Free The Still Point Of The Turning World by Emily Rapp Page A

do the shitty, backbreaking stuff. And so the gods get their freedom and humans are left to try and break free of their circumstances, to change their lives.
    Our country runs on the pursuit of achievement and ambition, and on the effects of individual striving. It’s a capitalistic and therefore limited and problematic approach to vocation and purpose. For most of my life I was an ambition addict (be the thinnest, the smartest, the funniest, the
best
),
and I found fuel for this addiction everywhere I looked. On bumper stickers (“My child is an honor student at—– School”); in the assumed joys of becoming an Avon saleswoman (“It’s amazing what you can achieve with a bit of passion and hard work; call 1-800-AVON!”); in the barrage of ads for diet products that always appear on January 1 (“5 weeks to a NEW YOU! Includes the cost of food!”). In 1981, as the poster child for the Wyoming March of Dimes, I was quoted in the local newspaper as saying, “If you believe in yourself, you can do anything.”
    Do more, be skinnier, get richer, be famous (and then be even more famous), get a bigger house and a bigger car and a hotter girlfriend and a better life.
Be
better. When did having a good life mean living one that other people envied? Behind this drive to achieve lurks a deeper desire to be transformed. The standards for what is “normal” have become so formalized and yet so restrictive that people need a break from that horrible feeling of never being able to measure up to whatever it is they think will make them acceptable to other people and therefore to themselves. People get sick with this idea of change; I have been sick with it. We search for transformation in retreats, juice fasts, drugs and alcohol, obsessive exercise, extreme sports, sex. We are all trying to escape our existence, hoping that a better version of us is waiting just behind that promotion, that perfect relationship, that award or accolade, that musical performance, that dress size, that raucous night at a party, that hot night with a new lover. Everyone needs to be pursuing something, right? Otherwise, who are we? How about, quite simply, people? How about human? This is the great message of Shelley’s
Frankenstein.
Part of Ronan’s myth was this acknowledgment that we need the freedom to be people, that’s all.
    On Valentine’s Day I dressed Ronan in his “All You Need Is Love” T-shirt with its black-and-white photograph of the Beatles. I took him to acupuncture with Dr. Janet. I fed him heaping spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream. I wondered what he would be like next year—what kind of medications he would be on, what kind of movement he would still be able to make, if he would be able to see me, if he would still be eating comfortably, if he would even be alive. What kind of baby would he be? The answer: mine. Even after he was dead: mine. Wasn’t that enough?
    Not for everyone. In the summer of 2002 I taught “gifted and talented kids” (I don’t believe in that terminology, as it almost always means rich kids, nothing more) at Stanford for a summer session. The class was called “Writing and Imagination,” and the kids were smart and funny and, of course, creative, although several of them did complain to me that they had gotten stuck in my boring writing class because their math scores weren’t high enough. Most of them were also curiously stressed out. They would write a story or a poem and then nervously show me what they’d written, asking, “Did I do it right?” I tried to explain to them that creativity, by its very nature and definition, allows for variation; that there is no “right” way. They blinked at me and returned to their seats, often giving me the hairy eye because I’d refused to answer their question with a simple yes or no.
    One girl, I’ll call her Sananda, never asked me if her stories were “right” or “good.” They were, in fact, extraordinary. She took risks in terms of image and