Why do I write?

I haven’t formally addressed this question since Lisa Goldfarb’s class in college, almost twenty years ago. Clearly it is time to circle back to it.

My first answer is not all that interesting – I write because I want to. Because something inside of me has always wanted to, has felt even through the many years when I wasn’t putting pen to page, that I am a writer.

I write because it’s hard. Because I spend half my time, at least, talking myself into sitting down to start and staring at blank pages and feeling like I can’t write or don’t know what or how. Both of these – the what and the how – seem immanently more interesting than the why, by the way. Because staring that blankness down is good for me, because doing things that come easily and have clear-cut right answers is only superficially satisfying. Because something in me has always craved the gray area, no matter how uncomfortable it can be, no matter how much I also like the black and white.

I write because Mr. Edelson in fourth grade told me I should try to publish some of my stories. And I always liked pleasing the people in authority. Until I stopped liking it. But that’s another story. I still think of finding Mr. E when my first work gets published. Of sending him a copy. Maybe of dedicating part of it to him or at least giving him a line in the acknowledgements.

I write because it feels like I have to. Like if I don’t, some vital part of me will be lost or fall sleep and not be fully alive. Like I will not be truly myself if I don’t. Like it is one of the things tethering me to this world, helping me walk through it with a modicum of grace and sanity and compassion.

I write because I’ve found that when I go past the point where I think I’ve answered the question, past the point where I think I figured it out and have to fill the next line anyway, past the first attempt, the first draft, the first words that come easily, that is when and where I find the good stuff, the better stuff, the real-er stuff of my self and of life. That the opportunity for, the necessity of, constant revision is what allows me to find the story I want to tell myself, and the story I want to tell about myself.

I write because the blank line is an invitation – a gathering I want to be a part of, an event it would be rude to decline. A beckoning or a summoning to parts of me that are waiting to emerge. Waiting to see the light.

I write because the sand is still streaming through the small aperture in the hourglass. I write because my time is not yet up. I write because I do not fully know myself. And because it is impossible to fully know other people.

I write because it makes me feel accomplished. And every now and then because it makes me feel joy.

I write because I have always been fascinated with words – their essential and fickle nature, their playfulness and treachery, their power and impotence. Because they are all the things at once. Because they are what we, what I, make of them.

Touched

 

Pushing my cart of groceries through the Fred Meyer sliding doors, I stop because the man in front of me has come to a standstill. I pause for a moment, not wanting to violate the sacred six feet of open space between us, but quickly realize he is lost in the screen of his phone and won’t be moving forward any time soon. To my left, a steady stream of patrons are making their way into the store, so my only option is to cut around the man to my right. Maneuvering the unwieldy cart as best I can, I manage to steer clear of the man, but accidentally clip a tall flowering plant on the edge of a garden display. It starts to topple towards me, the pot dropping off the edge of the slightly elevated display platform, and I instinctively reach down to grab it before it can hit the concrete. At the same moment, a woman whose presence I have not until now been aware of, does the same thing. And in that fleeting second of reaching for the flower pot and setting it back on the display, our bare hands touch for the briefest instant. It’s a flash of skin on skin, accidental and meaningless, but it goes through me like a lightning bolt, this unsanctioned contact with a stranger’s body. It jars me the same way TV shows do, when they portray day-to-day life from pre-quarantine times – friends going out to dinner together, families hosting parties, and strangers crowding into buses and trains.  All these people touching each other as well as the surfaces around them without any thought of the germs they may be acquiring or spreading with their fingers or their breath.  Behaviors that none of us would have thought twice about just a few months ago now take on a veneer of unbelievability, seem shocking in their disregard of social distancing norms. Because of course, both the woman whose hand touched mine and I are wearing masks. We both bagged our own groceries so the clerk wouldn’t have to touch the potentially contaminated reusable bags we brought from home. And we were both careful to take hold of the receipt by the end farthest from the clerk's hand. All these little moments of caution and attention to avoid not just contact with another human but with anything another human has touched. And yet in this moment – when I try to drive my cart as if it is a sleek and agile machine instead of an awkward box on sticky wheels, when I overestimate my ability to steer clear of the scenery, when my cutting the corner too tight results in what could have become a larger mishap – a woman reaches out to help. Even more than her fingertips, I am touched by her impulse to assist, to overlook the safety protocols and close the cautionary distance between us rather than letting me fend for myself. This, too, feels like a vestige of the old word, and if I can’t have the gatherings and the shared meals and hugs between friends that have been relegated to the world of television, I will take this: choosing to be present for a fellow human being when she needs a helping hand. Even if we both have to pull out the sanitizer immediately afterwards.

Juxtaposition

I was schooled early in embracing contradiction,
taught to marry the things that others found irreconcilable,
learning to pride myself in the paradox of my very being,
even if others found it ridiculous.

Later, I learned about cognitive dissonance –
the ways in which we all manage to live with the tension
of inherent, internal opposition,
to hold together things that cannot, should not, co-exist
without descending into disintegration,
which is literally the negation of integrity.

