There are a lot of blogs out there. A lot of weird ones, I might add. Today I was wondering about blogs and started looking around. There are a lot of weird blogs. I wonder why some of them have a following.
I would love to write. As a profession. To have "writer" as a descriptive adjective of who I am. My answer for years when I was a kid to the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "an author". I had a few teachers who told me I showed promise. My first grade teacher, my fourth grade teacher and my seventh grade English teacher.
I used to write stories and give them as Christmas gifts. I wrote plays and coerced my cousins and sisters into performing them for grandparents and aunts and uncles. I wrote stories and had my friends read them at recess. I wrote stories and had my seventh grade English teacher read them.
And then I started wondering if I was an idiot. And I stopped saying I wanted to be an author and said things I didn't really mean like "a hairdresser." (What?! My dog gets more use out of a blow dryer than I do! Maybe I meant pet groomer?) Around that time I also did a lot of hunting for a safer version of myself.
Which I've been trying to undo now for a few years, but I still don't know if I've ever put myself out there in an area where I am completely vulnerable. Writing is still personal. So much so, that for a good two decades I have been unable to write anything with full effort and attention. You know how they say when you dream you're falling, if you ever hit the bottom, you'll die, so you always wake up before that happens? I'm convinced with writing that I'm going to hit the bottom, and I am sure something in me will die when that happens. So I never really take the plunge.
A friend wrote on her blog (one of the good ones) about the fear of failure. I think we all fear failure on some level. But some of us overcome the fear, and others don't. And sometimes, it's the least talented who overcome the fear. You can't win if you don't throw your hat in. By the way, my friend is amazingly talented, and I am cheering for her.
Today I discovered that my kindergartner is worried about getting F's on her report card. Not only are F's not even given in kindergarten, but this child is brilliant and way ahead in every subject. Has she learned this self-doubt from her mother, or from a cruel world with terrible taste?
I don't know if I can successfully write, and I don't know if I'll ever give it a real try. Maybe I will continue to hold back, shrinking from a part of life I am too afraid to live. I don't want that to be me. I want to be the person who threw it all on the table. But I don't know if I will be. I've gotten really good at waking myself out before I find out.
2 comments:
Dear Tiffany, Get out of my head. It's doing creepy things to my psyche to hear you say this. I would encourage you wholeheartedly and say "YES! YES! You ARE a writer!," but I would be saying that to myself, too, and that's just too scary to contemplate. Ok, but here's what I do know. When you have a gift that is so easy to hide under a basket, and life gets very busy, your light seems so very common. BUT, no one is going to write what God puts in YOUR heart, blessing you with the ability to speak the words that make people see. Was Aaron any less God's servant than Moses? Absolutely not. Moses could never have done the work if he couldn't find the words, and you have been given the words.
To see your daughter following the same pattern of self-doubt is such a blessing, because there is nothing but potential in front of you! Don't worry about validating your work with a venue and nonsense now. You have to write, maybe for the first time in 20 years, with your whole being, and decide what it is you're holding back. You will not fail. But, you might find you can't NOT write anymore, and in some ways, that's infinitly more life-altering.
Jaime, I really appreciate your comment. Partly because I know you don't say things you don't mean, and partly because I have a high opinion of the quality of your writing.
Sometimes I think I have to figure out what it is God put in my heart. Maybe that's what the hold up is.
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