On being bad at birthdays

I’m going have a moment of honesty, here: I’m bad at birthdays. Really bad. I’m not at all an “I’m growing older with grace and appreciation” kind of gal. I’m more of a duck-and-cover, avoid the truth, “point me to your best anti-wrinkle cream” kind of gal. Though I’m certainly invested in developing the poise and gratitude toward aging that others around me seem to embody, I’m not there yet. I’ve never, ever been a natural at accepting myself as I am.   

And yet. When I stop to pause, when I look beyond the number and the achy joints and the new-and-already-deep eleven lines between my eyes, some of the changes that these past years have brought, I would not give back, not for anything. One point of development has been finding better ways to balance empathy with self-respect and assertiveness; in other words, I’m less likely to sacrifice my beliefs or needs to stay in others’ good graces; more likely to stick to my principles and have a dialogue or conflict about them if needed. Simultaneously, I’m more invested than ever in making the world better and kinder, one small action at a time. 

Maybe most importantly, I’m starting to own and honor what I am and accept what I’m not. I am moody. I am caring. I can be flaky and inconsistent despite having good intentions. My working memory isn’t good, so I will tell you the same story that I told you yesterday—but hopefully, it still makes you laugh. I am not a great hostess, but I am an okay bearer of random gifts and food. I have limits, physically and emotionally, and some of them are new. And finally, finally, I am accepting that I am not everyone’s type, and this is utterly okay, and in fact good. Being selective with who I pour my effort into is adaptive, both for me and for others—yet importantly, I can be kind and gracious to people even if we aren’t destined to be BFF. 

I am a writer. I am an activist. 

I am human. 

I’m 36. 

And if the price of the knowledge I now have at 36 was growing another year older, then so be it. Slowly, slowly I will learn to make peace with this process.

But I probably won’t be there by 37.

Penning privilege: What I learned from SCBWI 2018

When I attend conferences, my goal is to learn and retain one important thing. Just one, because at conferences, we take in data with indiscriminate abandon, and even with pages upon pages of notes and hours of excited post-lecture discourse with bright peers, who can keep more than one big takeaway? The conference I just attended (SCBWI, LA, 2018) was focused on writing kidlit, so I figured I leave with something to do with craft, or sales, or networking.

I did learn writing things. They’re in my notes.

What I will retain, however, is an expanded sense of my privilege, as a writer, and as a person.

As a counseling psychologist I’ve spent years in the study of it, in the awareness-building of it, in the talking to my clients and peers about it. And still, there are those life moments where I see the world through a different lens and come into contact with the extent of what I don't know. This weekend was one of those times. 

I became aware of my class privilege, as well as my lack of it, while chatting with conference colleagues about travel. We swapped thoughts on places we’d been and where we want to go. One woman shared which European destinations worked best for her young family, during their yearly summer two-week vacations.  Another shared which hotel pillows she preferred, and which beds, and which had the best toilet paper. I was swapping info and learning info, because my family can afford to travel a modest amount, but at the same time I was thinking about how neither of my parents had even been on an airplane until they were in their thirties. Our family vacations growing up were spending three days in nearby Kansas City or Des Moines, baseball games and museums and Dairy Queens, a far cry from the Isle of Capri or Edinburgh. 

My mom is as much a bookworm as I and had always spoken of writing a book, but in looking back, when would she have had time to pen the next American classic? Between 12-hour shifts working the floor at the county hospital? Or maybe in the one-hour time slot between suppertime and running off to my sporting events?  My mother would not have had the privilege of writing, not like I do, with my career and my spouse’s career and the way my life is set up. I’m so aware that there are many people in the world like my mother, those who have words inside of them that could be beautiful novels, but who do not the privileges of time and resources for writing. And yet, while I can afford time to write, and I can take my kids on trips in a way my parents couldn’t, and I had the means to come to this conference this year, I do not have the privilege of this conference fee and travel expense being a drop in the bucket, a one-off, something I can count on doing every year, as it seemed to be to so many people I talked to.

