Out of Office (And In the Woods!)
There will be no RWG events for June or July
I’m leaving for grad school today. There is a chorus that borders on cacophony inside me when I say the words, when I think them.
There is first, the goosebumps trailing up my arm. There is a kind of suppressed delight, a bit like a child being picked up from school and being told there is a surprise in store. I’m buckled into the car and anything is possible.
I think heading off to the Smokey mountains for six weeks of workshop, writing, and literature classes is, as an adult, what Disneyworld would have been for a child. Excitement feels like too small a word.
There is the practical voice that keeps asking me if I have remembered everything. It doesn’t matter that I’ve made lists and checked it two, three, four times. I will keep wondering and I will still have forgotten something.
There is the still, small voice that reminds me six weeks is a long time and there is so much that I love that I am leaving behind, at least for a little while. She also reminds me that I like to be home, will this new place be as comfortable as home?
No, silly voice, but comfort is not the point.
There are some meaner voices. Nasty old hags who have things to say about debt, about the place of higher education in the creative fields, who want to ask me “who do you think you are” and “if this place was any good why would they let you in”.
If this were a story I was writing, I would tell you something evocative, like how they speak with my mother’s voice, but this isn’t a story, and those mean voices are entirely my own. For years those voices have been the left and right weight around my ankles, my wrists. They have been the tape over my mouth. They have been the soft and false call of stability, they have been the reminder to remain grounded, the dampers on the burning flames of my desires.
They have always been mine.
Until recently, this path had seemed an impossible dream. A thing meant for other people.
When I had fewer responsibilities and more freedom to uproot myself for an MFA program, I wasn’t writing enough to seriously consider it. The voices of my fear and self-doubt were too loud. I was too chicken-shit.
I seem to have worked in reverse order. Becoming a mom, growing into my adult self, helped me write more, not less. These becomings meant addressing the voices holding me back, they meant unburdening myself of the ineffective coping mechanisms that held my dreams at bay. I found time when I had less time. I found devotion when I had learned it elsewhere.
The question for others seems to be what will I do with this new degree once I get it. What is the point? Do I want to be a professor? What kind of job prospects are there?
I want to laugh, and I want to cry. There aren’t job prospects. There isn’t a plan here. There’s just this desire—I want to be a better writer. I have reached the limits of what I can do on my own. I arrived at a place I had strived for and dreamed of, and I didn’t know where to go from there.
I am—in my thirties—finally doing the kind of experimenting I should have been doing in my twenties. I am writing without a reason. I am writing a lot. I am letting myself be bad without self-flagellating. I am working without reward. I let the rejections, dozens and dozens of them, flow over me without crushing me.
I have let go of the illusion that I deserve anything, that I am owed anything. I have decided that to write will be enough.
At the precipice of this change, I am charged and my mind is chattering. Pure kinetic energy, everything full of possibility. There is no knowing what happens next, but it’s happening is inevitable, the falling irrevocable.
My feet on the path, the world falling away. Be right back, I’m off to live my dreams.
