WEEK 5 – REVIEW REMIX REVISE
Write your autobiography (not memoir but the entire story of your life) on one page, in ten minutes. Seriously, set a timer.
What are you surprised you left out? What are you glad you left out? What frightens you? Now, pick one detail from the original piece, and let it be the point of departure for a second draft of the same length.
Once the clouds came, I could not see my way out from under them. Maybe they'd been gathering all along, but at 13 dark shapes blocked the sky entirely, and 16 raged full hurricane. By then at least I'd found kindred spirits to weather the storm with. Outsiders called us "the emo kids," sensing some of our emotional intensity, but not understanding our shared sensuality, vulnerability, sensitivity, queerness. I put my every everloving egg in this friend basket, a wreck without it. Sometimes I even shattered in the safety of the nest – hiding in the closet with the cat box at my costume party. But when we were good? No lunch table laughed louder. Underwear dance parties, rolling down golf course hills, making music + movies, cigars at the diner, a home in every park + parking lot. No romance ever punctured the sanctity of our circle, and we prided ourselves on silliness in sobriety. Key word "sincerity." We found each other in the fortress of a public institution, improbably, when many of us were at our lowest. All our eggs riding in that collective basket. Nested my confidence + capability atop them, our strength woven into a community. (I'd argue this was our queerest characteristic at the time.) And even knowing all this, the immense love and shared support between us "snapdragons," I never realized how lost I'd be without it.
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