I became more aware of my racial privilege, in a city with far more racial and ethnic diversity than what is typically seen in my home city of Lincoln, Nebraska. It was unlikely anyone was going to doubt my motives because of the color of my skin. I was aware that, as a writer, I do and will come under less scrutiny than my peers of color. As Malinda Lo, one of the conference presenters, spoke of, the difficulty level I start with as a White woman is relatively easy, especially compared with those from marginalized groups, whose default might be "medium" or even "hard." I also thought more about my writing and became increasingly invested in the idea of not letting my manuscripts reflect “default race” as White.

And then there was this new-old thing going on, that has to do with both privilege and oppression. I was aware of the slide of eyes down the bends and curves of my body; men, in a way that made no pretense of hiding sexual interest; women, in barely-veiled disapproval of something hard to pinpoint: my body, my clothes, the way I carry myself? I must note here, too, that this didn’t happen with every person I encountered by any means, not even most. But when it did, I felt it, right in the scarred-over places of my patchwork heart. As an overweight, overachieving, straight-A straight laced teen I would have reveled in the appraisal, even the “bad” attention, because it was still attention. Even ten years ago, when I was still adjusting to a new type of body and a new type of interaction with the world, I had loud internal monologue when out in public, one that screamed, “I have a body! I am not just a brain on legs! Please, please, do you see me?”

And now it’s different. Though sometimes I still feel like girl who at age ten wore women’s size 18 clothing pulled off the racks of Wal-Mart because that’s what fit and that’s what we could afford, I’m more adjusted to this size 8 self, used to the way my body feels, the way the world treats me. By the third day of this conference, though, I started feeling when someone’s eyes crawled over my body. I felt sad. What hurt is that the dip between my breasts and the cleft between my legs was apparently a much bigger deal than the space between my ears.

I had the urge to run up to my room and change clothes, put something “more modest” on. Something that would make me invisible, or at least, no longer an object. But the feminist within me rallied, pushed back, “But why?” I was wearing my favorite dress, the one I call “my happy frock,” because I wore it when I went to Hamilton and the fabric is woven with all of my favorite colors, and it is breathable and cool and L.A. is hot. Why would I swap out my happiest clothing for less-comfortable camouflage?

I left the dress on, but I stopped looking people in the eye. Carefully, carefully I kept my eyes facing forward, or at the ground, or on my phone. Even though I didn’t let myself go incognito, shame still led me to shrink down, back down, not be myself, the self that would look people on the street in the eye and smile.

In this body of gained and lost weight I have gained and lost privilege, yet overall, the objectification of me has merely shifted. As an overweight youth, I was a funny, maybe tragic aberration, and now, I’m a sexual commodity.  

As I sit here in the Los Angeles International Airport, at a charging station in my simple black peasant midi dress that I purchased for $25 at Old Navy, I think of the privilege that brought me here. I have the means and support to be across the country from home, taking time away from work and my family. I have a laptop that I’m plunking away on. I sip on a Dunkin Donuts iced latte and snack on M&Ms, because I could buy these things and because no one will judge someone my size for putting junk in my body. People do not clutch their purses closer when I come near, because I’m White and not seen as inherently criminal.

And the man sitting across the table from me cannot stop looking at my chest. I’ve got my eyes dropped to my laptop, because I need to need to need to need to need to finish this post, but also, I don’t want to look at his bushy eyebrows, red-alcoholic nose, frizzled hair. I don’t want to see him. But I know he’s there. Maybe before I leave, I’ll get brave and shoot him a return look, one that lets him know that I disapprove. A look worthy of Minerva McGonagall herself. But maybe I won’t, because I’m here alone and he’s bigger than me and I am, after all, a woman.

I’m coming home from this conference with more than I thought I’d leave with. A suitcase of new books, a notebook full of plot ideas, a bulleted list of things to discuss with my agent, a handful of writerly contacts to keep in touch with, a deepened understanding and relationship with my dear critique partner, and this, my one big takeaway thought, the one I’ll retain without help or review: I have privilege. I lack privilege.

