Looking Back: 2019 Top Stories

My personal Top 3 and favorite Top 3 from others

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

In response to Daryl Bruce’s Top 3 prompt, I took on the challenge of picking three of my own stories that I’m proudest of and selecting three favorites from among many by my fellow writers. After much consideration, here’s what stood out to me in 2019.

My Personal Top 3

Smokescreen

An essay about moving past my strained relationship with my father, Smokescreen was my first piece to be accepted by a literary journal outside of Medium and opened the door to publishing regularly on Medium. I shared Smokescreen in a creative nonfiction Facebook group and was invited to publish it in Indelible Ink on Medium.

The essay was curated in Family, and I received numerous comments about how the piece resonated with readers. Its publication was the permission I’d been waiting for to embrace my identity as a creative writer. It boosted my self-confidence and is the piece I come back to when my confidence begins to wane.

Altered Perceptions

After Smokescreen’s positive reception on Medium, I began to comb through writing exercises completed for various classes and workshops I’ve taken. Altered Perceptions, about my husband’s humorous first kayaking experience, began as an exercise in description. While the story itself is fine — my husband gets disoriented and thinks he’s floating downriver when he’s twenty yards in front of the dock where I stand — it needed something more. There was a lesson in there somewhere, and thus Altered Perceptions was born.

What’s special to me about this piece is that it showed me how I can take existing material and weave a bigger story around it. As I learned in a recent course on story structure, there should always be a top story (my husband’s experience) and a bottom story (perceptions can be misleading).

When Loss Becomes Part of Us

I’ve always used writing to work through my feelings, but When Loss Becomes Part of Us was the first time I had written about how I process emotions, specifically grief. I was shocked by the reception this essay received. It was curated in Family and Mental Health, and many readers commented about their own experiences with grief.

Like Smokescreen, this essay resonated with readers, and a few thanked me for sharing the concept of absorbing grief into our emotional tapestry as an alternative to the idea of “moving on” from grief. Both essays showed me how being vulnerable on the page is a form of therapy and a way to foster deeper connections with readers.

My Top 3 by Other Writers

It’s Okay to Have Multiple Identities

I wrote about this one in my November Top 3 article. Because understanding this concept is important to our self-esteem and sense of well-being, I wanted to share it again. Niklas Göke discusses the theory of identity negotiation, proposed by sociologist Erving Goffman. In each of our various relationships, we adopt a slightly different identity, one shaped by the roles we play in each relationship.

When we understand it’s natural to feel like a different person in different situations, that we actually should feel a little different depending on the relationship, we stop trying to be all things to all people. If we are comfortable with these roles, fulfilling them can enhance our connections with others.

You Are Who You Think You Are: How Your Identity Shapes Your Life

I’m always inspired by Ayodeji Awosika’s advice for living authentically. Keeping with the theme of identity, this article explores how the negative stories we tell ourselves about ourselves keep us stuck. He draws on Carol Dweck’s work on mindset to describe how he used personal narrative, the things we say and believe about ourselves, to transform his perception of himself from lazy to motivated and productive.

Awosika invites readers to challenge the stories we tell ourselves and literally re-write them through a series of steps that first identify such stories and then turn them around from “I am” statements, such as “I’m lazy,” to “I’m working on” statements, such as “I’m working on being more productive.” This article has the potential for profound transformation if you find yourself mired in negative self-perception.

I Watched My Husband Die and Come to Life in a Single Day

This stunning personal essay by Karie Fugett had me in tears by the end. Fugett takes us through the nightmare of watching her husband’s escalating addiction to opioids. A young war veteran, he suffered an injury on the battlefield that led to an amputated leg, an onslaught of pain medications, a near overdose, and the fatal overdose of a friend.

Fugett’s essay is both an indictment of health care for veterans, highlighting the growing rates of veterans addicted to prescribed opioids and their elevated risk of overdose, and a deeply personal journey that brings the reader into her world. This is an important essay for understanding the severity of the opioid epidemic among veterans and is a piece worth studying for the craft of creative nonfiction.

---

Follow Krista on Facebook or Twitter.

