define.

I have always been the changeable one. Whether in friendships or in love, I have been the one quickest to shape my thoughts, opinions and personality to fit those around me. I want to fit in. I want to avoid conflict. I want to be what I imagine others must want.

It’s strange to say that out loud. I admit, it’s not one of my proudest character traits.

One of the great challenges, I believe, of my adult life has been to learn how to be myself. To learn how to form an opinion and hold it as my own. To learn how I would like myself to be defined, as a person, and how I would like to tell my own story.

You know that we’re all telling our own stories, right? We’re telling them to ourselves. Which bits will you remember and which will you forget? What will be the mood cast on those memories? Who will be the good guys and who will be the bad guys? It’s one great long story-telling venture, from one end of your life to the other.

Things happen. And then we tell them in a story. And that is our life.

Things happen that you can’t control. But many many many things happen that you can control. That’s your ammo. That’s your story-crafting material.

I ate popcorn for dinner. I tried to watch the newest Downton Abbey, but my internet was too slow. And I told myself to sit down and write you (lovely reader) a mess of crap because writing a mess of crap is better than writing nothing at all. There’s no wisdom today, and really no point (which I believe is breaking a great cardinal rule of blogging). This is what comes of having nothing to say.* I am forced to dredge deep. So I dredged up my slowly growing ability to define myself as a person, independent of what others may want or expect. I also dredged up my story, which made me think of yours. You better dredge it up too.

*For the record, this is what beat out my attempt to write about a glass of water...sitting at the edge of the table...with tiny bubbles. Here we are, being real.

old words.

I am wild with the need to write. Wild with it. I love it.

I was looking over this blog today and my eyes landed on the Twitter feed on the right. I have fallen out of that Twitter habit, which is ok for now. I might pick it back up in the next months, but for now it’s ok. One life lesson I’ve learned: don’t try to form or break too many habits at the same time. Being overwhelmed is the surest way to abandon your goals. At any rate, I hadn’t realized before that Twitter lists those tweets by how many days old they are. The most recent one is 134 days ripe. What?

I realize that, in other words, that is a few months. But there’s something about seeing the number of days that makes it feel an epic long while ago. And so, seeing those 134-days old words made me think of T.S. Eliot.

For I have known them all already, known them all --
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
- The Love Song of J, Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

A dear friend sent me a link to this post yesterday. I zeroed right in on the end, which contains the thought I will carry with me for the next many days:

"There is literally no reason not to write. Nothing bad can come of it. Even if no one reads what you are writing, you have a chronicle of something. You are creating something. I’m not the first to say it, but the act of creating almost always leads you somewhere you never would have gone otherwise, and makes you see things differently. How is that ever bad? The luckiest among us might even get nice notes from readers saying how much what we’ve written has inspired them. I’m telling you, if you are coming from a real place, there’s no question that will happen.” - Jenny Rosenstrach (of Dinner: A Love Story)

august: remembering.

I label my writing by day, nothing else, never titles. So I have files and files full of unidentified writing. Some of it I remember vividly, the exact moment and emotion that triggered the words. Some of it I don’t remember at all. Those are my favorite - forgetting severs my emotional, possessive attachments and I can read with clean eyes. It's an incredible thing, to read something you know you wrote, but you can't remember writing it. At any rate, while digging through this mess today, I found what follows below. Technically I didn’t write it today...but I decided to share it today, so that counts.

15aug2012.
I’ve grown tired of running in the neighborhood we’re in right now, temporarily, for a few more weeks. It feels like any direction I run, there are hills at every inconvenient moment. At the moment when I need a flat stretch to keep going and find my second wind, there is a hill. So my lungs start to burn and my head spins and I slow to walk over the crest.

So last night, as the light was falling earlier still, we drove up the road to a man-made lake with a paved path around it. The path is flat and weaves in and out of cool low brush and stubby trees that smell of damp moss and wet dogs. The lake, I have heard, was made when they extended the Metro line out further into Maryland. I have heard that, for some time, this lake was just marked by a sign: Lake Metro. Now it has the name of a person.

food.