And my fervent hope is that this post helps you to think more holistically about your own.

The gift of closure

Every day, life hands you a gift. Rarely, it hands you a Very Big Gift.

Sometimes that Very Big Gift comes in the form of unexpected closure.

We all want closure, right? Many of my clients are very explicit in their desire for it. One client described the loose ends in her life as constituting her very own Circle of Hell, a fiery inferno of What Ifs, I should’ve saids, ‘I wish’es, if onlys.

It’s human to crave the end of something distressful, and also to believe that we must see the end of that something to truly heal and move on. We as a society tend to like symmetry, and full circles, and clean cuts.

Yet, we live in world that’s inherently asymmetrical, the circles more like wavy ovals and rarely all the way closed, and the cuts jagged, hard to stitch up. The world we live in is messy. And despite our best efforts, we as people are messy.

It is for these reasons that I, more often than not, end up in a tough love position when my clients tell me that they need this thing to move on in their life. They need that apology. They need that validation. They need to be heard, or seen, or noticed. Need, need, need, they say, and I smile, and nod, and then say, “no, you don’t.”

You see, it’s a matter of want. We want those edges sewn up. We want to know we’ve said all we could, or that we were understood, or that there are no hard feelings. We want to apologize or be apologized to. We want the mess cleaned up, swept up, stowed away.

But we don’t need it. And in fact, I think it’s the believing that we need something from someone, in order to move on, that keeps people sunk into distress, despair, and with bad habits on repeat. When we rely on the reactions of someone else to determine our healing, we put the key to our contentment into someone else’s pocket.

Closure in the form of an interaction with another person, a certain thing you want to say or want said to you, is certainly something you can crave, yearn for, and seek out. And sometimes, if you’re really, very lucky, you just might get it. But hear this: You Are Not Entitled to It. If you get it, consider it a gift. Consider it an ultimate win.

Nine times out of ten, people don’t get closure in the form of an interaction with another person. They get it from somewhere inside of them. They learn to think about the situation in a different way. They accept that there are things that will never get to be said, or heard, or felt. They accept their lack of power in de-cluttering all of the chaos in the very messy world, and they find ways to move on with their lives. It can be done.

My life is just as messy as anyone else’s; maybe a little more so. That being said, I’ve got some broken circles hanging out limbo, swinging from branches, taunting me with their lack of completion. One of these broken circles, in particular, was not only broken, but also on fire. It has kept me up at night. I’ve cried about it, raged about it. It comes up in my dreams and I wake drenched with cold sweat and cursing my pockmarked and hypersensitive heart. And because I thought it was the best thing to do, I worked very hard at making peace this thing, internally. My gut told me that it wasn’t fair to involve the other person who held the missing link in my incomplete circle—because my circle was my burden to carry, not theirs.

I made progress. I left the circle hanging up in the branches, scorched and ashy, but no longer burning. I became able to tolerate its brokenness. I accepted it as it was.

Then I happened to run into the person who had the power to complete that tattered circle. And because I am both very lucky and also because there is goodness in the world, the person gifted me with closure. I said some stuff I’d wanted to say. I got some questions answered that had weighed on me. I felt heard and forgiven and valued, and I hope the other person did, too.

To be clear: I didn’t deserve this interaction. I didn’t earn it. I wasn’t entitled to it. It just happened. It was a gift.

I’ve still got a lot of broken circles hanging out in my branches—unfinished business and unanswered questions and points of grief and loss. It’s pretty human to have a few. And I know with a certainty that runs bone deep that many of my circles will never be closed; they’ll always be missing a piece, or bent beyond recognition, or crafted with a dotted line.

But I’ve gotta tell you: I am grateful, grateful, grateful to have one less now.

Half my life

I recently turned 35. I’ve been with my husband, Jeb, for 17.5 years. Do the math: I’ve been with this man half my life.

