One of my earliest memories is my dad holding my coat out for me as a gentleman should, and saying, “I can do it myself!” with all the irritation a three-year-old (or thereabouts) can muster. His feelings were hurt and he got mad and punished me with the silent treatment.¹

Then later, maybe I was about ten or so, because reasons, he was calmly discussing my attitude, which concerned him: “Elizabeth,² no man is an island.”

Oh, I understood what he meant immediately. It wasn’t like he hadn’t hinted at it before, but there were two problems with this advice: 1) the guy giving it thought he was an island, so WTF Dad, and 2) he really didn’t understand that from the very beginning, being offered help was saying I have no faith in you or You’re too stupid to do this yourself.³ I didn’t have words for this when I was three and I had no concept of social niceties because I was three.

Having to ask for help was even more humiliating: You were right to have no faith in me and I am too stupid to do it myself.

I started writing Dunham (that wasn’t its title back then) with a lone female pirate captain who got there on her own, and was the sole authority on her ship. She was a loner. She did everything alone. And she was a virgin because of course she was.

Anyway, life tossed me around somewhat and I started to see something: Those with power, money, or even people who just had their shit together, had support. Sometimes, lots of support. They had help along the way, from generational wealth and grooming to catching a glance of a homeless guy down on the corner that one time who gave you an approving smile and a good piece of advice. Nobody got there alone.

I spent 23 years doodling along on my lone female pirate captain who did it all on her own. But every year that passed, problems kept popping up, logical fallacies, plot holes.

How is she supposed to be educated when she just randomly plopped out of some hoo-ha with no guidance? How is she supposed to get a ship when she doesn’t have a pot to piss in and she’s “too moral” to steal?⁴ And, wait. If she’s too moral to steal, why’s she a pirate? That’s what pirates do, isn’t it? How’m I supposed to square that circle?

Meh, it’s my story, I can do what I want. I am going to shove that very big peg through that very small hole, and I’m going to do it by myself.

However, shit happened and by 1996, I’d stopped doodling on my pirate captain. It was a vestige of my past, my immaturity, my inability to bring my vision to paper because I knew I didn’t have the chops for it and had to keep writing books to acquire them.

In 2002, I got married to a wonderful man who helped me pretty much without me noticing, and by the time I did, I realized he did it out of love, not because he had no faith in my ability, intellect, or general existence. I acquired children. My interactions with other parents were … well, less than effective and pleasant. I learned. Mellowed. Maybe I softened. Learned how to pick my battles. Or maybe I was just tired of everybody’s shit and decided almost none of it was important at all.

In 2007 wrote The Proviso after an epiphany that I was going to have to chuck my idea altogether and rewrite it, which I did to my (mostly) satisfaction. Gutting all that gentleman thief, unworkable premise, stewpot thinking made my world and my writing so much better. So I very carefully opened my pirate captain files to reacquaint myself with the work. I had a vague vision, but I didn’t know how to fulfill it, and what I had already done would not work.

One day, I sat my ass down to read a romantasy wherein the main female character, a warrior commander of some military force was captured, leaving her troops in a complete mess. She had a second-in-command, but he was ineffective. This was addressed sort of, but only tangentially to point out that she was a wartime leader, but not a peacetime one. When I was younger, teens, mid-twenties, I would have felt satisfied, complete, whole. Yes, this is how it’s supposed to be. Yeah, so what if she’s not a peacetime commander? Those guys are pussies anyway.

It got me to thinking: What would happen to my pirate captain’s life’s work if something happened to her that didn’t actually kill her, and she was disabled or had to start over?

Oh, and then came the weevils.⁵ It was eye-opening. What’s this?! Pirates engage in subterfuge to win? They don’t just slug it out head-on like honorable men?⁶

My time living life, having a husband, having children got me thinking: We are a product of our time and circumstance. We do what we must. We don’t get anywhere alone.

And fuck me if I was going to allow my pirate captain to have an ineffective pussy as a second-in-command because she can’t stand to rely on someone else and lose everything she’s got if something bad happens to her.

She might be a lot of bad things, but she is not stupid.

A lot of things really bad and really good have happened around Chez Moriah the last couple of years. One of the good things is that XX tax deduction has learned how to drive and is getting out and about on her own. She works only a few minutes away, so we got used to her driving to work and back. But she has an internship 20 minutes away from home, all freeway, heavily trafficked, and sometimes very windy. Today was her first day driving it by herself, and I am nervous and scared.

Generally speaking, I tend to “borrow trouble,” as Ma Ingalls would say. I spin up scenarios in my head of all the bad things that could go wrong, and then I ruminate on them. I have tried very hard not to do that, because I found out during the Great Mojo Prepper Panic of 2008 that living that way is soul-crushing. Self-help/inspirational/affirmation memes all warn of doing this. But I do it anyway, just on a smaller scale.

I have a great deal of respect for the stoic philosophers, though, and as I learn more about them, I try to incorporate their thinking into my own. Well, today I learned of “premeditatio malorum” or, to be more specific, borrowing trouble.

On purpose.

Seneca had this to say:

What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events… Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck. All the terms of our human lot should be before our eyes.

Let me emphasize this:

What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, being mentally prepared for disaster has its advantages. You know what you should do and in the heat of the moment, you’re not making stupid decisions. On the other hand, that’s kind of a stressful way to live. If I go into a Tuesday (because Tuesdays are always bad) expecting bad things to happen, bad things are going to happen and/or I’m going to look at every wrinkle as A Bad Thing That Happened and if enough of those wrinkles are there, it is going to have been A Bad Day.

Except … yesterday was Tuesday and I took note of all the ways in which my day was easy: all my lights were green, all my lines were short, most of my errands were effortless, I got (good) things I was expecting. The worst thing that happened was that I forgot to tell Arby’s not to put tomatoes on my gyro. I was braced for a bad day because it was Tuesday, but when the day was over with I noticed that everything went my way and I was grateful for that.

I’m contemplating the role of this Stoic concept in my life. It’s something I already do but have been trying to break myself of, but now it’s been approved by philosophers I look up to. Where and how does this fit with my concomitant contemplation of boredom, contentment, happiness, and gratitude?

★★★

For a fictional treatment of Stoicism and one of my favorite novels ever, and one that informs just about everything I write, try Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full.

May all your lights be green and all your lines be short.