“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.
Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ~ Ira Glass (thanks to Jo Malby for introducing me to this quote!).
My blog, as you can probably guess, means a lot to me.
I’ve had some really meaningful moments on here. Times when someone has thanked me, so profoundly, for something I’ve written that’s helped them, and I feel like they really get what I’m trying to do here. Or, in different way, the times when a person or an organization with a lot of followers has shared a link to my blog, and I end up getting hundreds of views and multiple re-shares in one day. This, of course, doesn’t happen very often. But when it does, it’s an absolutely breathtaking feeling to know my words resonated with so many people.
But in a weird way, all these experiences have sort of made it harder to come on here and write from a place of vulnerability. To admit that I don’t have it all figured out. After all, I want to inspire people, not bum them out. It’s supposed to be “Sunlight in Winter,” not “The Clouds of Winter.” And the posts that people have really tended to gravitate to, for the most part, tend to be the posts where I talk about everything that I’ve learned.
But my roommate said something really helpful the other day. She asked, “You know what? I think you should just not give a fuck. When I read a piece of good writing, I don’t care whether someone thinks they have all the answers, or whether or not they are writing as a professional. What I am impressed by is their truth– that they had the courage to put something so real, so raw down paper. When someone tells you about the truth of their experience, it makes you feel that you are not alone.”
And she’s right. When I think about the different pieces of writing that have resonated with me over the years, it’s not necessarily the straightfoward, informative, “This is what I know now” pieces that have stuck with me. It’s the writer’s voice that makes the difference.
After all, telling your story is not about skipping ahead to the end, to the answers you found. It is about how you got through.
So I want to tell you about all of it. About how, in high school, I starved myself, convinced that if I didn’t I would become fat. And then I ran myself into the ground– all to later realize it was based on an illusion, and that I wasn’t being healthy at all.
And then, at 17, the leg injury I got from running too much. For years, I blamed myself, and even after the surgery was afraid to move at all, feeling like I couldn’t trust myself not to break my own body all over again.
And then, at 20, how my nervous system changed. It was a physiological process, not a psychological one, but I didn’t know that at the time.
And then, a few lost years of thinking I was crazy– of everyone else thinking I was crazy too. Of my nervous system spinning out of control, and telling me that everything was hurt; everything was damaged…
Until finally, I discovered the work of Neil Pearson (and, by extension, Lorimer Moseley and David Butler)…
And how it changed everything about how I think about myself. Not just my pain, and my physical body, but myself as a person. How I realized I didn’t have a psychological problem, and that everyone who told me I did wasn’t seeing clearly.
And now, five years later, I’ve developed a perspective that I am honestly quite proud of. I’m not afraid of my body anymore. Not afraid of myself anymore.
I can now hear in my own voice, at times, the same rationality that I used to cling to in the voices of my doctors and physical therapists. Thanks to all the classes I’ve taken, and the reading I’ve done, and all the questions I’ve sometimes had to push various medical professionals to answer, I’ve actually managed to piece together a larger picture. One in which I’m not constantly afraid, or thinking something’s wrong with me.
Now I can think objectively. I can think scientifically.
But I’m not out of the woods yet.
It’s the story of my life that just I find the answers to one problem, another problem develops. I’ve written before about my issues with the sacroiliac joint, and they have turned to be almost as mysterious and vexing as my chronic pain problem.
But I’m going to write about them. I’m going to write about all of it.
It’s not just about finding the answers. It’s about how you get there.
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