#5 Stay Here

On panic, patience, and finding what a story is really about

When I agreed to try scuba diving in La Paz, Mexico, last November, it wasn’t a given that I’d be able to do it. I knew from experience that when I least expect it, claustrophobia overtakes me, panic ensues, and my body fights to get away.

It happened on a guided tour of an underground cave in the UK. It happened while exploring the narrow bowels of the USS Growler, a Cold War-era submarine at The Intrepid Museum in New York City. When I was caregiving, it happened with increasing frequency.

The air becomes thick and visible even as my vision narrows. I can’t breathe. My heart threatens to break out of its cage. For a few years, I had a hard time driving through tunnels, existing in crowds, taking elevators.

The elevator to the radiation suite was the worst offender back then. It was old and slow. I dreaded the day we would be trapped between the first floor and the low-ceilinged, windowless basement where every hospital keeps its MRI machine.

I’ve learned that when I panic, there’s no arguing with it.

Years later, I’m a lot less stressed. I’ll always approach caves and submarines with a healthy respect, but I drive through tunnels, stand in crowds, and take elevators without a second thought.

Still, I figured the odds were 60-40 that I wouldn’t be able to handle scuba diving, that the sensation of breathing under water would immediately trigger panic. But I was willing to try. Worst case scenario, I’d have a beach vacation while everyone else went diving.

After 10 hours of online learning and a few days’ training in a pool, there was a moment off Los Islotes where I rested below 30 feet of rollicking surf, in the company of a colony of 600 California sea lions. Ahead of me, divers swam in a beam of light framed by the shadow of a rock arch above the surface. I watched as sea lion pups performed graceful maneuvers, swirling among the divers, in and out of light and shadow.

The best part was when Luke, the dive master, saw me overcome my fear. Luke was a stocky, jovial Brit with a military past and a thriving sense of humor. Even underwater, I could tell when he was proud of me. He made the OK sign with both hands and pumped them back and forth in celebration.

“I’ve never seen anyone make such a controlled panic,” he said when we surfaced after our first ocean dive. He encouraged me to own the story. “Tell them what you did,” he said, gesturing to the other divers.

What I did: I descended thirty feet, following Luke and Ford and guided by the boat’s anchor line. We reached the bottom and swam away from the line. A moment later, Luke turned back to check on us.

OK? Luke signaled.

Ford returned it. OK.

My mind was crawling with gremlins. The surface was right there, but the surface was so far away. What if I ran out of air? Sure, I was breathing now, but what if suddenly I couldn’t? I knew what to do, but what if I forgot? My brain tried to logic through the psychological stress.

I held up a flat hand and tilted it back and forth, meaning Not OK. Gremlins.

Luke hovered. As much he could with a rebreather in his mouth, he smiled. He raised one hand and conducted an underwater symphony, bringing his hand slowly away from his chest and back toward it, telling me to breathe. In, and out. In, and out.

I nodded. I breathed.

OK? Luke asked again.

I shook my head. Gremlins, I motioned again.

He put up a finger. Wait. Breathe. In, out.

OK?

I was still not okay.

Discouraged, I made the sign for Go up, letting Luke and Ford know that I was done. They would dive on; I would sit out the day on the boat, enjoy the sunshine, and try not to feel bad about having failed. At least I tried.

Then, as Luke described it, I oriented myself underwater, swam back to the anchor line on my own, checked my air gauge, and changed my mind. Just like that. I had just needed a minute.

OK, I signaled.

Luke nodded, turned with an elegant flipper kick, and led us toward the sea lions.

What the moment meant to me that day was nothing short of miraculous. I’d beat back anxiety and pushed beyond my comfort zone to receive the gift of swimming with sea lions, watching cormorants fish for sardines, exploring shipwrecks in the Sea of Cortez.

A few days later, I understood so much more. Yes, I’d overcome something, but that wasn’t what this was about. Overcoming was what Vivian Gornick calls the Situation.

