I'm doing some gymnastics over at Single Roots today. You're welcome to join the spectator sport by clicking on this trusty little link.
"Moving to Texas was a good decision—except for in Texas, or at least the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, everyone has a smart phone. Back in upstate New York, where I hail from most recently, phones are...
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Pretend with me for a minute. We've finally decided to make this happen, meet face to face, you've been reading my blog, I've been reading yours. We feel like friends. We're Facebook friends. Our friends think we're friends. So let's just be friends.
We're at a cool, independent coffee shop. We going to be transparent and honest and authentic, or whatever the hip kids are calling it these days. I'm wearing my favorite pair of jeans, you're wearing your favorite t-shirt. We're just going to talk. And drink coffee. But talk, mostly.
We exchange a few little introductions, banter about innocuous coincidences, laugh at things that may or may not be funny or ironic or kindred.
But brimming beneath both of our surfaces we are filled with so many things to say.
I want to tell you so many things about me and about who you think I am and who I'm not. I want to tell you that I'm not big-time or out of your league or too cool. But I also desperately want you to know that I'm something and I'm worth your time and I'm a cool kid too.
I want you to know that I've done awesome things in my life and I also want you to know that I feel like I've done nothing with my life. I want to say that despite the past two years and the life which has been breathed into me, I am terrified almost constantly that the honeymoon is over and it's all downhill from here.
I want to tell you that I want to matter to someone, and I'm okay if that someone is you, but I want to know that I matter to that someone and so you might need to tell me that I do. I might need to hear that from you. But know this, I'm willing to go out on a limb and not look a gift horse in the mouth in order to say the same thing to you.
I want you to matter to me.
And then I'll take a deep breath, take a sip of coffee, one sugar, a bit of cream, and I'll wait for you to tell me everything you need to say too.
PS. To all of you blog readers who I've met in real life
or who I will meet in real life: this isn't about you, I promise.
Except it is about you, I promise.
My great-grandfather was an artist and so was my grandfather, and my father, when he took a pencil to napkins in restaurants or bic pens to paper in our kitchen, he was an artist too. He, like all parents of burgeoning children, thought me an artist too, but I felt that every sparse compliment was his way of taking ownership over me: this is mine, I created her and now she creates too. And so I stopped drawing.
I still inked in margins and doodled on homework, but the real work of artistry happened in my head where it would be safe from the gift of DNA and genetics. I am stubborn like this.
I was in middle school when my father left his position of 25 years to work as an entrepreneur, a graphic artist. I couldn't understand work being a calling or working at your gift because work, to me, was laborious and had little reward. My parents were always into hard work and never into allowances, both models which I am grateful for now, but despised then.
"You could do this too, you know," he would tell me and I would shrug my shoulders.
He had boxes of paper samples and a fanned book of colors with codes I didn't understand, but I was secretly fascinated by it all. Sketches of designs and type and programs he left open on his computer—all of it some secret world into digital design. This was 1992 or 1993 and he was just starting out, so his tools were crude, but his creations were not.
I remember the first design of his that I saw in the real world, a car-dealership logo on a highway in Upper Bucks County. I knew all the headache and pain and frustration and fears that had gone into that logo and I knew that though the rights no longer belonged to him, the artistry did.
In college I was the senior editor of our literary magazine, a 100 page annual of the finest our English and Arts departments could offer up on the altar of narcissism. I was the editor because I was a hard worker and a good writer and our faculty liked that about me, but I knew next to nothing about layout or design. It was the first time I touched the digital tools that had come so far in only a decade, since my father was towing the line of graphic art.
I spent hours on those programs, aligning margins, editing content, placing objects and that semester I also took a class in digital illustration. I found the classes easy and intuitive, a creative outlet from the technical writing and literary analysis I was spending the bulk of my time doing. The design lab was a secret and dark room, special permission only and I was let in—they let me in.
The following semester I took a class in painting and somehow became friends with the professor, a young, brooding artist who pushed my skills from flat, boring still-lifes to my real love, mixed media with a message. I illustrated my favorite Flannery O'Connor story and gave the finished product to my mother for Christmas. I rarely go to Florida, where she lives, so I haven't seen it since.
I finished college, picking up enough art classes for a minor, though graduated with plans to only write for the rest of my life. But DNA is a hard beast to beat and now it is my desk that holds paper samples and a fan-book of Pantone color codes, my pens and pencils inking sketches on notebook papers.
