Writing

Sometimes I wonder at my life. Here I am "in the middle way" as TS Eliot put it. I am a writer and a teacher--at a university. I still feel about 18. This what interests me. Why 18? Why not 23 or 7 or 2. My amazing roommate is a Marriage Family Therapist and we have these deep amazing conversations about regression and being blocked developmentally. When I think of that I wonder that I don't feel like I am two. I had trauma at that age and sometimes I wish I could walk up to people and say "I am tired, put me to bed. But first hold me and sing me a lullaby. But I am not 2. Nor do I feel two. Though strangely "Winnie the Pooh" holds all the keys to unlock my personality.

I feel 18. Why??

Then it came to me. At that age I made some very big decisions in my life about who I was and who I wanted to become. It was at that age that I decided to fight against the way I had always been. I am not a born optimist. My mother is, but I am not. At 18 I decided that I had had enough of always feeling anxious and upset about life and fearful. I wanted to be different. I wanted to throw off the nighted cloak of suffocation that was depression. I decided to choose joy. I have been choosing ever since. Sometimes I wonder if the last 11 years of my life has been a dream. Sometimes I still feel very young and very scared. Maybe that is the 18 in me. But I also realize that I chose very definitively that I was going to be a writer--for real.

Maybe that is it. I am actually doing it. There is a strange sense of duality--seeing life through my eyes at 18 and at 29. I am a very different person--but I still write. The following is an excerpt from Anne Lamott's amazing book about writing "Bird by Bird"

"Ever since I was a little kid, I've though that there was something noble and mysterious about writing, about the people who could do it well, who could create a world as if they were little gods or sorcerers. All my life I've felt that there was something magical about people who could get into other people's minds and skin, who could take people like me out of ourselves and then take us back to ourselves. And you know what? I still do.

"So now I teach. This just sort of happened. Someone offered me a gig teaching . . . and I've been teaching writing classes ever since. But you can't teach writing , people tell me. And I say 'Who the hell are you, God's dean of admissions?'

"If people show up in one of my classes and want to learn to write, or to write better, I can tell them everything that has helped me along the way and what it is like for me on a daily basis. I can teach them little things that may not be in any of the great books of writing. . . .

"Interviewers ask famous writers why they write, and it was (if I remember correctly) the poet John Ashebery who answered, "Because I want to." Flannery O'Connor answered "Because I am good at it," and when the occasional [person] asks me, I quote them both. Then I add that other than writing, I am completely unemployable. But secretly, when I'm not being smart-alecky, it's because I want to and I'm good at it. I always mention a scene from Chariots of Fire in which, as I remember it, the Scottish runner, Eric Liddell, who is the hero is walking along with his missionary sister on a gorgeous heathery hillside in Scotland. She is nagging him to give up training for the Olympics and to get back to doing his missionary work. . . .And he replies that he wants to go to China because he feels it is God's will for him, but that first he is going to train with all of his heart, because God also made him very, very fast.

So God made some of us fast in this area of working with words, and he gave us the gift of loving to read with the same kind of passion with which we love nature. My students at the writing workshops have this gift of loving to read, and some of them are really fast, really good with words, and some of them aren't really fast and don't write all that well, but they still love good writing, and they just want to write. And I say, "Hey! That is good enough for me. Come on down"(xxviii-xxix).

I over-quote this extensive passage to remind my 18 year old self that I am a writer and a teacher, and that I love them both. God made me fast using words, and fast in the ability to help others with words. I write because I want to, and because I am good at it. And I need to write. I love my students, even when they are not kind to me, or do not handle things very well. They can write, some good, some bad, but they are writing. Sometimes I write good and sometimes I write bad, and sometimes I feel good, and sometimes I feel bad. But I write. And I feel. "That is good enough for me."