Altered Perceptions

What kayaking taught me about the nature of illusions and the power of perspective

Reflections on the water (photo by the author)

How often do we find ourselves perceiving one thing, convincing ourselves that our perception is the way things are, only to discover that we’re looking at things the wrong way? What if we turned the lens? What might we see differently, and would we accept it? My husband and I were faced with these questions one summer day a few years ago when we first tried kayaking.

---

Feyodi Park on the Arkansas River, Northeastern Oklahoma

The wind catches the brim of my turquoise sun hat as I get out of the car. If not for the strap dangling beneath my chin, it would already be in the river.

“It might be too much to go out today,” I shout to my husband over the gale. “What if the boat flips or something?”

One moment the water is an orangey brown, the river’s bed of clay and sand churned to the surface by the wind and reflecting the sun’s rays, a muted sister to the red dirt that defines Oklahoma. The next, it’s the gray of an artist’s putty rubber, yellow light of day absorbed by graphite clouds moving in and out of each other in a rhythmic dance. A shocking crest of white appears on the water with every gust, waves propelled down the low valley of the river’s path as if rushing to catch the last train to some nameless haven.

“The boat won’t flip,” Derek says. “It’s practically impossible given how it sits in the water.”

My husband’s demeanor betrays the nonchalance in his voice. Wind whips his long hair in a frenetic dance around his shoulders, protected from sunburn by a red and yellow tie-dyed T-shirt. He grips the brim of his Detroit Red Wings ball cap, eyes squinting against the sun, lips pursed against the grit of blowing sand.

Our kayak arrived yesterday, and we are like children on Christmas morning with their favorite toy, unwrapped and ready for play. Derek inserts the nozzle of the plastic bellows into the valve and steps repeatedly until the boat begins to resemble an oversized Pillsbury Doughboy, limbs swelling and curling into a protective fold with each successive rush of air.

“Ready?” I ask when the boat appears seaworthy, although I’m nervous about Derek paddling for the first time in this wind.

“Think so,” he says as he slides on his life jacket, cinching the straps tight before situating himself in the boat’s only seat.

Between growing up with hydrophobic parents and living in the countryside with the closest body of water a small roadside creek, Derek never learned to swim. Given the stability of the boat, his life jacket, and the narrow stretch of river, its sandy bottom a few feet below the surface, I’m not concerned. Not too much, anyway.

I grab the front handle of the kayak and lead it and my husband into the river. The boat’s rhythmic bobbing becomes more exaggerated with each step. When we’re far enough out, Derek starts paddling toward the opposite bank, there and back again according to our plan. I watch him glide away from me and think he’s doing okay despite a bit of wobbling with the waves.

Suddenly, mixed with wind’s shrieks, I hear shouts and barely make out the words: “We shouldn’t have done this! This was a bad idea!”

Confused since he’s directly in front of me, I yell at him to turn around.

“How?!”

Dang, I think. We should have gone over this before we started. Not everyone was on the crew team in college. I yell out strokes as fast as I did when I was a coxswain and steered my team away from a dam we didn’t expect, but the wind snatches my words. After several minutes of fighting to keep the paddle from flying away, Derek manages to turn the boat around. He sees me straight in front of him, twenty yards away, and I hear wisps of laughter float to shore.

---

My husband experienced an illusion of self-motion. The waves created by wind blowing across the water’s surface at an angle to the opposite shore gave him the impression that he was drifting downriver, a branch separated from its trunk floating anchorless to destinations unknown. He perceived himself in danger, but once he refocused the lens, he saw the reality of the situation.

When we attempt something for the first time, it’s easy to perceive it as daunting, as something larger than it really is. Moving out of our safety zone, becoming open to the idea that things are not always as they seem, is a risk we must all take at times. Otherwise, how would we know who we are and what we’re capable of?

If my husband had been so shaken by his fear that he vowed to end kayaking right then, we never would have experienced the quiet of the water when no one else is around, the sudden burst of pelicans from a tributary tucked around a bend, the silky feel of the paddle as it slips beneath the surface, the soft lub lub of the boat bouncing on gentle waves.

If my husband had let his perception color that day, we would have lost these shared experiences, these moments that we treasure.

---

Originally published in Indelible Ink on Medium on July 17, 2019.