It’s easy to mistake the Situation for the Story. The Situation feels important. But the Story is something more. The Story had to do with what it meant that I’d overcome something.

I read recently that every story comes down to answering a simple question: Who did what? If I limit my answer to describing the Situation, it’s tempting to frame this experience as “Nicole became a diver,” or, “Nicole overcame claustrophobia.” But the Story goes deeper than that.

I used to be trapped on earth, breathing air, encountering sea creatures only when they surfaced. Now, I can encounter their environment alongside them. An entirely new realm of the earth opened itself for experience and learning.

What matters to me isn’t that I overcame something. It’s that it changed how I see.

Time elapsed between original experience and landing on a concept of story that felt true? Two days.

In my experience, understanding doesn’t always arrive this quickly. In the years in which I’ve been working on a memoir, the story has changed many times.

When I first looked at a blank page with the intention to share the story of what had happened to my partner and to me, I thought I knew what the story was and why it mattered. I told anyone who would listen. Friends, family, editors, artist grant committees.

We are not living the usual story of illness and suffering and death and grief, I told them. No. The Story is: This is how he lives.

In my experience, part of what makes writing this memoir different from telling other stories, and more difficult, is that as I’ve grown and changed over the years, my understanding of the story has necessarily changed, too.

After my partner died, the story went from This is how he lives to This is how I live for both of us. But that wasn’t right, either. The story changed several times, and each new understanding led to a new draft, which came with a feeling of frustration, that I’d been wrong again, that I was no closer to done than before.

Those last thoughts? Those are the real gremlins.

In the middle of last year, a writer friend asked me a question about my story that I’d never once asked myself.

“Why did you stay?”

Meaning, why, when your partner was diagnosed with a terminal illness, didn’t you leave?

The question was a door I didn’t want to open. Neither the question nor the answer interested me. I stayed. So what? It didn’t make me special.

My friend wasn’t satisfied with that answer. “Ok,” she said, “But really, why did you stay?”

Suddenly, there it was, my Story, staring me in the face, encompassing everything I was trying to express.

It’s what happened: my partner got sick, and I stayed. It’s what I wanted from him, and what he wanted, too: just stay, stay here, in this life. It’s what I’m asking of the reader: Stay with me, in this story, for a little while.

I opened the manuscript and typed a new first line.

It has never taken much to make me stay.

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Field Notes

(a craft observation from the week)

Memoir writers often feel stymied by their shifting understanding of their own story. Early drafts cling to the Situation because it’s so easy to identify: this happened, and this, and this. Sometimes a writer (raising my hand) spends many drafts trying to make the Situation as beautiful and compelling as it can be, only to look up later and realize they’ve failed to figure out, let alone convey, what it means.

It’s tempting to interpret this moment as failure. I’ve learned to interpret it differently.

When the question of what it means arises, it’s not because the work is broken. It’s because the work has deepened. The writer has reached a point where the Story is asking for attention.

It’s tempting to flee the discomfort of this moment and dive back into the Situation. If the writer can stay with it, can quiet the nasty little gremlins that insist the work is directionless, she may recognize where the work has been asking to go all along. Sometimes the Story arrives like this.

It helps to form community with other writers who ask smart questions. As for the gremlins, don’t get them wet, and don’t feed them after midnight.

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What I’m Reading

For an elegant example of using Who Did What as narrative structure, see Jess Walter’s excellent latest novel, “So Far Gone.”

Each chapter title, structured “What Happened to (Name),” is a satisfying little dopamine hit, telling the reader what to expect and how it relates to what you’ve already read.

also

Not every writer takes a long time to understand their story. Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow” was finished within a few months of her son’s death and published the year after.

In discussing the book with another memoir writer, among other things, we talked about how Li’s speed here thwarts the adage handed down to new writers as common wisdom; namely, the idea that you have to get some “distance” from the experience before you can write well about it. Li helped us consider why the idea of getting distance is subjective. We also discussed why the speed of understanding and crafting a book might look different for Li than it does for us.