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writing writing & practice naked
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I want to say: "Welcome! I am a writer!" . . . But there's some confusion about who can and who cannot say those coveted words. "I am a writer." Why? Well, I've never been published, haven't won any great awards (well, at the time, I was pretty thrilled about a lot of them. They are stepping stones that say, "Potential! Keep going!" So I go). But, I write. And that's where I say to hell with the stigma and speak the truth:
I am a writer. Welcome!
In the seventh grade, I went into foster care (for anniversary enthusiasts, it was February 16, 1990). In my second foster home, about one month into the "good life," my foster father bought me a diary. It was purple with a shell on the cover. I called it "Shelley" and wrote "Dear Shelley" virtually every day. I finished the book a little over a year later on my fourteenth birthday. You could say that my writing days began there. I wrote poems and limericks before then, of course:
I have to go to the doctor's,
I have to go to eat,
I don't have the time,
But the time I have to beat!
It wasn't until the eighth grade, however, that I discovered writing as an actual task, a hobby, that for some becomes a light at the end of the tunnel, a pot of gold, a dream to attain, higher than all other dreams.
I wanted to be a photojournalist, go into the peace corps. I went to the highschool library in search of journalism books. In the appropriate section, I found a book called, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, a woman who practiced Zen and applied it to her writing. Fifteen pages in, and she had me writing about grapefruit (something, at the time, I don't recall ever tasting) and fish who sing underwater. It was a new experience and I had one goal: fill the notebook. Fill it as fast as I can!
Soon, I wanted only to be a writer. It occurred to me the things I had done prior to that crystallizing moment: I wrote short stories, books of poems, little fragments of life. I even once wrote a skit about Michael Jackson and broccoli (I don't know. I was writing!)
This, I thought, is the life.
I came to call that process of writing, in which I let go of myself, my penmanship, my boundaries and just wrote above and beyond, outside the margins, using words I made up, Writing Writing and Practice Naked. For I felt I was naked. There were times I would feel afraid, weak. It made no sense. I was only writing! I was only holding a pen and putting it on paper and writing something!
Today, I think I have learned where that fear comes from. You know you want to be a writer when you are afraid because you fear failure. You fear not living up to that god-like position you dream about. Because to be a writer . . . oh! It's just unfathomable!! I don't mean somebody who writes mystery novels, though they too are writers. They are not the writer I want to become!
I want to become the writer who drinks too much, who feels saddened, depressed, craves she knows not what, always thirsty, always hungry, always tired, awake, lost, working her mother fuckin' ass off for what? A few pages. That's all. "Just give me a few pages," I say to myself.
But I cannot do that. I cannot allow myself to do that. So I live with the fear that I cannot achieve Hemingway-hood without losing myself. And I do not want to lose myself. I will not, therefore, become that thing, that writer, who in her day was never appreciated, but in death: statues are erected in her honor.
In this day, right now, I strive for a new writing life. Writing writing and practice naked. Will that be okay for you?
shortcut up
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when you want to rip out your heart