Test

Test. What does this word mean? Going into finals, and dealing with family drama, both inside and outside of my home: death, impending death, teen angst, differing views of parenting, mamma drama (both my own and my mothers, and for that matter my mother’s mamma), pet food scares galore... This word, “TEST” weighs on my mind. Is a test something that comes to us on a piece of paper and measures the depth and breadth of our knowledge on a given subject? Is it a crisis of faith that we must face and come through, whether for the better or the worse? Is it Love, that most inexplicable emotion that drives us each to the very extremes of behavior? Is it a difficult situation, combinations of situations, or obstacle that we must face or run away from? Is it a particular person who, although important to you and perhaps even an integral part of your life, is pushing the limits of our patience and tolerance? Is it all of these things?

What is this elusive thing? Why is the word so scary in and of itself? In elementary school a test was a little thing, usually it seemed like a game. In Junior High a test was an annoying thing, something that couldn’t be avoided but was unpleasant none-the-less. In High School it was a judgment, a compartmentalizing of human beings. Throughout grade-school social tests took place, on the playground, in the classroom, in the cafeteria, on the bus, during sleepovers, birthday parties... What kind of clothes were acceptable and what judgments were passed against you and by whom based solely on your appearance, a thing, as likely as not, that was almost completely outside the scope of your own control?

In adult life simply getting through each day can be, and often is, a test. It’s a competition with the world, your family, your boss, your co-workers, even strangers who are encountered in random places as you plod or skip through your day. Children. Ah children, they are the biggest test of all. Whether or not you have children, you will be judged for your choice, or sometimes lack of choice, to have or not have children. Once a child comes into your life you become a solid target for judgment. This is the hardest test to face. Your judges will be parents, siblings, spouse/love interest, friends, strangers in the street/on the bus/in the store/etc., and worst of all (and hardest to face) yourself.

Ultimately, I believe, a test is actually a judgment. I am, most certainly, my own harshest judge, jury, and executioner. I grade every test I am faced with in the harshest possible style. I give myself no curve, no mercy, no exception regardless of whatever extenuation circumstances may exist. I crucify myself for every misstep, every slip, and every error. I see myself under an imaginary florescent light, every wrinkle, face hair, blemish, and wart magnified and exaggerated. Perhaps then, this is the hardest and only true test, this testing of oneself. perhaps the greatest accomplishment one can strive for in life is to overcome this harshest of judgments. I would never hold another to the impossible standards that I hold myself to. Suppose I were to overcome that need to eviscerate my own personality, what then have I become? Am I more or less than I was?

The Reality of Reality

I’ve often thought about how odd it all is. Reality, after all, is a strange thing. In writing fiction, be it for literary purposes, for television, a movie, or what-have-you, what you put down has to be believable in a certain sort of way. That is to say, the recipient of the aforementioned fictitious material must be willing to accept said material within whatever framework it is presented. If you, for instance, write a science fiction story your readership must be willing to accept the behaviors of your main character. So, if you write this, utterly make-believe, person into a futuristic time setting wherein rocket ships and space aliens are all flitting about doing their futuristic alien business, then you must attribute behaviors to this non-existent person that readers will accept. If you, for example, have this person zooming around the galaxy in a super-duper, spandy new, shiny rocket but also have him wearing a pistol on a hip-holster than you will have to make this pistol into some kind of futuristic death-ray rather than a turn-of-the-century six shooter.

Fictional setting aside, reality is truly a relative term. My reality is that I am sitting, this very moment, in front of a computer punching buttons on a keyboard in order to string perfectly lovely words together. Meanwhile, somewhere outside my window, perhaps a mile away or perhaps 20 miles away, there exists a living, breathing, flesh and bones human being whose reality is one of hunger and homelessness. The only thing that separates my reality from that of this hungry homeless person is experience. By way of example, I have lived through times of extreme poverty, I have witnessed my own mother giving birth to my brother when I was no more than six-years-old, I tasted my first puff of marijuana when I was less than six-years-old, I lived for more than nine years in an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship and did so completely of my own choosing. I have experienced childbirth twice, I have experienced having my children both taken away from me and returned to me. I have worked in extremely rural and difficult to reach locations with multiple teenage boys who had all been convicted of truly heinous crimes (mostly of a sexual nature and almost unanimously perpetrated against small children). As a part of that job I was required to wrestle those, chillingly deviant, young men to the ground and hold them pinioned with my hands and knees by sheer force. I have experienced what it is to truly, from the depths of my very soul, Hate someone, an emotion so extreme that at the time I truly believed that if I were to witness that persons violent and prolonged death I would not be traumatized by it but rather relieved, perhaps even elated. I have experienced what it is to truly, from the depths of my very soul, Love someone, in a maternal fashion, in a platonic fashion, and in a romantic fashion. All of these experiences, and many more, seemed utterly real and ordinary, completely correct in every way, to me at the time that I experienced them, in retrospect still seem so.

The question I pose now, oh fictional reader, is this: Can you identify with all of those experiences? Some? None? What experiences have you lived through that other people might find extraordinary, but that you do not?

Is the secret to successful writing the ability to string words together to create vivid realities in such a way that total strangers can identify with, even in the face of finding such experiences utterly extraordinary? Is it the ability to convey experience you, as the writer, have never experienced at all?

Have you ever found yourself in the midst of an experience that you knew many people would find extraordinary and been surprised to learn that it was simply another event that you had to live through and not exciting or romantic in the least, no matter how hard television, newspapers, and movies try to make it appear to be so? As a writer are you willing and/or able to use that, whether exactly as it happened or completely fictionalized and exaggerated, in a way that will make me, as a reader, identify with?

What say you?