The truth is that I design, though I am only marginally good at it, because to do what I really want to do is too fearful a step to take. Sometimes I think about my dad, who quit after 25 years to pursue a dream and a gift and I wonder if I will ever be as brave as him to stop doing what I accidentally discovered I could do, and to start doing what I know I was born to do.
I was disappointed by someone this week.
She doesn't know me. Once we shook hands, exchanged smiles, shared a meal when she came to speak at my university. But she doesn't know me and she didn't disappoint me on purpose. My disappointment stems more from the heroic ideal of her in my head and less from something she actually did or didn't do.
The truth is, what can you know from a person but what they share with you, in huddled conversations and knowing inflections?
I maintain that I am easy to know, only because if you ask me, I'll tell you anything. But the real truth is that unless you ask me, I won't tell you anything.
Which, I'm afraid, is the real disappointment in all of this.
I'm afraid I go around disappointing people because what they know of me is not what I have told them, but what they have perceived to have been told by me. Whether though my writing, my friendship, my presence or otherwise. And this may be true, I may go around disappointing people more often than I wish. In fact, if I haven't disappointed you, you're probably in the minority.
The thing is, this girl who disappointed me didn't do so by being something other than what she really, really is. She never lied to me. She never pretended to be anything other than another stumbling Christian, fumbling through life with a pen in one hand and a scotch in the other. She never preached anything but what she had lived and was living and I would be a fool to not know how dastardly frightening that is.
My disappointment arose when I realized that what she had lived and was living was exactly what I am afraid of in my own life. The difference is that she'd gone ahead and done something with her life in the meantime.
I was disappointed by a perception of her that proved true: she had lived and was living and telling her story as she went—but the story forked and she took the unexpected route.
Not that route, I silently cheered in my mind, knowing, just knowing she'd do the right thing. Not that route, I dismally thought as the first step was taken toward it. Not that route, I wept, when I heard the news.
It seems there have been a lot of of her recently, smoke and mirrors, guises I build around heroes I love, writing I see myself in. Blogs and twitter and email make us feel all so small, though, so close, so human, so near, so. . . disappointing.
Writers and filmmakers talk about the element of surprise that should be present in every good story, but isn't the strength of the story we're telling with our lives the fact that we know the end of the story? Isn't that what makes the best story? Isn't that why the Story of God is still the bestseller, after hundreds of years? Because we know the end? Because the fork in the road has already been chosen?
Yet I'm still building fortresses of my perceptions, conclusions that will be disappointed yet again because I put my hope in a guess and not in God.
___________________
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You can stare at a blank page for an hour and not write anything.
Or you can just start to write, push past the fear, whatever it is, and just start.
You can conjure up memories from when you were nine, writing stories with your best girlfriend, or you can tell another story from when you were in your teens, mourning the loss of things held dear. You can tell anything you want, but you're always telling yourself this: the story you're telling has already been told, and probably better than you can ever tell it.
You should push past that fear and encounter the worse fear: that the story you're telling won't be true in six months or six years and you will disappoint everyone who wanted it to be true.
And everyone else who already knew it wasn't true will gloat, hook their thumbs behind their suspenders and say "I told you so." Only they won't say it to you, to your face, they'll say it to themselves and anyone else who is waiting around their table for a morsel of self-importance.
After that fear there's another one and it's the fear that what you write will change someone's life so dramatically and drastically that they tear the page from the book, fold it into small pieces and carry it with them in their wallet or their journal. And that fear is accompanied by the reality that you know you don't even believe half of what you write, not, at least, until after you've written it. And if that makes you a hypocrite, well, at least it's not retroactive.
But deeper still you're afraid that what you say won't matter at all. That no one reads or cares, despite how facts might say otherwise. You're afraid that your small voice in a clamoring crowd is just noise and then you're afraid that that's not enough for you, even though it should be okay.
You scribble short fiction, four paragraphs or less, because anything longer takes you places in your mind you'd rather not go.
You're afraid that if you let your mind take a foot, it will take a mile and you've gone down that road before and the scenery left something to be desired.
But you can't help but wonder if this time it will be different, if this road, this book, this piece, might set free that fluttering, flightless bird stuck in the depths of you.
So you try. You stare at that blank page. You stare at it for ten minutes. One hour. You stare at it and then start writing, in the second person, because to say I is to own fears you don't want to own.