Yet not even the knowledge that comes with time can stop me from sometimes being plagued with doubt. I often worry whether we’re doing marriage “the right way.” I don’t know about you, but I do this thing where I look at other couples and assume they have it all figured out, everything in their life is perfect and wonderful. I go so far as to let others’ lives play out like movies in my mind. Other couples, watching every TV show together, spending all night talking. Agreeing on every single opinion about every single thing in life, ever. Skipping through dewy meadows in their perfectly pressed clothes and clean shoes, then going home to their pristine houses. (Y’all are killing it, in my imagination.)

I wonder if people do that with me and Jeb. We have an exceptionally well-documented life via social media, due to Jeb being a photographer and also knowing a lot of photographers. A quick perusal of either of our Facebook  accounts reveals lots of pretty pics of us, all made up. Tons of snaps of our kids being awesome. Photos from tropical vacations, and warm, cozy holidays. Our social media screams “We’re happy! SO FREAKING HAPPY!”

And that’s about half of the truth. A lot of the time, we are happy, content, doing fine.  

And a lot of the time, we’ve struggled.

Getting married is easy. You find someone you love. You think, yeah, I could spend my life with this person. You have a celebration and your friends and family all show up and everyone cries. The world is your oyster; everything is possible.

It’s staying married that’s hard.

If you’d have asked me at twenty-three, which is how old I was when I got married, I’d have predicted that over the years, I’d change very little—I knew who I was, what I wanted, the road I was headed down. I had it all figured out.

Except I didn’t and I didn’t have enough foresight to see that I didn’t.

People can change a hell of a lot over time, and I think it’s possible that Jeb and I changed more than most. I pursued many years of higher education, and due to that, was exposed to ideas and people and adversity and growth and culture in a way that molded me, shaped me, carved me into a different person. As for Jeb, he left his job as a public school educator and became a full-time photographer/creative. He learned that he needs to be making things, thinking outside of the box, and not answering to a hierarchy to feel fulfilled through his work.

We also became parents of two kiddos in a span of twenty months, so as we were stretching and learning and developing our singular identities, we were also immersed in the task of keeping tiny humans alive.

The years marched on. I got my PhD and started a private practice. The kids started school. We went to family celebrations. We hung out with friends. We did date nights sometimes. We traveled. We pursued individual hobbies and interests. We built a house and moved to a lovely new neighborhood.

And then one day in our thirties we woke up and realized we had no idea who the other was. I won’t speak for his side of it, but my personal awakening came with the question: Why are we together? We had different groups of friends. We didn’t read the same books, or necessarily gravitate to the same kinds of media, or have any hobbies in common. I loved Jeb, but I didn’t know why I was with him anymore.

At about the same time I was grappling with these serious questions about my marriage, I became depressed— so depressed I couldn’t even see straight. It seemed like every decision I’d ever made in my life was wrong. I questioned my entire existence as a human being: where I’d come from, what I was doing now, where I was going. It was hell. And Jeb got angry and withdrew. He didn’t know what to do with me; didn’t understand what I was trying to say when I talked about my questions, about my doubts, about what wasn’t working for me in our marriage. In hindsight, he was depressed, too, but men sometimes look different when they’re depressed. (Google Masked Male depression for more on that.)

And we fought. Good Lord, did we fight. There were tears and storming out and many nights spent sleeping apart. I spent the night of our 11^th wedding anniversary at my parent’s house, that’s how bad it was.

We contemplated separation. We ate meals together with our kids and had our best “everything is fine” faces on, even as I researched apartments, always late at night, or at the office, while I wept my way through my fifth box of Kleenex.  

But in the chaos, something miraculous happened. We fought for each other. Even through all the squabbling and miscommunicating and passive-aggression, we kept coming back to the same point: we wanted to try. We wanted our family. We wanted to see if we could find each other again.

