Reflections of a Girl

I had a memory this morning when I was preparing my coffee and congratulating myself on doing a little bit of writing again after a very long hiatus. Ten years ago, I wrote a novel and started a mid length story that I was really excited about. I reread them both a while after I wrote them. They need some work, but there is some really good writing in there. I am curious to read them again now when I have time, because my perspective on the world has changed so much. I have become so much more open minded and gained a sensitivity to viewpoints that I did not possess a decade ago. It has been almost a decade! Life got really complicated and challenging and didn’t really let up until the last few weeks!

I signed up for a creative writing class in college. I was also doing some bit of writing for the school paper, which was mostly political. I hope those pieces have disappeared because they were immature and I have grown a lot since then. Opinion, satire, and political writing was always easier for me. Its less vulnerable.

The professor walked into the class on the first day, and before we received any instruction he had us write. We were supposed to write for most of the period. We were then paired with a partner and asked to read one another’s writing. I got paired with a girl who was a little bit older then me, and I was already older then most traditional college students. I was attending a commuter school at the time, and most of us had jobs, or had worked for a few years before going to school. I was fresh out of the Army and freshly back from a tour of duty in Iraq.

I stared at my computer screen for the duration of the period. I couldn’t think of anything to write. I read so broadly. Even as a fairly young child I would imagine scenes that had a fair amount of depth to them. I couldn’t even start. I was so self critical that I couldn’t let myself come up with an idea, and the thought of putting something on paper that another human being was going to read caused my brain to blank. Embarrassed, I read my partner’s story and had nothing to give her in return. Her story was a dorky story with a fantasy theme, and the writing was rough and immature (it was a rough draft of an impromptu story in a beginning writing class!).

There are lot of causal factors for my inhibition at the time. Shame and guilt loomed heavily over me at that point in my life. I grew up in a conservative religion, and attended a religious school for a couple years before joining the army. As a neurodivergent, queer, oddball I just never stood a chance in that environment! At the time I was basically going through conversion therapy and trying hard to suppress so much of myself. No wonder I couldn’t even start writing. I couldn’t be honest and open with myself, with God, and certainly not with an older, dorky, girl who was into High Fantasy. I quickly asked the teacher if I could audit the class, which he reluctantly agreed to. I think I dropped it completely before the next period.

As a child I was a kind, goofy, nerdy little person. Being queer and neurodivergent set me up for a lot of rejection and loneliness. I felt like an alien. I constantly studied people around me to figure out how I needed to act, in order to be liked and included. I became an expert at masking. By the time I was flying for the military I felt like everyone in the squadron was my friend and I was liked by everyone. I was never cool though. I was too much an oddball at my core. At the end of the day I was everyone’s friend because I was reflecting back at them what they wanted! I only have really come to terms with this in the last year or so.

I think the path for creative people is always a hard road like this. In human culture there are strong incentives for “tribes” to enforce conformity for the good of the tribe. That being said there are advantages for a community when it has a few folks that can innovate, so there is some tension there. Established religious communities have an even stronger dynamic. As they become more hierarchical and the power structures become more embedded they become less tolerant of dissent. Even small acts of difference are punished.

For us to engage in any creative enterprise, we have to let go of so much baggage. We have to tear up our shame and guilt, tear up the narrative that tells us we have to conform and release them all into the wind. Our ingenuity and insight bubbles up from the font of creativity but only when we can unstop it and be free. Paradoxically, creativity is a freeing act. Freeing ourselves of inhibitions, among them shame, guilt and self-critique, is how we prime the pump. I wish I would have taken a small step, been willing to be vulnerable and started to free myself years ago when I was sitting at a blank computer screen in my first creative writing class. One small bit of vulnerability would have primed the pump and started a flow.

My little Luna pup surveying the vast expanse of the world that we have yet to explore!