Becoming

words of others

Hello Reader,

I’ve been in a state of creative dormancy the last few weeks. Life itself has been good, continuing to chug along as it does, but the will to sit down and write something of substance has been anemic. For the last few PDWs I’ve found myself on Thursday night with nothing on the page. As I write these very words it is 11:33 PM on Thursday. A mere 6ish hours until this goes out into the world.

Perhaps it’s inaccurate to say the will to write isn’t there. The will might be there but not the execution. Many are the days where I find myself parceling out pieces of my time to things that are not a priority (aka things that are not writing). I give away chunks of my day and precious energy. At the end of those days I often feel that time has slipped through my hands. There’s a feeling of “waste.”

But if I take a step back I realize that while I haven’t been writing, I have been living. The holidays were rich and included some healthy familial pivoting. There was illness overcome. A circus. A new bed. A fresh coat of paint on the wall. A big career happening. Many good things and many normal things and a few sad things.

So while I don’t have great words for you today, I will leave you with some delicious words from another. Cheryl Strayed wrote these excerpts for her Dear Sugar weekly advice column back in 2011. She was asked to give advice to her younger self. I probably read it a decade ago but was reminded of this piece recently. Ms. Strayed is a modern sage and her work is as honest as it gets.

Please enjoy -

There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

…

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.

…

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

…

One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.

..

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.