So we tried. We went to therapy together, and went to therapy individually. First, we bent. I started trying harder to listen to him when he was sharing something he was excited about, even when I was exhausted from listening to people all day, and even if what he was saying didn’t interest me. He started greeting me when I came in the door after work, and went out of his way to tell me all the ways he appreciates me. Essentially, we slowly figured out the ways we had been failing each other and made the others’ emotional needs a priority again. We made a few big shifts, but mostly, we made a million little changes.

And after awhile, we had bent so much that we softened; the rigid edges of us melting. I let him back into the places in my spirit that had long been steeled against him. Though he isn’t and will never again be the man I married, he became a man I wanted to stay married to.

I don’t think that Jeb’s my soulmate. This is because I don’t believe in soulmates, this idea that you can meet someone and POOF, love happens and it’s forever and you don’t have to do anything to make it work. I used to buy into this stuff, and sometimes that wily belief wants to come weaseling back in—mostly when Jeb and I are struggling. I think, during those rough times: “Oh, if only I’d found my soulmate and married him, then I wouldn’t be going through any of this arguing or pain or doubt.” But you know what? I call bullshit. What I really believe in is two people fighting for each other and choosing each other again and again and again, every day. I can’t think of any better definition of love than that.

I didn’t write this for some kind of “atta girl.” I’m not aiming for you all to see me as a paragon of morality, because believe you me, the level of fuck uppery that I’ve reached during these years of growth and struggle has been unreal. I also fully anticipate that I will in some way, at some point, mess something up again.  Our struggle isn't over. It's not a thing that ends. I think marriage/partnership is less like a straight line with some kind of destination that a couple can arrive at, and more like a circle with little pit stops along the path, some happy, some sad, some totally fucked up. And round and round the circle you go, hopefully learning how to navigate the rough times as you know yourself and your partner better.

I also didn’t write this to shame those of you who have divorced or ended long term partnerships. I don’t think every relationship can be saved, or should be.  

I wrote this for the folks like me, who are sitting there comparing their imperfect relationship to everyone else’s “perfect” one, lurking and hiding in secret shame. If your marriage is messy, if there’s some stain on it that you wish wasn’t there but is, if you’ve hurt your partner or been hurt, if you’ve wondered if you made the “right” choice in a partner—you’re not alone. You’re more normal than you think. The more I talk to people who I’m real with, and who are real with me, the more I realize that every long term romantic relationship has problems. It’s what we do with the problem that matters.

As for me, I’m going to keep trying with Jeb for as long as it makes sense to try. Being with him for half of my life hasn’t been nearly long enough.  

Photo: Sarah Gudeman   http://www.sarahgudeman.com

Dust

8/13/17

Sometimes I write bittersweet things. Is there anything more beautiful than that edge between joy and pain? Here's a little snippet from a work-in-progress novel. 

***

It’s been months.

Days pass where I hardly think of you at all.

Days pass where I am buried and smothering in you.

I don’t know which is better.

There was a time that I wanted every trace of you away from me, because the shards you left sticking out of my skin were bleeding and painful. I picked you out with tweezers. I threw the bits and pieces of you into the air and watched them soar.

And now I bleed less but I remember less. I can hardly remember the way that your chocolate eyes crinkled and your hair grayed—just a little—at the temples. Your face is all blurry, like a moonlight lake reflection of you, not Actual You. I’m not sure what your voice sounds like anymore.

Sounded like.

Remember when you started talking about me in the past tense? I do remember that.

I’m not sorry that I met you. Months ago, when I was bleeding, I was sorry. But now I can see that if I wouldn’t have known you, there are so many other things I wouldn’t have known, some of them so precious to me that I wouldn’t be willing to give them back, not for anything. Not even if I could.

And so even though maybe you ruined my life a little bit, I have no choice but to welcome in my grudging gratitude for you.

I don’t know what to wish for you. When I think of you, you’re smiling. Happy. Looking at your new lover like she is made of magic, your light reflected in her eyes. On my very best days, I think of this and send you warmth, and kindness, and “I’m so glad, I want this for you, you deserve happiness” -type intentions.

