Locked In vs. Locked Out

Growing up my parents always had small social gatherings that they would invite their friends to who in turn bring their children my age. I would always love to play with these kids but there was always that one little girl or boy that I never wanted to play with. So when my parents' friends would begin to show up with their children I would quickly grab the little girl that was my "best friend" and we would run and play. We would go into my room and lock the door. We would play house, school, beauty store, anything we could think of we played. Even though we would be having the time of our lives I can remember times in which the friend I didn't want to play with would bang on the door. Sometimes she would cry but I never wanted to let her in. After awhile an adult would wander down the hall and pick her up. She would then be in the care of the adults for the night. She might get to have a special desert or get to watch her favorite tv show. But I always got to play with the friend that I wanted to play with. Looking back at it now I wonder if it was really worth it. Had I let her in and played with her would I have gotten a good dessert too?
In a roundabout way I can relate this to Virginia Woolf's idea of "how unpleasant it is to be locked out...[but] how it is worse perhaps to be locked in". I think Woolf was trying to depict the idea that either way women have difficulty becoming successful writers, or holding any position of authority. How women were reliant on men to have a home yet they wanted to have a job of their own. The other side of the table is that women that have a job of their own often had difficutly providing for their families. I relate this to my story in that even though I was able to play with my friend I still missed out on that dessert that every kid wants yet the little girl on the other side of the door didn't get to play with me yet she got to have that dessert and have freedoms that I didn't have.
Sometimes I wish that these figuritive doors could be dutch doors. Women can open half of it. We can still see out into the world but we are not ostrasized and critized for having a job of our own and we are able to maintain the comforts of life.

Haunted Houses and Writing

A couple of years ago my friends and I went to the Niles Haunted House. Its the go-to place for scaring during the fall. While we were there my best friend and I went through this maze. You had to first go through this part that was set up like a maze of office cubicles. If you wandered long enough and looked pitiful you might get a ghoul or ghost to help you out. Once you finally reached what you thought was the end you had to run through a series of rooms. One of the room that I remember was a room that was all black with black light in it. I also remember there being loud music and a strobe light. It was like a little rave in this room except for the fact you were absolutely terrified that something was going to jump out from behind you.

I relate this experience to writing, or most of it in a sense. When you are given a topic to write about you think about it. You may try jotting various ideas down but I always end up backtracking and taking another route. If all else fails and you can't find your way out or figure out what to write about you seek help, from friends, professors, family, granted they are not as scary as the ghouls and ghosts in the haunted house but they are there for relatively the same purpose. Then finally when I finally figure out what I am going to write about I relate it to I finally got out of the cubicle maze portion of the haunted house. I then have my ideas flowing and I made it through room one. Then...I am in room two. The strobe light, black light room. When I am writing it always seems that for the first part of the process I am breezing right through it. I know what to write about and I know what I want to say then BOOM! I stop. Its like the light turned off. In that moment when I realize that I don't know what to write its like I'm in the dark and am just groping for the exit, then BOOM! its back. I then have to furiously throw everything down that has just come to me before I lose it again. This is like the perpetual flashing of the strobe light. I see moments of inspiration and then they are gone. In those few moments I am scrambling to write down as much as I can as fast as I can before the light gets turned off and I am left in that state of darkness.

Finally when I am done and I have exited the maze I can turn to a friend and we can decompress. We can laugh about the funny things we can laugh at the fact that we wandered the same 5x5 area for twenty minutes. Its like that with writing. Once I have finally finished writing my initial thoughts and they have taken a semi-paper form I can begin to look over them. I can then see what I liked about it and I can organize my thoughts. I can see where I made a wrong turn and where I needed to backtrack and make things more clear. Its the end of the maze where I realize that the writing process wasn't so bad and that maybe as long as I have someone there with my I could potentially do it again.