have had a dear friend put it away for me while I was away (several hours’ work), have paid a stranger to help me put it away, and have sorted it into piles several different times… only to I mess up many, many little things per day, and unfortunately many people around me have had to accept this intermittent incompetence.

If you know me in real life– or even if you’ve glanced at some of the titles of recent posts here– you’ll know that I’ve been dealing with some extra-big Big Things. Some of those I have written about, and some I haven’t. Overall, I am coping with these Big Things as well as can be expected or better.

But, there’s a catch! I’m not sure if this is obvious to all but I’ve been clueless, or whether these Bigs differ from my many previous Bigs, or even if my unskilled skills have gotten even less skillful. Turns out: the these Big Things I am dealing with now have necessitated way, way more Little Things than I had already, and I am drowning. Just as one example: my son’s mystery tumor and its related or adjacent other medical mysteries require coordination, communication, and administration by me, as do the bills, insurance, times and places of appointments, transportation, medication, rehabilitation. It’s cascades of unrelenting -ations of the very type I’m absolutely miserable at. The other Big Things I’m wrapped up in are the same way. It’s like the Autobots of important life priorities and the Decepticons of tasks required to address those priorities are in a full-on melee situation, but they keep transforming unexpectedly, and switching sides, and nobody is quite sure whether the enemy is a truck, a dinosaur, a giant gun, or a bumblebee.

Then, and here’s actually why I started this post, there are the ways I make it harder for myself. I’m unaware of most of them, and the ones I have caught onto are apparently the ONLY habits I’ve been successful in forming! Like how I hire help with some home maintenance projects to save me some time, but then I have to keep the multiple unfinished projects in “pending” mode, with materials everywhere and clutter then amassing around it, leading to clutter in some other place, and we’re all living in a house with alarming, precarious piles and nothing in its right lace and a looming threat of panic attacks from the visual clutter alone. You know, those ways!

No solution, just a report from a tired woman who, coincidentally, is not only behind in tidying but who also discovered– just as I was about to hit “publish” on all the remaining course material my students need and have waited so patiently for– that the video material comprising about 1/3 of the “reading” for the course has DISAPPEARED! Like, every link now broken. Good news is the library still owns most of the resources; bad news is every single one is now on a different platform, indexed in a different way and requiring a different link. So what was to be a ten-minute task on Tuesday is now STILL not done!

And so Friday night is like this: the students, who are amazing and very busy, will keep on waiting, and I’ll keep on trying to accomplish the Big Thing of supporting teachers in the very hard work of teaching writing via a trillion impossible Little Things of hunting down links and editing an elaborate course management system accordingly while trying not to accidentally Google symptoms of horrible bone cancers or what kind of grout I am supposed to order or forget to eat the soup I heated up three hours ago.

No answers! But since that’s all both grim and a bit dramatic, I’ll leave you with this aggravating, inspiring statement, one we can file somewhere right in between Little Things and Hard things perhaps: Let it Be Easy. It came up accidentally when I was trying to source/link Glennon’s quote about “easy things.” Go read it. It’s got me thinking about my way of linking one task to another to another, and then overwhelming myself, causing blockage of my more important pursuit of the Big Things that matter to me.

And yes, I knew it wasn’t the detail I needed to complete this post, which itself arose organically and distractingly from a different search I was doing for an essay to replace one of those damn videos! [Process note: I had to search for my own essay Writing is Hard (because Filing! It’s a little hard thing!), which led to this Writing is Hard post from Jeff Goins, which led to his Let it Be Easy post, which led to this post you are now reading. Yes, I know. I KNOW!] I’m a free woman, damnit, and I clicked on it, and read it, and MAN I want to learn how to let it be easy.

Gymnastics coach Mike Spiller abused me in the 1980s and is still working with kids in Texas gymnastics, circus, and camps (TBW#1)

In 1983 and for a while after, the gymnastics center in Northwest Houston that I attended held sleepovers. These were fun extras, like the lock-ins a church youth group might have. But, beyond the normal kid fun of a sleepover my friends, something else happened. My coach, Mike Spiller, whom I adored and whose attention and approval I craved, sexually abused me.

And while I have many, many stories about that in my own life, THIS short post is really a LONG story about how almost 40 years later, he is still immersed in working with youth at camps and gyms. Finally, after almost 40 years, he is under investigation and is temporarily restricted from any contact with/in/via any USA Gymnastics-affiliated entity, as shown on the public database of USA Center for SafeSport.

Since child molesters have apparently been pretty welcome in American gyms, and since Mike Spiller went on from a gymnastics career to work with youth in countless camp and retreat settings along with gyms, I figure I am not alone.

In fact, I know I am not alone, since I am not the only complainant in the investigation.

Mike Spiller has most recently been working in Boerne, TX and the San Antonio area. He began his career at a University of Texas gymnast and then as a coach beginning in Houston, TX; since then he has worked all over Texas as well as New Mexico and outside the USA. If you remember him abusing you or someone else, or even had suspicion of such, please contact SafeSport, which you can do online with or without anonymity. Or, contact me using any of the means on this site.

Please consider sharing with every Texan, gymnast, journalist, or human being that you know!

The Big Scary TBW List

Do you have a to-be-read list? Or shelf or pile or bags full, like my kids and I do? Are you such a cool reader kid you call it a TBR? There’s an art to the TBR, and I don’t have it. Take for example my friend and colleague Rob, who one magical year actually accomplished the impossible of actually reading all the books on his TBR shelf before buying more. Not me; it’s just piles everywhere and then I grab whatever, or I end up ordering from the library/internet anyway.

