Both ironically and appropriately, I’m taking a four week blogging class on Saturdays.

Ironic because I’ve never blogged this much before, so, I don’t really need a class to jumpstart my practice. Appropriate because, well, I’m blogging and I want to know more about it.

Our teacher suggested a writing prompt by which you take an emotion that you’ve had during the previous week and you relate that to a memory. When I hear the phrase “during the week” my mind goes to the day to day and that usually involves anxiety or boredom and I’m a little sick of writing about the mundane. I had nothing.

I should mention that the class is in Los Angeles, which means that I’m participating online with software called Zoom. I see my teacher and then, in smaller boxes above her, myself and the other student taking the class remotely. Everyone else is a disembodied voice behind the teacher’s computer.

Our teacher was in the middle of saying something when I got kicked out of Zoom. The screen went white save for some text that said, “The moderator will let you in when the class begins.”

A big panic trigger for me is when something technical is supposed to work and it doesn’t. It always provokes anxiety. And I thought, “Just let me in.”

And that’s when a memory came back.

Two memories actually.

This happened when I was a kid. I must have come home from riding bikes or something to find that I was locked out of my house. I didn’t know where my parents were and they hadn’t told me that they were going anywhere.

Unexpected absences were and still are a big panic trigger for me. So, I panicked. I started crying. I banged on the door hoping that if by some chance they were in there that they would hear me and let me in. I screamed, “Mom, Dad, let me in!”

I was a kid but I was too old for this to be happening. I believe I was in the seventh grade, which leads me to the second memory.

About a week later, I was hanging out with my friends and out of nowhere, one of them said, “Mom, Dad, let me in,” and everyone started laughing. Apparently my friend down the street had seen me crying and told everyone.

I didn’t fight back or insist that it didn’t happen. I just sort of went silent, a little stunned that my friend would rat me out like that. To be fair, that was some prime gossip for middle school humiliation. And they didn’t know why I was really crying. Hell, I didn’t either, not for a long time.

I cried a lot when I was a kid. I cried when I got a bad grade. I cried when I struck out in little league. I cried when I thought I was going to get in trouble or get yelled at. For a long time, even after I grew out of it, I would look back and think that I was such an odd kid.

As an adult, I realize that it was my anxiety. I wasn’t crying for attention or out of pain, I was crying because I was experiencing an overwhelming feeling that I couldn’t cope with. I still can’t cope with it sometimes, I just don’t cry anymore.

My father eventually pulled into the driveway. He had been out at a meeting somewhere. I wiped my eyes and we went in the house.

Here’s the thing, though. My mother was home. She was just upstairs taking a nap. She was sleeping deeply enough that she slept through her son banging on the front door and screaming, “Let me in!”

I think on some level I knew that she may have been home and that I had to scream loudly enough to wake her because, if she was inside, she wasn’t sleeping, she was passed out. And on an even deeper level, I thought if I could scream loud enough and wake her up, she’d snap out of it and magically not be drunk.

There’s a low level terror to growing up with an alcoholic parent. It’s the constant unease. You know something is wrong but because you’re a kid, no one will tell you what it is.

The screen clicked back on and my teacher said, “Hey, Rob, you’re back. Don’t worry, this is being recorded so you can go back and watch what you missed.”

The rest of the class consisted of the anatomy of a great blog post. She mentioned that hamburger model where you start an essay with something, then veer away from it in the middle, then conclude the essay how you started. It’s what I’m doing here. It was a great, informative class.

The real key to a great post, though, is the ending. Don’t summarize like is an essay for English class, just leave the reader with something. A detail or an observation. It could be anything really.