"Be without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your writing and set aside the large ones until they behave – then use them, maybe even write them. Too much fear and all you'll get is silence."AL Kennedy
Writer's block isn't something where you just take two and wake up in the morning healed. It's one of the most frustrating maladies I've experienced because there is no fix except to write.
And so write I do.
But all it lands me is no less than a baker's dozen first paragraphs. Some have the makings of something good and some will never see the light of day. They're the blathering younger sister of something half good, and nothing but good should do.
The problem is that I've been coasting by on half good for the past few months and so I don't even know where to start but with the blathering younger sister. (No offense if you're the blathering younger sister. I am too. I'm also the bossy older sister, though, so there's no winning in my case.)
I tried to look back and see where it all started going downhill and I've tracked it back to July, my writing hiatus. That hiatus was great for my soul, but the half-good writing that's come after it has been anything but great (or good). There were a few keepers in there, but let's be real for a minute here: I can't remember what they were, so the chances of you remembering are fairly slim. The only really good piece in there landed me a pile of emails unknowingly quoting our old friend Clive, "Friendship is born when one looks at the other and says, 'You too! I thought I was the only one.'" But here's the truth, that piece was raw and real and written in a moment of honesty that comes rarely to my soul.
I want that back.
I want to take the preach out of my write and just write.
But I'm afraid.
I don't even know what I'm afraid of. I think I'm most afraid of being known, not heart-known, but person known. I'm afraid of being the girl with the blog who writes. I hate that person because that person isn't me. That person is just a slice, one slice and 15 minutes of my day. All the rest of the time is the real me and I have a host of people who will tell you that I turn a pretty phrase, but I live one foot in front of another, one broken heart after another, one frustrating sigh after another.
A writer friend sent me an email a few months ago, "So now I'll tell you a secret because your words are too lovely, in those times when you unfurl yourself and write wildly, to keep caged. The secret is that there is no silencing them, the people who want to consume you, who think your words are an invitation to nibble at your flesh and carve and mold you until you've suited what they want you to be, until they can fall down on their knees and worship the icon of You that is nothing like you..."
So I need you to know this, but mostly I want to not care about whether you need to know or want to know, but I want you to know that sometimes I want to crawl into a hole, bury my head in my arms, and hibernate for the long haul. I have spent much of my life desperate to be known and really known, but I care less and less about this. I long for heaven more today than ever before because there there is no name to be made or had. There is no icon of wisdom and no need to turn a pretty phrase. There is Only One.
January 2012 was supposed to be another hiatus, but I need this writer's block to take a backseat and the only way I know to do that is to write it back there until it's limping along behind the ride of this page on the web.
So write, unfurled, write wildly, uncaged, until it is written and always point to the real Author—this is January 2012. Because this fraud makes her way plagiarizing the real Creative source, but she wants more than anything for Him to get all the credit.
You know those people? The ones who have perfect hair and perfect teeth and perfect skin? The ones with the perfect blog and perfect story and perfect tweets? The ones with perfect families and perfect lives and perfect jobs?
Yeah. Me either.
Well, that's not entirely true. What is true is that I think I know them, but I don't really. Not when I put it all in perspective.
The other night I sat on a curbside and talked about feeling like a fraud. I talked about how I don't have the answers and the pithy things I write here take 15 minutes to type and not much more to think through. Most of life is processed inside a circular motion in my head and most of it heads down toward the drain on my soul.
I'm sure that everyone must know this about me because, well, I've never been one of those specimens of perfection you see above. I've never had a manicure in my life, my hair is the bane of my existence, my story is far from interesting or perfect, my family isn't perfect and my job has its perks, but I also sit at a desk in a corner all day. I'm sure that everyone must know that I'm deeply flawed because I know I'm deeply flawed and I wear it well.
But the truth is that sometimes I feel like you don't know that I'm deeply flawed and it's a surprise to you when I reveal that.
This week had a some raw, real writing and it also landed a lot of emails and voicemails from people concerned that I'm not alright.
You know something? I'm not alright.
It's so good though. I mean, deep in my soul, my heart, the parts of me that get bared to God alone--those parts are so good, so healthy, so raw, but do you know why? Because I'm not alright and I'm okay with not being alright. I'm okay with not being the perfect girl. I don't want to be that girl.