I have a TBW list. I think many of us do, whether we know it or not: these are the stories that may matter most but also can be hardest to tell. What Glennon Doyle calls your “truthiest truth.” And I don’t know about you, but these years since the pandemic began, or maybe it’s since Trump, or wait maybe it’s since… all the wrong and sad and overwhelming things ever… These years have showed me some TRUTH. And the more I know what is true, the more I have to write about it.

And it’s super scary.

What if it hurts their feelings what if they don’t believe me what if it doesn’t count what if I am wrong what if I can’t what if it’s stupid what if nobody reads it what if I’m crazy what if i regret it what if I show too much real me what if what if what if kind of scary.

Here’s the list of things To Be Written in the coming days and weeks. Hold me to it.

  1. How Mike Spiller, my first gymnastics coach in Texas, fondled my crotch while “massaging” me in a tent of gym mats at a lock-in in the early 80s
  2. How Mike Spiller is still active in gymnastics and other youth camp settings, to my horror and stupid surprise
  3. How I didn’t realize what Mike Spiller did was bad at first, so starving I was for affection and approval
  4. How I did tell what Mike Spiller did, but not right away and not firmly enough, maybe
  5. How I lived out a life for the almost forty years since then, in all the messy and fucked up ways people live lives, but with the additional mess that Mike Spiller left behind for my head
  6. How I work at Penn State and did not re-report Mike Spiller even when child sexual abuse was all anyone talked about
  7. How I watched the trial of Larry Nassar and did not re-report Mike Spiller
  8. How I recently reported Mike Spiller to USA Center for SafeSport
  9. How it appears that I am not the only one who has something to say Mike Spiller
  10. How now I am doing everything I can to encourage others who may have similar experiences with Texas gymnastics coach Mike Spiller to contact me
  11. And whatever happens from there.

Thanks to the many people who have tried to love me at some point since 1982 and have recently answered questions when investigators have gotten in touch. I’m diving into the big scary TBW.

Here’s to all the truthy truth!

Wrap your learning community in cushy foam?

My son has a very, very cheap laptop, and I’ve been surprised how little he uses it. He likes gaming, coding, writing, making videos and podcasts, and all kinds of graphic arts, and this device was a gift for him to expand his skills, to play around in the more powerful and flexible environment of the PC as compared to his locked-down school-issued chromebook.

And yet, he’s taken it out maybe twice in six months– all the while watching video after video about things he wants to someday do on it. What’s stopping him?

Finally, last time he took it out, I sat next to him on the sofa and watched over his shoulder. Nine year old boys don’t necessarily love their moms doing this, so I had my own computer open as a decoy. I’m sure he was completely fooled! From this vantage point, I saw it. He’d be typing text, maybe into a document or, in this case, a Minecraft command line. Being a human being and a nine year old and my genetic descendant, he’d make a typo every other word or so. And just as I have done three or four times in the last line or two, he’d reach up to the backspace key to go back and change it. All typical. Until, seemingly inexplicably, his whole machine shut down. “Argh! I hate that!” he yelled, then powered it back on and waited. And waited. Then clicked on the program he had been using and waited. And waited. And waited. (I said it was a cheap PC).

About two minuted later, it happened again. Again in another five. Finally I saw what was happening: the Power button was somehow, stupidly, right next to the Backspace button. Apparently this is a thing. And has been for at least 11 years as seen on Reddit, the mothership of internet ranting. WHY?!? People have the actual job of designing computers, and they suck at it.

How perfect a metaphor for writing, though! So often we seem to power off when only a backspace is necessary. Sometimes I’ll be working on a piece of writing and, sometimes after writing many thousands of words, realize I don’t like what I am doing or that I need to change my approach. Reaching for the Backspace button, I realize I don’t yet know how to fix it, and I get so discouraged I can’t make myself work on it at all. Power off! I’ll go hide out in email, or course prep, or more likely eating chips in bed and feeling bad about not writing. It feels safer.

In fact a lot of learning can be like this, too: take for example groups I’ve led or participated in where the aim was to understand and address racism and systemic inequities. As a white educator working among other educators who are predominantly white, so often the work requires unlearning things we thought were true about ourselves and/or the systems in which we work. Backspace! Envisioning change, we find we will have to take apart things that are awfully firmly cemented, like curricula or policies. Backspace! And then racism is so everywhere, and so very baked in to the entire American educational enterprise (big, collective Backspaces) and into our own socialization as human beings and as teachers (backspaces) and the more we look at it the more those backspaces might slip and Power Off. After all, it’s hard to keep mind of one’s own power to effect change in systems that we not only work in but have also been shaped in. It’s…a lot. To say the least.

Photo of laptop keyboard to which I have affixed with blue masking tape a big chunk of foam to cover the Power button

I fixed my son’s keyboard like this. I am apparently an engineering genius!

I have found that when it comes to writing, this same strategy of adding a barrier works pretty well. The more we can make it impossible to shut down, the better we’ll do. So I do things like make writing dates with friends, switch to freewriting or speech-to-text, use Focusmate, and/or promise writing to people so that it’s just harder to hit Power and quit writing.

What about the learning communities doing that hard work of subverting racist and other oppressive conditions in education and in the world? The work of making deep change, and of learning deeply, only really gets done when we choose to be there. So while covering the Power button might work on the keyboard, in a learning community part of the work is actually learning how NOT to “Power Off” even when the button is right there. We could quit any time. So many have, and many more have not even begun the work. Yet we keep on showing up, writing our ideas and intentions toward greater freedom and teaching that liberates, Backspacing when we need to while keeping the power On.