A Snake in the Bed

I always get some pushback from friends and family when I tell them to write about their problems. I ask them to open a blank page, be it on their computer or in a crumpled notebook, and give voice to what needs to come out. They look at me skeptically like I did when my coach asked me to embark on 100 days of stories and then they give me some not-so-unique reason for their inability to fill a blank page with words unique to them. 

I’m not a writer. Well, I've been listening to my therapist more lately. And my most favorite response, If I write it down then it becomes too real.

I adore these excuses because I have uttered every one of them at least a dozen and a half times. I quit writing for years because no one thought I was a writer. I have listened and put into action multitudes of advice from holier than thou acquaintances and I have quieted the voices in my mind because if I heard them out, let alone wrote them out, the things I would have found there would have destroyed the illusion of what I thought I wanted. 

What makes you a writer is writing. It is not the likelihood that someone out there will care about the words you put together but the act of putting them together to begin with. 

When I was a sophomore in high school I asked one of my closest friends what she could see me doing with my life. I expected her to say something empowering and lofty like an artist or lawyer, or god forbid a writer and she did not. She told me I would make a great office assistant, someone who sits behind a desk and takes calls for actually intelligent and capable people because I am very good at being nice. 

I also remember this being the first time in my life I wanted to hit somebody in that soft spot where their throat and collar bone connect.

As we stood in front of my open locker visions of a lifetime spent in some doctor or accountant’s office transferring phone calls and cleaning the coffee pot danced in my mind. I suddenly became not so nice toward my not so empowering classmate. 

In the average friendship and family circles, I think there are very few people who will press upon you the statement, I think you should write. Probably because it’s very scary. When I had my head safely buried in the sand of the suitable career world the second to last thing I wanted to do was read through the stories of someone like me who decided to pursue a bigger happier life. The last thing I wanted to do was give voice to the terrified tiny voice inside of me that screeched you are throwing your life away each morning I opened my eyes in that South Dakota rental house. 

I hate to tell you this because truthfully I learned it the hard way, but things are very real regardless if you write them down or not. I like to think of a page of words strung together like a flashlight. If you feel something slithering over your feet in the night chances are it’s your cat's tail or maybe a giant snake hinging its jaws wide open in preparation to swallow you completely. The words are the light you can shine into places of your life to assess danger and just maybe they’ll allow you to get away from that horrible snake before it gets your feet in its mouth.  

If I would have given the tiny shrieking voice inside of me an empty page of words much earlier than I did I think my life would be better now. I would have quit horses way before I actually did, told a few people to use the advice they so freely gave, and not accepted that I would never be happy in this lifetime. 

Maybe it's lazy that I tell them to go write about what itches them because I prefer not to waste my breath. I know that any advice I have to offer them cannot compete with the truth those tiny shrieking voices nestled somewhere between their lungs and liver have to offer them.

 I wish someone would have told me to write when I told them I couldn’t keep getting out of bed in the morning. Instead of telling me my expectations were too high for life or that I needed to get comfortable with the monotony of adulthood, I wish they would have told me to write and I would have shined light on the truth of them being absolutely wrong.