So what should I do? I asked my friend the other night.
Write about what you don't know, he said.
You mean like math and algorithms? I said.
He snorted in response.
The hardest things to write about are the things you don't know about.
And I don't know about a lot.
The list goes on: I can't explain photosynthesis, lightening, UX or CSS, pi. Don't know all the states and capitals. Still have to concentrate to come up with the answer to 7x7. I have no idea what the population of the world is.
So these are the things I don't write about. And hear me here, I'm okay with that. This post is not me complaining about that. This is me saying, I don't have it figured out and I don't want to figure it all out. I want to trust that other people have it figured out and then make sure you know that I'm not the girl with the perfect blog and perfect story and perfect job.
That girl isn't me.
That's someone else.
Or maybe not.
****************************
What about you? What do you not know about? What are you content to just continue not knowing?
You listened to part of the transcripts this morning before someone who knows you better than you do told you to stop, before you'd end up in the closet, in a ball of tears.
You've never seen New York like this. Eerily silent and dust covered. A city of the walking wounded. You stare into the eyes of strangers for five, ten, forty seconds before either of you realized that in New York City you don't do that. You avert your eyes, look away, avoid, but not this week. This week you stare. And you nod at the end, sighing in unison. You are both thinking the same thing after all: what just happened?
Every park is filled, every corner is filled, every mind is filled: what just happened?
Fences are filled with Missing Person signs and the homeless aren't the only ones laying, dazed, on park benches and curbs.
You know things are going to change you, but you don't know how much, or to what length. You don't know, for instance, while you watch planes crash into familiar buildings, that in ten years two of your baby brothers will be soldiers and men, stationed in countries torn by war. You don't know that in ten years every day you will pray for peace, mostly because peace means that they will come home in one piece.
You don't know that in the weeks to come, you will open the coffee shop every morning at 5am and you will listen to your fellow countrymen wake up to the news, giving their best war-plan strategies while they hand you their dollar-sixtyfive. You don't know these things. You don't know that freedom really does cost something, but in your wildest dreams you never imagined it would cost this.
You stumble through a shell-shocked city, one wrapped in yellow caution tape. You try to make sense of what just happened.
You don't know that everyone you know knows someone who knew someone and you find out years later that you knew someone too. You regret losing touch.
You love history because when you hear about what has happened, it helps make sense of what is happening. But when what is happening is happening in real time, in your life, around you, there is no sense to be made of it.
You just stare at strangers a little longer. You both nod. Maybe you reach out and touch their arm.
What should have made us afraid, for a few weeks there, made us brave.
You're proud to be an American. You are. You pray for peace. You hate conflict. You hate that your baby brothers wield guns and wear uniforms. But you love your country. You loved it dusty and shell-shocked, and you love it bankrupt and tired. You loved it confused and bewildered, and you love it arrogant and corrupt.
But you love heaven more and you long for it. So you pray only this, but every day: even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly.
The question comes about once a week, "when will you write a book?" and I tell them the truth: writing the story of your life means lying or hurting and there is no in-between.
I grew up on the stories of other people's lives and I thought they were the whole of truth. But even the truth, when you get beyond the prairie dresses and cornhusk dolls, feels bleak in the face of an adult. We know that the Long Winter isn't all kettle-corn and fiddle playing.
This is what happens when you grow up, you begin to see that the good memories were tall tales spun of half-truths and scents, snippets and perspective.
And yet it's truth that I'm drawn to again and again. I want that raw truth that feels like spun gold, instead of mined gold. I want to subsist on truth that also tastes good. And this just isn't how it is sometimes.
I'm looking around our home tonight and there on surfaces, chairs and tables, are the books we're reading. Stories of people's lives. Truths that they were brave enough to bare and gold that was mined from their story. And I am jealous.
I am jealous.
Because I know I have a story.
But I am afraid to bare it. Because the truth that I remember and the truth I still see, is still so much only a part of the truth that is real.
There are three sides to every story, my dad always said when he split two of us apart before we clawed each other out with our own version of truth. But the truth is that how can you see beyond what you know to be true to you? The ways in which you've been wronged? The ways in which you have hopelessly wronged? How can you know what that third side is? The real truth? The side no one really knows on this side of glory?
The truth is that I don't know if I'll ever write a book. The story I would tell would only be one third of the truth, and not even a reputable one at that.