You, my friends, are the real ones. THE GEMINI MIND SUBSCRIBERS. Many of you have been with me since ye olde blogge, The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, and some might even remember the saccharine names I cycled through before it:

Explosions of Pen (a bit Freudian)
Happy To Be Stuck With You (my Huey Lewis phase)
Together Forever: Spielings of Splenetic Spouse

Let me just say, “Spielings of a Splenetic Spouse” was not exactly SEO-optimized. Nor, for that matter, was “The Lady Doth Protest Too Much.” Or “Raesevelt.” My obsession with my own cleverness has always been my undoing!

If there is a reason why my writing has failed to make me millions, it’s that my proclamations of identity need explaining. It has never been as devil-may-care as, say, “Pink Peonies” or “Barefoot Blonde” or “Mormon in Manhattan.” My devil, it seems, cares quite a bit.

I was thinking about this the other week when my neighborhood salon asked me to appear in a promotional video. They needed footage of a client getting their hair washed, cut, styled, and—best of all—walking outside, flirting with the camera, and coyly flipping their hair. It was my Pantene Pro-V moment. I’d been waiting for this ever since I’d seen the commercials between Full House and Boy Meets World on TGIF at 8/7c, only on ABC!

And friends, I pulled out all the stops. I posed in front of a brownstone that I did not own! I took sassy struts down crosswalks! I gave postal workers the right of way on the sidewalk under the guise of being polite but really just not wanting them to ruin my shot! It was like I’d been bitten by a radioactive influencer and could see Grid Opportunities™️ everywhere I looked. Ahoy, steam rising from a manhole cover! Tally-ho, yellow taxis at a red light!

I made a joke with the salon manager about how disturbingly easy it was to know what to do. She laughed and said, “I’m glad you could fill in! We work with two influencers, but one of them was out of town and the other has a broken ankle.”

Fill in?

I’m not too proud to admit that this information was deflating. I was third place behind Gone Girl and the one who was literally wounded.

But my ego, ever quick to recover, found a way to reframe this. Sure, I thought. I could say I’m a third-string influencer. Or, by the same token, I’m a first-string plebe.

And I think there’s something juicy in all this. In first-string plebes, in identity that needs explaining, and in devils who care.

So I’m writing a memoir.

Tomorrow marks one year, to the day, since I wrote the first sentence. I was in Utah, sitting across a table from Ashmae Hoiland. She is the first person I tepidly talked to about this idea. I was looking for soft encouragement, but I’d gone to the wrong person. Ashmae conducts online courses and mentorship programs for writers finding their voice. Her advice? Do it. Start now. You have to.

“Meet me at Pioneer Book. Bring your laptop. We’re sitting down to write.”

Pioneer Book is a used bookstore in downtown Provo. It is located next door to City Limits, which is the only bar in town apart from the Marriott Hotel & Conference Center. Say, isn’t Provo a college town? Yes. 34,000 students attend BYU. And there’s just ONE bar? Ahem, like I said. There are two. And if you stay overnight in the second, there’s a Book of Mormon waiting in your nightstand.

Provo is a very cosmopolitan place. Which perhaps explains why the ambient music in Pioneer Book is a local soft rock radio station—including commercials for car dealerships. Ashmae set a timer for twenty-five minutes and started typing. I sat around for a few empty moments waiting to, I don’t know, be Joan Didion already.

That did not happen. But something else did.

So I'm back to the velvet underground
Back to the floor that I love
To a room with some lace and paper flowers
Back to the gypsy that I was
To the gypsy that I was

Look. I don’t know many things, but I do know this: when Stevie Nicks comes on the radio at the exact moment that you sit down to write your memoir’s first sentence, you do not sit slackjawed at the page. You take that blinking cursor and you make it fucking move.

To the gypsy
That remains
Her face says freedom
With a little fear
I have no fear
I have only love
And if I was a child
And the child was enough
Enough for me to love
Enough to love

“There are two very large maps of Africa in my living room.”

I have since rewritten this sentence. But the original from February 26, 2020 will always be dear to me. It is a sentence about maps—and about having something to say.

I stopped writing Gemini Mind consistently at around this time last year. I wish I could say it’s because I’ve been furiously buried in Scrivener, but that’s not true.

Two weeks after my February trip to Utah, New York went into lockdown. And the pandemic, it turns out, was far from the most jarring shift 2020 had in store for me. (I made a list. It comes in eighth.)

Friends, be careful what you wish for. If you give yourself license to write your story, you give yourself license to live it.

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.
So try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen. Squint at the screen in your head, and if you look, you will see what you are searching for, the details of the story, its direction—maybe not right this minute, but eventually. If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you’ll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about. It is hard to stop controlling, but you can do it. (Anne Lamott)

This is why I’ve gone a little quiet. Not forever, but for a while. I am breathing, listening, squinting. I am looking for intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about.

I am the this and the that. I am the devil who cares. And if my proclamation of identity needs explaining, well then.

I best get on with it.

Sedona Film Festival presents 'Stevie Nicks 24 Karat Gold The Concert' Oct. 21 & 25 | Kudos AZ

Thanks for reading Gemini Mind! Elsewhere, you can find me as @yokizzi 💫

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