The Story of a Story

I’m in the middle of trying to finish the last two essays of my second book and so I am living in the past for part of each day.

Specifically, today, I’ve been stuck in the year 1990. That was the year I checked into a psychiatric hospital for depression. It was also the year I spent a lot of time in the fetal position watching bad TV. Before and after the hospital.

I remember I was obsessed with a show called Rescue 911. Each episode was two or three reenactments of true stories of emergencies when people had to call 911. There is one storyline that stays with me and I think about it every time I see a field covered in snow or a snowmobile.

A young man was driving a snowmobile and didn’t see a wire stretched between two fence posts and he nearly decapitated himself. I don’t know how he survived but he did.

I liked the show because it shook me out of my own intrusive thoughts for thirty minutes, distracted me from the dark place where I was spending most of my time.

Years later, when my son was a baby, I found myself following this group of 911 operators on social media. They posted stories about horrible calls they had taken and people they had helped from the other end of the phone. I became obsessed with reading about people who made a living by saving other people.

I read about extrication specialists, people who know how to get still-breathing bodies out of a twisted wreck. There is extensive training involved in learning how to stabilize vehicles that have left the road and landed in precarious positions.

I read a story about a woman trapped in her car where it was perched half off a bridge and how she had to keep her two kids still and quiet in that car while the extrication specialists worked out how to remove them without sending the car off the bridge and free falling into a gorge.

When my son was four or five and I was a single mother, I started writing seriously again. I started thinking about getting an MFA. At that time, I wrote short stories and never imagined I’d write nonfiction.

And I wrote a short story about an extrication specialist I imagined. I was looking to explore a kind of urgency that made sense to me. The life I was living felt urgent every day and I wanted it to make sense. I wanted to go inside a moment where all that matters is the two people living it, the dying and the rescuer trying to save her. There was something I needed to know about how that might feel so I wrote my way into it.

I borrowed one of my son’s matchbox cars and every time I wrote, I turned that tiny vehicle onto its side to be able to imagine the way it might work to be trapped in a Hatchback, everything I owned strewn across the road behind me. Papers, kid rain boots, a bright yellow frisbee, the contents of my purse.

That story helped me get into my MFA program and it was the first thing I submitted for critique weeks before my first MFA residency. At the opening reception for my first residency of grad school, when I introduced myself to another student, they asked, “Are you a paramedic?”

This is one thing I love about writing. I love getting lost in the things I become obsessed with and I love living two lives in this way. The one I walk through when I am grocery shopping or in my zoom class and the one I close my eyes and see in my mind. It’s a good way to live.

Tell me about one of your obsessions or deep dives and as always, thank you so much for reading.