A (Re)Discovering
The three plastic storage containers taunted me. Dropped off by my parents four weeks ago when they drove down to babysit my nephews, the boxes sat idle in the corner of our second room. I wasn’t sure what I’d find.
Confident I’d need to throw most of it out, I dreaded the guilt that comes from tossing stuff in the garbage. To steel myself for the challenge, I engaged on a weeks-long purge-fest in the rest of our house. Throwing out old papers and putting together bags of books and clothing to donate was a necessary desensitization process. With nothing else left to do, I took a big breath and dug in...
My first doll (a tattered Raggedy Ann), swim meet ribbons and trophies, high school memorabilia. These are just a few of things I found in the boxes my parents had cleaned out of their attic. My old sticker albums (five!) made me smile. I was a card-carrying member of the Lisa Frank fan club. Anyone coming up on their mid-forties will probably get the reference. Stacks and stacks of fish-faced glamour shots of my best childhood friend and I elicited a few embarrassed giggles. In the decades before Instagram filters and the smartphone delete function, there were more than a few outtakes which hopefully served as a check on our outsized tween egos.
Wading through heaps of my old stuff, I found it was surprisingly easy to put much of it in the bin while I was still in the throes of my cleaning and purging bug. Yet amidst the junk, I uncovered some gold.
Silly illustrations, quirky stories, and surprisingly wise poetry. And notebooks. My childhood musings filled many notebooks. Some were for school, like squiggles for Mrs. Rayborn from 4th grade. Many others, like my diary or angsty teenage poems, were private reflections. Still more writings were to be shared between one or two people, like a spiral-bound journal that acted as a day-to-day letter passed between a high school friend and me, or angry teenage letters to my parents about the latest indignity of being their firstborn. Oh, the drama!
My diary is, as expected, melodramatic and yet utterly mundane at the same time. I really, really loved a boy named Kirk! The notebooks of elementary and middle school writing assignments were revelatory. I clearly have always had a flair for humor and absurdity. Of my teachers' comments, common refrains were “I love how you begin your story!” or “wow, I never thought about it quite like that!”
Sadness crept in as I read through the notebooks, looking back with regret that I didn’t start out my career with writing playing a central role. Writing always felt indulgent, not like something one does for a living. I didn’t invent this line of thinking, and I’d guess that most creative people I know can relate to it. We’ve heard it in many subtle and overt ways over our lifetimes, and then we adopt it as our own.
I can’t simply be a writer.
I need to find a real job, then I can write on the side.
I should find a job in which I write, but not the writing I really want to do.
Throughout my adult life, these statements have been the soundtrack inside my brain. A self-imposed prison sentence.
Pulling myself back into the present, I’m reminded of an insightful quote by James Victore,
“The things that made you weird as a kid will make you great tomorrow.”
This self-imposed prison is not okay. It’s not okay that what we long to do is put on the back-burner so that we can do ‘real’ things.
When humankind seems to be teetering on the edge of no return and the world around us is literally burning and sinking beneath our feet, there is value in creativity for creativity’s sake. There is value in irreverence. There is value in articulating what we see authentically so that others can connect to it. There is value in revealing oneself and offering context to bridge understanding. There is value in writing.
Reading through my childhood reflections, I thought to myself, this kid is whip-smart and funny and sees things differently. She should write!
So, I’m going to right (write!) my ship in 2019. I’m going to let the weird kid inside write out loud. I’m going to resurrect this languishing blog and develop my voice out in the open. I’m going to devote myself to finding my writing community. I’m going to call myself, identify as, and be, a writer.
