I’m thirty-eight years old and I’m sitting here in front of anyone reading this…completely exposed.
I wrote a story in the fourth grade that was chosen to be read at a Young Authors Regional Awards shindig that I had never heard of, knew nothing about, and that existed in a world with which I had no familiarity. I was working class, low rent, salt of the earth stock. My people worked with their hands…got other people’s coffee.
I had turned in my story for the local Young Authors competition as an assignment for my English class. A few months later, my teacher handed me a piece of paper to give to my mom after school. She said it was important. I figured I was in trouble. So, I gave the paper to my mom after school and, two weeks after that, I was a 10-year-old kid sitting on a stage in a downtown hotel ballroom, in front of a roomful of adults, armed only with the knowledge that someone liked my book. I was, indeed, in trouble.
I was a poor, little, shabbily-dressed, white girl with stringy, working-class mullet, holding a hand-illustrated, hand-written story with spaghetti on the corner, which had been hastily thrown together using whatever sparse art supplies I had found laying around my modest, two-bedroom house. My book had been stapled together at school, because we didn’t have a stapler. The drawings were colored in with dried out off-brand markers. The page shapes weren’t uniform because I had hand cut them with cheap kitchen scissors.
On the stage with me were a handful of other elementary school kids, except those kids were in pink poofy dresses and miniature striped ties…in other words, appropriately dressed for the occasion. A few of their books were professionally bound and (gasp!) typed! (This was 1988 in southern IL. Only rich kids typed things.) My parents weren’t there. I had been dropped off and told to meet my mom back out front in a hour. I mean, it was a Saturday and she had shit to do.
I remember my name being called and walking up to the podium. I remember never raising my head to look up at the sea of round tables, covered in white linen, filled with adults who, for some inexplicable reason, were there to listen to stories written by little kids. “They” had to tell me twice to speak up. I have no idea who “they” were because I wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone. I read my story, turning the stiff, uneven pages with fingers as shaky as my voice. I heard applause. I glanced up in the direction of the din, not directly, but sort of out of the corner of my eye, and the adults were on their feet…cheering?…for my story?
Talk about a WTF moment. I felt vulnerable and completely exposed. I happened to get a look at the clock on the back wall at the same time and, oh shit, it had been an hour. Audience still standing, I grabbed my book, bolted down the four aluminum steps off the stage and out the first exit door I saw. My mom was waiting in our dinged-up VW Rabbit out front of the Renaissance hotel, smoking her Salem Slim with the windows up, looking irritated.
“How was it?”
“Fine.”
“Where’s your scarf?”
“I don’t know.”
“Goddammit”
Back at school that next week, I received accolades and kudos from the adults around me, and a kick in the back of the knee at recess from the little rich shit in my class who announced to everyone that my book was crap and his book was better. I didn’t understand any of it.
All I wanted to do was freakin’ write stories. The one I submitted to Young Authors just happened to be a story I was writing for myself, like the 30 others I had written that year in my free time. Honestly, submitting it felt a bit like cheating. I used something I was doing for fun anyway and turned it in for a school assignment…hee hee hee…I thought my teachers were so dumb.
Writing isn’t new to me. I wrote stories that let me escape my reality in elementary school — fiction. I kept a journal with my first BFF in the 7th grade — autobiography. I learned to bullshit my way through a book report in the 8th — persuasive. I wrote endless notes to my friends in high school — narrative. I wrote a sarcastic senior column for the SSHS school newspaper — humor. I wrote undergrad papers on subjects that I had slept through in class — research. I wrote other people’s papers in college for money — academic. And, most importantly, I have written about almost every significant experience I have had spanning my 38 years on this earth — therapy.
There were times I wrote to keep myself alive — by the grace of god.
Writing is like breathing to me. Sometimes I feel like my soul will either implode or explode if I don’t write…this…very…instant. It’s a bodily function.
The sharing is new. The sharing is terrifying. Like peeing in front of strangers. It makes me feel vulnerable in a way that I have avoided confronting…until now. I have shared tiny snippets with small audience and people I love here and there for the past ten years, but never with any potential to scale. It’s like recording a session with your therapist and broadcasting it on YouTube.
I feel vulnerable. I feel naked. I feel blindfolded in the middle of a melee with no armor and my belly exposed. I feel like a poor little kid up on stage being asked to read something she created from the purest part of herself, and submit it for judgment.
You are judging me. You are judging the parts of myself that I hide. You are judging my moles and my sag and my crusty heels and my stretch marks. No clothes. No armor. Naked.
I write myself naked.
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I write this in the eye of the storm of a panic attack about sharing my writing, induced by a sudden, sustained increase in views on a story I wrote and posted recently. When I get anxious, my mind hyper focuses on the thing that is making me anxious and said topic gets temporary exclusive rights to my brain. So I’m writing about it — therapy.
I’ve learned a few things in the last few months that are driving me to share right now, in this very moment, instead of shutting the whole fucking thing down and deleting my Medium account, which is admittedly my instinct:
- Fear means, “Do it”.
- To be the person you want to be, you need to do the things that the person you want to be would do.
- Vulnerability is strength, not weakness.
- Perfection isn’t a thing.
- Writing is my purpose.
So I’m gonna keep showing up here…naked and afraid. Naked and afraid. Naked and afraid. Over and over and over again. I’m going to stand here, feet firmly planted, in what feels like a goddamn hurricane, vulnerable to judgment and criticism, sharing details about myself with strangers that are nearly as intimate as sex, possibly moreso (but that’s a whole different essay.)
I will write about my experiences with motherhood and childhood trauma and rape and sex and anorexia and birthmothering and dating and abortion and relationships and marriage and divorce and autism and any other topic my soul is driven to vomit onto my keyboard…with all of the fears that kept me silent for 15 years staring me dead in my bare naked face.
I will overuse ellipses and chalk it up to stylistic license. I will use “and”s instead of commas, because I think they communicate my points better. I will write about things that people label “TMI” (or they did 10 years ago) because those things will resonate with someone who needs to know they aren’t alone. And connecting with other humans is the whole fucking point. It’s what that little girl wanted to do 28 years ago.
I will write. I will write my way.
People will tell me my writing is crap. Unoriginal. Offensive…and I’m going to keep writing, even when it means sitting naked in the shower for 45 minutes at 6 am, scared to look at my “views” because the only thing scarier than no one reading my words, is a ton of people reading my words.
I will do it because I’m done denying myself the thing that feeds my soul. The thing that binds me to the rest of humanity. The thing that reaches a level of spiritual interconnectedness that I can’t access any other way.
I will do it because I’m a writer and I’m not going to let fear hold me back anymore.
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Originally Published on Medium
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Photo Credit: Pixabay