Still later I learned the power of simple conjunctions,
the subtle shift from joining two parts with a but –
sending them to their respective corners 
for coaches to mop sweaty brows
and prop up tired arms with the bluster of heightened emotions,
the adrenaline required for battle –
to joining those same parts with an and –
tension now conscripted as binding agent,
uniting disparate pieces into one whole.

I’m no physicist, but I think this is not unlike
the forces, weak and strong, that hold the universe together

and bond the very atoms of existence.

Joy as Extended Metaphor

Joy is the new pen I take out of the package when the old one has run dry, its lifeblood spilled out in sacrifice to the daily ritual of sitting in front of this window and writing what I see beyond the glass: my own yard, the sidewalk, the tree dropping its twigs and leaves onto the roof of the car I now rarely use, the street the dogs and I walk up twice a day, the yellow house on the other side with its ever-changing garden. The tulips of early spring, give way to irises by May, followed by roses and daisies in June and July. Joy is watching life progress like this even as it also seems to stand still, realizing that the closer I look at the stillness, the more moving parts it has. Joy is the dirt beneath my fingernails when I pull dandelions out of the lawn; it teems with slugs and grubs and centipedes, roly-polys and sometimes spiders. And joy is the dandelions themselves, continually springing back up in the spots where I rip them unceremoniously out of the ground, refusing to be eradicated by my callous diligence. Root fragments unwittingly left behind grow from near-nothingness, clawing their way through the dark, damp, packed-in earth, reaching for the daylight and the air that, as far as they know, could be mere inches or vast miles above them. Hope may have feathers but joy digs its way out of the dirt, and breaking through, extends its insistent head up toward the sky, spreads its leafy arms wide and unfurls its glorious mane, as if to rival the sun.

Letters to Myself

To My Younger Self:

I’m not sure where to start. There’s so much I could tell you – guidance I could give, warnings I could issue, reassurance I could offer – but I also firmly believe that I would not be who where I am today if you had not been who or where you were through every moment of my past and your future. It sounds trite, but in this case it really is about the journey and not the destination.  I am who I am because of all the many moments, choices and yes, mistakes you make along the way. Without this history, exactly as it happened, I – this specific version of me sitting here on a rainy April afternoon, typing on this tablet while a pasta sauce simmers vigorously on the stove behind me and the dogs nap in the other room – would not exist. And I – this specific version of me – want to exist. All told, I like who I am and my life is one I am grateful for. So I’ll skip the spoilers and specific admonitions and opt instead to tell you the things I tell myself, the things I most need to hear today. I’m not sure what they will mean to you, but here you go:

       1. Try not to be too hard on yourself.
       2. Embrace the uncertainty of life.
       3. Don’t just do what comes easily – put yourself in a position to fail.
       4. When you fail, keep trying. Life is not all or nothing.
       5. Keep searching for your voice. You have something worth saying.

To My Older Self:

Version 1: January 30, 1989

My Future

In 20 years I will be 28. I will be single. I will live in New York City. I will be a major in math, English, and history. I will teach seventh and eighth grade. I will teach at least one of the subjects I major in. I will teach in a public school.

I will live in a single house and have a flower garden in the front yard, and in the back yard I will have a fruit and vegetable garden.

In my spare time, I will draw and read. I will own a small, four-person car.

The End

Version 2: April 22, 2020

To be honest, I don’t think of you much or often. Maybe because I don’t’ fully know who you are. My vision of you keeps changing as I myself change . . . But that feels like a cop-out. After all, my eight-year-old self got things pretty right all those years ago. For some reason, my 39-year-old self doesn’t like to admit that I know myself (you) well, that my core is fairly constant through all ages, that committing a particular vision of the future to the page is not an irreversible commitment or something that I have to get “just right”. So, shall I give it a try, with a nod to the 1989 version of me?

My Future

               In 20 years, I will be 59. I will be legally single but happily partnered and fond of the companionship my partner provides. We will live in Washington state, either near to or within Seattle. Unless we live in Tennessee – it’s cheaper there and closer to family. I will still teach in some capacity or another, whether professionally or informally, perhaps through content creation or mentorship of some kind.

I will live in a single-family home with a flower garden in the front and a vegetable garden in the back.

In my spare time, I will read and write because books and language will always be central to who I am. I will be surrounded by animals: dogs for sure and hopefully some others as well – chickens, goats, maybe a cow.

The End

Except that it isn’t the end. This, too, feels like a cop-out. I’m hedging my bets, sticking to the things I can easily predict. The things that don’t require risk – either the risk of being wrong about who I will become and what I will accomplish or the risk of doing and becoming someone or something outside of what is obvious.

What my younger and my current selves weren’t quite brave enough to put out into the world is this: I am a writer. One who for most of my years so far has not lived into this truth. And one who is trying to do so now. And one who hopes – but doesn’t quite know in the same way as I know other things – that at 59 I won’t need to soft pedal this title but will have earned it fully and proudly. Hopes that I will know it for myself and that others will know it of me as well.

And if you’re not there yet, 59-year-old me, well then, here are a few things you might need to hear:

       1. Try not to be too hard on yourself.
       2. Embrace the uncertainty of life.
       3. Don’t just do what comes easily – put yourself in a position to fail.
       4. When you fail, keep trying. Life is not all or nothing.
       5. Keep searching for your voice. You have something worth saying.