I’m super
excited to have been invited to join a blog group alongside three talented
bloggers. Each week, one of us chooses a topic and we all post a blog
entry on that topic, usually on Thursdays.
Here are
the links to the other fabulous blogs:
This week’s
topic was my idea. In honor of
Halloween, I asked the group to discuss facing a fear. Here’s my take:
Okay,
I’ll say it: 2012 kicked my
ass. From start to finish, bad
things happened. The awful began
in March with the death of a much-loved aunt, followed shortly thereafter by the
death of an uncle and, in a blink, another wonderful uncle. (By year’s end, all said, I’d have buried
two aunts and three uncles.)
Then
in June, one of my kids got sick.
Really sick; like in-and-out-of-the-hospital-for-a-month sick. Once she was out of crisis, I breathed
for about a week before yet another doctor told me that one of my other kids
needed some testing for yet another medical issue. Her diagnosis wasn’t life threatening, but it was life
changing. And terrifying.
Needless
to say, I felt scared. No, I felt
absolutely, completely petrified.
Somehow,
even weighed down with all of my fear, I made it through the remainder of the year, mainly just by coasting on automatic pilot.
I felt like I’d spent the entire twelve months either in a funeral home,
a hospital, or a clinic. I never
quite seemed rested; my eyes burned and my hair smelled of grief and antiseptic
and whatever makes funeral homes smell the way they do (I don’t want to know). I cried more tears than I thought I
could produce. I began dreading
phone calls and emails, as they seemed to bear only bad news. All of 2012 had scared the pants off of
me.
I
wanted to hide under the covers and stay there until someone, anyone, sounded
the “all clear.” I found myself
wondering what else could go wrong – and then running scenario after scenario
of scary possibilities. Fear
consumed me. It absolutely took me
over in whole.
But
fear is a funny thing. Sure, it
steals your breath and disrupts your sleep and makes you feel like every nerve
ending in your body is on fire. But
fear has a flip side. Fear also
motivates. It shakes those rosy
glasses right off your face, forcing you to look at life a bit
differently. Fear moves you.
Yes,
funny thing, fear: after a full
year of it, after wishing and praying it would go away and leave me unafraid, it
motivated me to do something that absolutely terrified me.
It
made me start writing.
I
mean, I’d always written. My whole
life, in one way or another, I was always putting something down on paper: short stories and unbelievably sappy
poems as a child; news stories and witty feature articles as a college and then
professional journalist; dry legal briefs and motions as an attorney. I’d even begun this blog, but I rarely
updated it. I blamed it on work,
claimed that writing legalese for a decade had messed with my creative writer’s
voice, and left it at that.
But
I knew better. I knew I’d stopped
writing because I was afraid.
Writing
takes a leap of faith. It’s one
thing to put the words on the paper in the privacy of your home, but it’s
completely another to show that paper to the world. That’s what tripped me up, that’s what terrified me. I tried to break it down; what exactly
was I so afraid of? Of course, I
feared failure. I feared
rejection. I feared that my
writing was no good and that I wasn’t the writer I’d always fancied myself to
be. Failure meant loss of control,
which meant I feared powerlessness – and who wouldn't fear that?
Once I put my writing out there – even on my blog – I opened myself up
to criticism and the interpretations of my readers. That scared me silly.
And
yet.
When
2012 blissfully ended and January finally arrived, I did something I’d never
done before: I loaded my pink
overnight bag into my Jeep and drove to St. Louis to attend a writing workshop
run by one of my all-time favorite writers, Wade Rouse. I spent eight hours in a book store,
seated at a square of tables, surrounded by people much like me, people who
wrote but not for a living, people who wanted to write more, who wanted other
people to read what they wrote. (Well,
maybe.)
We
all came to the tables with a book idea.
Some had pages, some had chapters, all had a story. I’d been writing mine for a few years,
on and off. I’d start and stop and
then start again. I told myself I
didn’t care if I finished or if it was published, but there I was, 300 miles
from home in a strange city at a workshop for writers hoping to be
published. Of course I cared; of
course I was too afraid to admit it.
The
night after the workshop, I returned to my hotel room and I proceeded to write
for five hours. And then I went
home and I wrote some more. I
signed up for the second part of the writing workshop to be held in June in
Michigan, and by the time I threw my pink bag in the car for that trip, my book
was complete.
But
my fear remained.
I
can list out all of the scary specifics running through my brain; the nagging
questions that again invade my sleep:
What if no one likes the book?
What if no one wants to publish it? Or read it? What
if people think it’s stupid? Or
that I’m stupid? Or that I’m a
poseur and not really a writer after all?
I
still carry those fears with me, and I feel them each time I hit “publish” on
my blog and each time I show my manuscript to someone.
But, like I said, fear is a funny thing.
The only way to make it go away is to face it. Otherwise, it just festers and grows.
I
don’t know why I chose 2013 as the year to tackle my writing fear. I can only assume that the death and
loss and fear that filled 2012 snapped something in my brain, some reminder
that life is short – and that fear is relative.
Sure,
part of me fears writing and all of the little terrors it involves, but an even
bigger part of me fears not
writing. Because this much I
know: the only way to be a writer
is to write . . . and to be read. Scary, yes, but not nearly as
terrifying as the alternative, which I also know: if I don’t write, I’m not a writer. And then my biggest fear comes
true.
And
that? Terrifies me.