And on my lesser days, I wish thoughts of me would steal over you and soak into your body like heavy August damp.

Maybe in years, when so many days have passed that I’ve lost track, and the memories are faded and yellow and brittle with age, this will all mean nothing.

But even then, in some recess of my heart you will stay. You held yourself out to me with cupped hands, and I drank you in. You’ll be with me even as memories turn to dust and scatter in the wind.

I suppose I hope you are being you. Wherever you are. 

To the friends who saw Me and liked me anyway

On one of the last days of my undergraduate career, one of my best friends wrote this in my graduation card. “When I met you, I didn’t like you. I was a fool.”

Youch.

But it only took me about thirty seconds to completely understand what she meant. Why she’d felt that way. 

You see, I wasn’t the easiest person to get to know, in my younger years. It was weird: I was SO excited to go to college. I’d thought I would reinvent myself, create a new identity. I was all outward confidence and gusto, and if anyone would have asked, I’d have told them I was planning to take UNL by the balls.

Yet I didn’t know myself at all. There was all of this stuff happening on the inside of me that I couldn’t see.

I entered my freshman year convinced that I’d already made all the close friends I was ever going to make, EVER. I thought that only people who’d known me my whole life, since the beginning, would really care for me. In other words, I didn’t see myself as likable. It was more like I saw people as tolerating me—and not because they wanted to, but because they’d had to.

That (unconscious) attitude followed me around UNL for my first two years. I was closed off, reserved. I didn’t put much time or effort into making new friends. I poured every ounce of energy into academics, the one thing I knew I did well. I’m pretty sure I came off as a quieter, less spirited Hermione—the 11-year old Hermione living in the 19-year old me. (I even had really poofy hair. Hermione central!)

Yet even though I had no idea how to find it or build it, there was a big and growing part of me that craved community. Belongingness. So I applied to be a Resident Assistant for UNL. I’m forever grateful to the late (and wonderful) Sheryl Haug, the woman who chose me to be a part of her staff at Cather Hall. She saw something in me and gave me a chance. Without her, I’d probably still be Grangering it up, able to tackle serious math theorems but unable to make friends. 

I got a chance to meet my future fellow coworkers the Spring of my sophomore year. I had super unchecked anxiety at the meet-up, and this came out of me as rigidity. Shut-down mode. And it didn’t matter, because these people weren’t going to like me much, anyway.

Though not a lot of real info got over my walls during that first encounter, there was this one guy who stood out, who I thought about long after the day had passed. He was everything I wasn’t yet everything I was. He was blunt, sarcastic, uninhibited. I was none of those things. Yet he also seemed to love Moulin Rouge and kids and music—like me. He scared the bejesus out of me and I dreaded seeing him in the fall. And, because life is life, he was the very first person I saw when I rolled up to move into Cather Hall the following August. We saw each other, and he—who wears all of his emotions on his face—gave me a lackluster hi, obviously not thrilled to see me. And I spoke through my teeth to my dad, “I don’t think I’m going to get along with that one.”

Our whole staff went on a retreat together, immediately, the same day we all moved in. It was a weekend full of ice breakers, trust falls, ropes courses-- you know, all that bonding crap. But I'll be damned if it didn't work. I let down my guard and started to let people see who I actually was. And they didn’t hate me. And that guy, the one who scared the shit out of me? He quickly became one of the best friends I ever had. (His name is Brett Hall and he is a stand up guy.)

My RA staff friends became lifelines to the self I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be stiff and scared of my own shadow. I wanted to be fun and silly and brave. I wanted to laugh a lot. I wanted to believe that I was a likable person, even if I’m not everyone’s type. These friends taught me that I could be...well, me.  And they brought me Razzles and ate Thanksgiving dinner in my room with me and drug me to Tarentino movies I'd never go to otherwise and drank Parrot Bay with me and bitched about hall government with me and hugged me when my great-grandma died and covered my socials for me when I was too depressed to handle them. They were always there. (Literally. I lived, worked, ate, and went to class with these people.)

