Ugh.
Hang in there with me dears. This post won't be punctuated by cute, appropriate little pictures between the paragraphs.
Despite my best efforts, today's been one of those days where I cannot stop questioning like, everything about the life path that I've chosen for myself.
Guys, it's not like I'm aspiring to be an accountant, or a nurse, or a teacher or dentist anything, although each of these is an admirable goal to strive for - except dentistry.
No. Instead, I have decided to dedicate my life to being a writer. Now, this hasn't been an overnight thing. All my life, it's the ONLY thing that has ignited me. Lit me up like a trailer park at Christmas time. It's been ingrained into my cells since I could put words together.
But I might as well be 6 years old telling my mom I want to be a princess or ninja when I grow up. Most people smile and nod and placate me with pleasantries when they ask me what I want to do. But then, inevitably, they say, "No, like, what do you to do, like for a living?" Ninety percent of the time I just smile and laugh and internally applaud myself for not being ignorant and short-sighted.
But today, for whatever reason, it sank in. It started with the fucking financial aid office at school telling me that unless the IRS processes and releases my tax transcripts (which can take 11 friggin weeks) by July 29, I will be forced to drop all my classes for Fall semester. This incident mutated into the following thought process:
Writing career = college degree + fancy shmancy internships + great connections garnered from said internships = fulfillment = living up to my divine responsibility to serve the masses with my profound and progressive mastery of the English language.
Somehow my entire writing life became hinged to attending classes in the Fall. Without them, I'd no doubt find myself to be 60, sitting wrapped in a tattered blanket, clutching the teeny handful of clips I'd managed to get published in my meager life, rocking back and forth mumbling lines from Sex and the City. I'm also severely drunk in this mental scenario. And also living somewhere like Mississippi. Dear readers, Mississippi fucking sucks. I don't want to end up there. No offense to any Mississippians who have found their way to my blog.
So, really long story less long, I've spent all day questioning why I want to commit my whole life to something I may never touch. What if all those people are right and all I do with my degree is become a bookkeeper at a mattress factory? What if all those people who scoffed at my degree choice would finally get to laugh their asses off and between gasps for air, point and say "I told you so?"
Maybe I should just give it up now and get a business degree. Or better yet, drop out and start applying with Sealy or SleepNumber.
All this negativity drove me to a bath tonight. I tried to sit down and write to center myself, but the thoughts kept coming and nothing felt good. I practically spoke out loud to the universe, begging to be validated in this very scary and uncertain choice I'd made for myself. It was just...bad. I needed a quiet, dark room that smelled like lavender and epsom salt, window open with the hum of the distant highway, to try and calm down and get my shit together.
I opened it up and began reading, and like a light from beyond, read this introduction:
Words. Words. This book is indeed about words. Speaking the unspoken. Speaking the spoken in a new and viable way, speaking the pain, speaking the hunger. Speaking. Speaking about violence against women not because it is the only issue, but because it is an issue that that lives smack in the middle of the world and is still not spoken, not seen, not given weight or significance. So that words crack open numbness and denial and disassociation and distance and deception. Speaking so that we are in community, in conscience, in concern.
Speaking about violence against women because in 2006, young Amish girls are gunned down in their school just because they are girls; women are trafficked like meat sold from poor neighborhoods to men in rich neighborhoods; women are raped in Darfur on their way to get wood from the fire or grass for their donkeys. In 2006, women are burned and mutilated and stoned and dismissed and undone and refused and silenced...Speaking about violence against women because of your mother, your sister, your aunt, your daughter, your girlfriend, your best friend, your wife. Speaking about violence against women because the story of women is the story of life itself. In speaking about it, you cannot avoid speaking about racism and domination, poverty and patriarchy, empire building, war, sexuality, desire, imagination...Speaking about violence, telling the stories, because in the telling, we legitimize women's experience...
We need writers in these terrible times of deception and manipulation and sound bites and half-investigated truths...We don't have many real leaders, we don't have many politicians we can trust. But we can trust writers. Rather than selling us something, they are exploring something; rather than dominating us, they are opening us; rather than winning or having a position, they are inviting us to ask questions.
We need each and every writer, each and every artist, to tell the truth the way he or she sees, the way it comes through her or him...
I thank you, the reader for taking this journey.
-Eve Ensler
The time is took for me to read that was all it took to re-center myself. THAT is why I will do this. It's why I don't mind the waiting or the nannying I have to do to pay the bills. We are all stories. And those stories matter. Writers make us all immortal. And I'm so, so lucky to be gifted with the opportunity to do it for the rest of my life.
Even if I have to make that opportunity for myself, everyday.
xo.
P.S. Don't worry, I'll never become a dentist. I'd sooner die.
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