I don’t write about food much here (really, ever). Strange, because I think about food, more or less, every waking moment. I love to cook, eat, and feed others. I love the creativity that comes with opening a refrigerator and asking, What can I make out of all this? I just love food.

There’s this desire that I believe comes with any creative urge to make something new. We all want to contribute our own thing. I don't think I’m alone in my instinctive need to make something original and unique, something that would make everyone say, Ah, we never thought of that!

But anyway, it’s bound to be an unrequited desire. It’s all been said and it’s all been done. I am slowly learning this lesson: it is less about original and unique, more about the truest expression of myself and my lens on the world. Authenticity - that is the business of this artist.

I love reading food blogs, but I would never never never dream of trying to write one. There are so many. There are millions. Everyone wants to write about food and take pictures of what they eat and pictures of what they make and pictures at restaurants and put the pictures on Instagram and on their blogs and...so on. I enjoy my share of food blogs, but it just seems too awfully popular to be writing one. That sounds very hipster of me, but even so, my reaction to a glut of food blogs is that I never write about food.

the ride.

Since mid-September I have been gloriously free of public transportation. For several months I commuted via a lovely one mile walk. These days, a zippy bike ride. But this morning, it was raining hard and I needed to wear something nice. I also needed my hair to not be a hot-frizzy-helmet-mess. So I took the bus.

I love the freedom of using my own legs to get wherever I need to go. I also love exercise that has a purpose, i.e. getting me to work. But this morning I remembered with a rush the infinite wealth that lies on one short bus ride, the ammo, the people. There’s so much to see and listen to and speculate about and imagine. I don’t particularly enjoy riding the bus, but it still fires up my writer/thinker brain.

The bus cleared out at the stop where I got on, so I sat in the front, next to a large man with a tall umbrella and a heavy head of fuzzy black hair. It had been raining, and in the moments his umbrella was closed, before he got on the bus, a dozen tiny drops caught in the net of his hair, like drops of dew on a morning spiderweb. He let me get on the bus first. He heaved and sighed until I got off. He looked up at the ceiling and out the window behind him and he just sighed these deep, anxious sighs.

When I reached my stop and the bus halted with a bump, he held out his arm, straight across the aisle, like a rail, offering it to the woman behind me, something to hold onto. People are always falling all over each other on the bus, and pretending that it's perfectly normal to stumble and cram oneself against strangers. She didn’t take his arm.

goal: inspiration space.

• Listening to this album.
• Eating this food.
• And writing in this inspiration space:

small life.

It’s lovely when the itch to write comes back to me. I just need to dust it off and shake it out and it finally takes me away. It’s worth reminding oneself that inspiration can only carry you off if you show up.

I have been successful at freewriting all days but one this week. Last night, I did absolutely everything else on my to do list first. I even added more things to my to do list, and did those as well. It was approaching 10:30pm and I was thinking about what book I wanted to read and how cozy my bed was looking and by some other power, I managed to get my notebook in my hand, set a timer for 10 minutes, and sit myself on the couch to write. I began by writing I don’t want to write but still...I’m showing up. My calendar on the wall is looking very happy with a few big black Xs on it.

Many years ago, a friend introduced me to Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow and my life was changed. It opened my eyes to myself and to human truths I had found no words for, which I believe to be the greatest feats of good art. I will never, never forget those moments, curled up in the Wellfleet winter, reading that book for the first time.

Today I uncovered this wonderful piece about Mr. Berry’s annual birding walk (I was pointed there by this excellent blog). The author, Erik Reece, kindly offered these words:

In tumultuous and uncertain times, it is worth being reminded that these fine things—beauty, faith, gratitude—still lurk eternally beneath history’s dark veneer, and that an artist working alone in a room beside a river may catch a glimpse of them and render them into a lyric poem, a short story, or an essay. 

brooding.

I had a professor in college who was a little wacky. She was the march-to-your-own-drummer sort of English teacher that no one openly admitted to liking. She asked for brazenness and silly self-expression that made me, at least on the face of it, hate her classes. But there was always that little high I got from whatever ridiculous thing she made us write or read or do. And not shockingly, there are things she taught me that sort of bubble up in my consciousness when I least expect it.