For a long time I’ve known what these guys did for me. I’ve talked about it in graduate school classes, and with my clients. I even pseudo-used this life experience as inspiration for my dissertation, which focused on social adjustment to college for rural students. I don’t know if I ever really thanked them, though.

So, to all of my Cather Staff peeps: thank you, thank you, for seeing all of my weird quirks and liking me anyway. I don’t know where I’d be today if it hadn’t been for you.

You will all be my friends 4 Life.

Big Pimpin'. (Yeah, I just said that.)

Find me on Twitter and Instagram @AllisonLBitz  


I never thought I'd see the day where the word Pimp appeared in my blog. Once, during a therapy session with one of my clients, I made the offhand comment that promos for the movie The Giver seemed to be "Pimping TSwift pretty hard." Later, I worried so much this had been an anti-feminist thing to say that I emailed the client to apologize.

And now you know a little bit about what I'm like. Holla back y'all!

Okay, so lemme get straight into some Pimp Juice:

Be Still in a visual nutshell

About Be Still

Living in the community of rural Fairfax, a town where sports are almost as important as church, and where a family's last name matters a whole heck of a lot, isn't easy for every teen. Fortunately for high school freshman Shelby Novotny, she has it all: basketball talent, a powerful family name, good friends, stellar grades. She's even earned the respect of her community through her unyielding patience for her mother, who struggles with bipolar disorder.

When Shelby's basketball coach, who's a longtime friend of her father's, takes an interest in helping her develop her talent, no one bats an eye. Everyone trusts Jeff Vogel. His last name has been part of the Fairfax social thread for generations.

Yet Jeff's interest in Shelby goes beyond her basketball abilities.

Shelby falls in love with Jeff. It's wrong, and she knows it, but it's meant to be, so she persists. For years, she lives a double life, maintaining her Good Girl image while also having as many trysts with Jeff as they can manage.

Three years later, Shelby finds out that her star crossed-destiny was all of Jeff's design. She learns that he has had student "loves" before her, and he seems to be working on the next one already.

Shelby finds herself torn. Report what she now realizes is abuse, and send a row of dominoes tumbling down: Dad loses his position as school board president. Mom goes into a depressive episode. Jeff loses his job and likely his family. The Novotny name, forever tarnished. If anyone believes her in the first place.

Yet if she sits on her secret, it's only a matter of time before the next girl meets the same fate as she and the girls before her.

Be Still is an 90,000 word YA contemporary fiction with series potential.

Q & A 

What else does Be Still have going on?

• Snarky dialogue
• Parents who are doing the best they can
• Strong father-daughter dynamics
• A dad who moves from passively supporting rape culture to taking a stand against it
• A fantastically witty mom
• A creepy, complicated antagonist 
• An adorable peer love interest for Shelby (not Coach! I'm talking someone her age)
• Rural, small-town culture
• Basketball! It's the backdrop for the drama... like how football was for Friday Night Lights

Who might like Be Still? 

• Readers of Rainbow Rowell
• People who loved The Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Lindsey Lee Johnson
• Anyone curious about what Nabokov's Lolita might have sounded like from the perspective of slightly older Lolita
• Lovers of One Tree Hill or Friday Night Lights

Why is it called Be Still?

The easiest thing about this MS was the title. "Be still" is something that Jeff says to Shelby with frequency. And there's more to it, but I want you to read the MS to find out!

Why did you write about such a dark theme? You seem like kind of a silly person. 

I know, right?! Laughing is my favorite. I am 60% silly.

And then I'm 40% pretty hardcore.

I feel like this MS came for me. I really do. It happened in my day job, where I work as a psychologist in private practice. One day in my first year, a client disclosed that she had been in a relationship with her band teacher when she was in high school. Okay. I took it as an anomaly. The next year, another client came in and told me the same thing, only she'd slept with her 8TH GRADE MATH TEACHER (when she was in 8th grade). And now five years into my practice, I've heard versions of the student-teacher relationship story many more times. Spoken painfully, tearfully, shamefully.  I thought to myself, "This is a story that's been untold. I want to give these young people a voice. I want society to understand what it's like to live in their shoes." Shelby was born out of this desire.

