i was at a party on monday night with a bunch of people i don't know terribly well, but know enough to know that we're mostly all at different points in our lives. not all of us, so much as, all of them, and then me, on the other side of some invisible line.

and one of the girls was asking about dating in new york city, which if i know anything at this point in my life it is that 1. dating here is absolutely unforgiving and hard and new york may very well be the worst place to meet anyone. ever. and 2. the experience of dating here is a perpetual case of heartache--mostly mild, but sometimes not.

over the last few years i've gotten really good at crafting stock answers to questions i don't want to answer. like what do you do for a living or what do you want to do with your life or are you seeing anyone. i answer obliquely or flippantly or, upon occasion, with a question that is just disarming and (relatively) charming enough that the person laughs and we move on to another topic.

on monday night someone asked about a man. and i let out a long breath and sort of chuckled. and i had no words. because sometimes the truth is too sharp to gloss over. and before my wise-ass mouth could catch up to my mind, i found myself saying, but you know, not everyone gets to have this experience. and maybe it's a bit lucky that i do.

and how shocked i was by those words. because where did they come from? that was my thought--i had that thought?

but out they came. and they felt really true. and really good.

but like a peripheral truth. sitting just on the edge of myself. and if only i could reach out, wrangle it, pull it in closer.

there's a man named brian doyle who is one of my very favorite writers. and once upon a time he wrote a nearly perfect essay on what it is to be a writer. and i've underlined and dog-eared and highlighted the whole of it. and i go back again and again (and again) to find answers to questions that have both nothing and everything to do with writing.

so i pulled it out sometime just after monday night searching for what follows:

I was visiting a class of fourth graders recently, and going on at tiresome length, as is apparently my habit, about Robert Louis Stevenson, and how great he was, and how he wrote timeless and vigorous stuff in every genre, novels and poetry and essays and travelogues and letters, like a pitcher who could throw the best curve and the best slider and the best change up and the best head-high heater, and a girl in the third row raised her hand to ask an honest question:

"If Stevenson is the best ever, and you say you'll never be as good as him, why do you write?"

She had me there for a moment--what do I say? Catharsis? Or benign neurosis? Or prayer? ...

My job--my itch, urge, dream, hobby, entertainment, prayer--is to tell stories on paper, to try to choose and tell stories that both inform and move their readers, and that is what I do to shoulder the universe forward two inches. I was given the urge, and a little of the requisite skill, and I have to do it. It's what I do, and what I love to do, and no once else can do it quite like I do.

Better, perhaps--but not with my peculiar flavor and music, and somehow, in a way I do not wholly understand, that is important, and in a very real sense miraculous, and necessary."

i believe that of writing. and i believe that of life. which i think is what i meant when on monday night i said, not everyone gets to have this experience.

i wouldn't wish my life on anyone. as lucky and charmed and impossibly blessed and undeservingly fortunate as i have been, i would not wish my life on anyone. because there were whole stretches of time in which i thought i'd been swallowed whole by sadness. and i was. years of my life i can't remember. whole years. just the other night i was out with a friend i hadn't seen in five years and he was talking about the last time we'd been together and my recollection was so vague and so dark that all i could do was turn to him and say, i can't recall. and the thing is, i have an exceptional memory. that's my thing. so to not remember is unnerving and terrifying and says more about a very sad and very lonely stretch of time than the small words i might choose to use ever could.

but here's the thing, and this is a relatively new thought for me, i wouldn't trade my life for anyone else's. because not everyone gets to have this experience. and maybe it's lucky that i do. and others may live their lives "better--but not with my peculiar flavor and music." this is my lot and i'll be damned if i don't figure it out. and frankly i'd like to see how it all plays out. which is to say, i'm invested in the story. i'm invested in the story of my own life. which, i think, is not a bad place to be at twenty-seven.

i used to think the not knowing was the worst bit. the great gaping unknown--an endlessly terrifying thing. but i'm starting to realize it's actually quite thrilling. it's actually, absolutely, the best bit. there is so much to look forward to, so much still to do. i have yet to live that night on which i'll meet the man i marry. yet to get my first piece published. yet to give birth or buy a house or figure out non-oblique answers to all those damn questions. there are so many firsts still ahead of me. and what a blessing--what a particularly exciting thing about standing on this side of that invisible line.

what i'm just now coming to realize is that the difference between the terror and the thrill--that razor-edge that separates the two, is faith.

i remember sending up a particularly vociferous prayer towards the start of the year, which wasn't so much a prayer as a demand, what do you want from me? what do you want from me? six words i said again and again. six words i angrily flung upward. and the answer came back immediate and clear: more faith.

more faith.

which at the time i thought meant more patience, and patience has never been my virtue.

but now, these many months later, i don't think it is patience. it's not about more patience or less patience. it's about a seed of self-belief. and how that seed is actually a divine thing. it's about embracing the bits that don't make any sense. trusting that the story is in fact made by the departures and aberrations. it's about wonder and curiosity. about moving forward and upward even if the movement is a sort of graceless thrashing about. it's about clawing and clamoring and dirt beneath the fingernails. it's about saying i don't know. and i don't know. and i don't know, again. because one day i will. and if one believes that in the end it'll all work out--even and most especially in the face of overwhelming doubt--then those moments of discomfort and unease and fear are made sweet and holy and wholly lovely by their impermanence.

more faith.

hell.

that really is the answer, isn't it?

this morning i took a warm shower, lit a candle, took note of the first sip of my latte. i took extra time for the small things. because when things feel stuck or hard the best thing i know to do is return to the simple and mundane--to rejoice in the beauty of the day-to-day. so i pulled out my quinoa, set in the stove to cook, and having just read an article a few weeks back about how many bugs are actually in our food (and how they can be good for our digestive tract) i saw a sliver of a bug running across the top of those uncooked seeds, and thought, nope, not today. this will not be how i take care of myself, today. so instead i'm going to share a lump of really good quotes. because i'm in need of some inspiration, and perhaps someone else is to...

"And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too." Khaled Hosseini (i can't tell you how often this gets me in trouble.

"People will love you. People will hate you. And none of it will have anything to do with you." Abraham Hicks

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence." Erich Fromm

"Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of faith." Margaret Shepard

"Inner beauty, too, needs occasionally to be told it is beautiful." Robert Brault

"Everything depends on how near you sleep to me." Leonard Cohen

"When you fall in love, I guess nobody ever does mean to fall in love. But it happens, and love brands itself on your brain. It's like a new street appearing overnight in the city you've lived in your whole life. The street is one way--you can't turn around and get off it--and it curves up ahead so that you can only see far enough to know that you are veering into the unknown." Fearful Symmetry

"Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness." Yousuf Karsh

"Grace is wild. Grace unsettles everything. Grace overflows the banks. Grace messes up your hair. Grace is not tame." Doug Wilson

"The conversations between your fingers and someone else's skin. This is the most important discussion you can ever have." Iain Thomas

happy monday. here's to hoping it's a damn fine week...

what i'm listening to | to kill a king + bastille

more faith

my new york | that one saturday in williamsburg that we ate too much and drank too much and played a little bocce ball

the feeling of it

image credit unknown

some inspiration to start the week

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