So.

I wrote something for one of her classes, I don’t remember what anymore, and she gave me one line of feedback on it. Stop writing so passively. She was absolutely right and still is.

This roared up in my brain last night after Jacob described my writing voice as detached and passive. It wasn’t a criticism, and sometimes passive and detached is exactly how I mean to write. But I really do write passively....all the time. Whether I mean to or not.

In one sense it’s nothing more than a grammatical choice. But in another, it is a subtle way to say things with less conviction, sharpness, passion and ownership. I literally tend toward writing in the passive rather than active voice. I use turns of phrase like seems and might be and appears and so on. It’s less vulnerable and frankly easier to write with less authenticity and self.

I’ve been reading Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, and it really has gotten my wheels spinning. It’s ushered in the epiphany that things I once considered my flaws might be the very opposite. She describes the powerful, heart-thumping empathy I have felt my entire life. She describes the intense dreams and consuming emotions, both good and bad, that might overtake a highly sensitive and introverted person. She mentions such people tend to avoid violent movies - which I absolutely do. She even describes the case of a child who would cry when other children got into trouble in class. Me, I blush when I can tell other people are feeling embarrassed.

success.

I can’t seem to settle on anything. When I write little bits, and delete, and write, and delete, and think, and think, etc. I tend to get lost at sea. The task (writing) seems to grow larger and larger and the importance more and more grave. Suddenly I find myself here, making lists about what kind of blog this is and imagining how I might totally change or totally scrap the whole thing. At least I usually recognize and reign in my crazylady brain when it comes around. Well, I try to.

I desperately want to classify the whole thing and give it some order. Much in the same way that I want to line up the deodorant and hand lotion and mouthwash into a neat row on the shelf. It’s a ridiculous thing. The world moves along just fine if my toiletries are in disorder and I can write big and unwieldy even without a schedule or tidy purpose.

I re-read the first post I wrote here to remind myself: the point is to write. It doesn’t have to be all bloggy and beautiful and attract one million readers. I don’t need to write features on a particular schedule about particular things. Some people do, but right now, I do not. The point for me is to write. I write about things I notice, things I think about, things I read or eat or listen to. That’s all.

For just over a month, I have been biking to work. It’s been a wild adventure. I’ve never biked so much in my life. In the deep dead of winter, it’s cold and it seems many, many cars want to run me over.

It was cold this morning - not too cold, but cold enough that my eyes stung and I shivered the first few blocks. I’ve been running a lot lately and my knee has been achy the past few days. So somewhere around 11th and Mass Ave, I decided to just be aware. Aware of the cold and aware of the pain. That was it.

this new year.

One of the things I have come to love about this blog is the way that I can look back over the months and see slices of myself. I can remember whatever quirky thought or emotion had me so captivated that I wrote it down. The more freely and openly I write here, the more impulsive my fingers fly, the more honestly I am able to see myself.

I don’t write because I am terribly terribly afraid of being bad at it. I don’t write because I have other things to do that are not as hard. I don’t write because I know I should. I don’t write because I am undisciplined. 

I’ve made some resolutions for this new year. I wrote them all out in a hippy-dippy mindmap. But it actually worked for me. I have felt, especially lately, overwhelmed with things I want to do and what seems like not enough time to do them. Drawing it all out onto one page helped me to remember my priorities and remember how to make time for them.

Today is January 4. We are four days into a new year. This is the year I will run a half-marathon and pay off my car loan and who-knows-what-else. Really, who knows what else?

I notice, the more I read what I write, the stuffiness in my voice. Or seriousness? Or ennui? Whatever it is, it isn’t quite accurate. I am a private person and I tend to write carefully in a way that is acceptable for strangers to read, in the way I might present myself, in life, to a stranger. Generally the stranger will find me quiet and shy and they won’t really be sure if I quite like them. The people who know me well know my ridiculousness. I suspect that the more I write, the more I work my way up to the reveal. The moment I can write just as I am.