Why should you choose me as a mentee?

1) I will do what it takes to make my MS shine! I'm ready to listen to your expertise, and I'm ready to work. I'm willing to make major edits.

2) I am growth-oriented. Although I don't like failure any more than the next person, I accept that it's part of the process of getting better. I'm willing to take risks. I will be vulnerable with my mentor. My mind and heart will be open to your ideas. I see my MS, and indeed my very personhood, as always, always a work in progress.

3) I pick really good GIFS in Twitter conversations. I work hard at this. Though I do have a couple that I tend to really like and overuse. My pick for this post WAS GOING TO BE the Meredith Grey "Pick me! Choose me!" scene, because duh. But a lot of people already used that for their pimping. So I will choose another favorite:

Hermione Raise Hand GIF from Harrypotter GIFs

4) I want to form a relationship with my mentor. I mean, of course I want my MS to get shinier through the mentoring process. But I love people, and I want to love you, prospective mentor. Not in a creepy way. Not too creepy, anyway. I probably won't window peep at your house or dig through your trash. But I might try to find out when your birthday is so that I can send you a card. Or find out your favorite stuff so I can Tweet all the right GIFs at you. And cheerlead your progress on whatever you are conquering these days.

I could have probably summed all that of that up just by saying I'M A HUFFLEPUFF, Y'ALL.

5) I am organized and task-oriented when the occasion calls for it. See my numbered list here? See?

6) I work hard. So, so hard. Rest and relaxation are actually harder for me to do than work. So if you want a worker bee...pick me. :) (also, if you want a poet, pick me. I guess).

What's your favorite color? 

Seriously, that, of anything you could ask, is what you want to know? Fine. It's blue-green, the color of the Caribbean sea.

What's your other favorite stuff? 

That's better.

I love my husband and my kids. And my kitties. And Stranger Things.

See us? Bunch of dorks. But man, we're the best dorks. (The kids haven't actually seen Stranger Things--we don't think they're old enough-- but we made them pose for the card anyway.)

I love Harry Potter. Maybe a little too much. (Is there such a thing?) I recently defeated my very HP-oriented group of cousins in HP Trivia, one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. My cousin with the Dumbledore tattoo was PISSED.

Other loves:
   TV: Parks and Rec, Silicon Valley, Downton Abbey, The Office, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Mozart in the Jungle, West Wing
   Movies: HP Series, LOTR series, Beauty and the Beast (both), THE FIRST PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. ONLY THE FIRST ONE.
   Music: The Head and the Heart, First Aid Kit, Lumineers, OK-GO, Strumbellas, Florence and the Machine, HAMILTON SOUNDTRACK, Garth Brooks, Queen, Tom Petty, Cake
   Hobbies: I'm a baller (league volleyball), voracious reader, loving gardener, and enthusiastic karaoke singer.

Books:  (*cracks knuckles*)....where do I even begin?

All the books by Rainbow Rowell
Outlander Series- Diana Gabaldon
All the books by Tana French
The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Small Great Things- Jodi Piccoult
The Night Circus- Erin Morgenstern
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry- Rachel Joyce
East of Eden- John Steinbeck
Bellweather Rhapsody- Kate Racculia
The Sun is Also a Star- Nicola Yoon
The Forgotten Garden- Kate Morton
The Perks of Being a Wallflower- Stephen Chbosky
Broken for You- Stephanie Kallos
The Time Traveller's Wife- Audrey Niffenegger
 

Please don't be strangers, y'all. I want to know you. Hit me up on Twitter @allisonlbitz. 

via GIPHY

Big shout out to Brenda Drake for putting on Pitch Wars, and to Lana Pattinson for hosting #Pimpmybio!