We sit in a small circle in the living room, some on chairs, some on the floor, and for a moment it is easy to believe that nothing will ever change. That old illusion. Lucy plays her guitar – Coldplay’s “Fix You,” Jon Foreman’s “The Cure For Pain” – and we are transfixed. Without fail, when she plays the guitar, I find tears taking root in the dark corners of myself, the spaces easily ignored during most of this over-busy life of mine.
And here tonight while the stars are blacking out With every hope and dream I’ve ever had in doubt I’ve spent ten years trying to sing these doubts away But the water keeps on falling from my eyes*
It is the end of a three-week journey for our family, from Pennsylvania to Florida to North Carolina, mile after paved mile. Now, it is Sunday night, and on Monday (while you’re reading this) we will drive north, complete the great circle, return to normal life. Only it is not normal, because our house in on the market, most of our things in boxes, and suddenly we don’t know where we might be living next month, next year. Suddenly, a crossroads.
“Can you play a Christmas song?” someone asks, and I wish we could go on like this forever. Forever. Music and listening and meandering off into the sound of my oldest daughter’s voice. Lucy gives a few options. We choose “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and she sings it slower than usual, soulful, and we join in. I look over at our Auntie, here from Hawaii for Thanksgiving, singing along. Her life is one that is indescribable, a story of perseverance the like you may have never heard before, and yet there she sits in my in-laws’ living room, a peaceful presence. Our voices rise together.
Here we are as in olden days,
Happy golden days of yore.
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Gather near to us once more.
Lucy picks the last note on her guitar, and it hangs in the air until the silence reaches up and plucks it down like ripe fruit. Monday morning we will pile into the packed car, hopefully by 5am, and begin the trek north, into the cold, into the unknown, into the future. We sigh, none of us knowing we had been holding our breath. I think again of the last lines of Foreman’s song.
And heaven knows… heaven knows I tried to find a cure for the pain Oh my Lord, to suffer like you do… It would be a lie to run away A lie to run It would be a lie It would be a lie to run away*
Sometimes it can be almost impossible to tell the difference between running and running away.
*From Jon Foreman’s song, “The Cure For Pain”
If you’re looking for a gift for a young (or young at heart) reader in your life, check out my book The Day the Angels Fell, described by Anne Bogel at Modern Mrs. Darcy as, “Neil Gaiman meets Madeleine L’Engle. I read it in two days!”
I’ll start by telling you that I have co-written somewhere around 20 books with various people. Sometimes these books are independently published and sometimes they are brought into the world through publishing houses. But in every case, as soon as I sign a contract, I become gripped by a terrifying fear that I will not be able to write the book the person is looking for.
These are the negative voices in my head. We all have them. Mine live in covered fifty-gallon drums, some of which are all rusted out while others are marked with radioactive symbols, ooze leaking out around the base. I’m usually able to press…the…voices…down…into…the…barrel by all means of distraction and positive self-talk and strength of will, but as soon as I sign a new contract, as soon as I start writing another book, the voices begin clamoring, their little fingers reaching out from under the barrel lids, trying to escape.
“You’re a pretender!” they shout. “You’re not much of a writer! And even if you were, you wouldn’t be able to write the book this person wants! Good luck, idiot!”
They’re not very nice. Sometimes, I’m a little rough with them when I try to close the lids. No one’s perfect.
Before the ink is dry on the contract, before I’ve scanned it and mailed it back to the client or the publisher, I begin questioning my vocation. Why do I write? Wouldn’t life be easier if I delivered newspapers or neutered cats or pumped sewage tanks for a living? Maybe I could work at the post office – I’ve heard they have great benefits. If that didn’t work out, I could donate my plasma, sell a kidney.
But I keep writing. I’m not good for much else, to be quite honest. I’m barely employable. And I eat way too much sugar for anyone to be seriously interested in my organs.
______
A few months ago, I sent in a three-chapter writing sample for a new project to both the wonderful client and the editor I’m working with. As soon as I hit send, the voices filled my head with the same old din, and I ran around from barrel to barrel, stuffing them in, trying to find something to seal the lids. Something heavy. A few days went by, and when I didn’t get any feedback, I stopped even trying to quiet the voices – I sat down among the barrels and bathed in the self-criticism, the self-doubt. I figured I might as well start brushing up my resume. Maybe I shouldn’t have deleted my LinkedIn account? Maybe I should start shopping for decent job interview clothes? I have nothing nice to wear. This writing-for-a-living thing means I rarely make it out of my pajamas.
I finally heard back. The client loved loved loved one of the three chapters I wrote. It made her and her entire team cry when she read it out loud to them. But I sensed some hesitancy about the other chapters. The editor said, “I like so much of what I see…The chapters here are solid, but they should come later in the book, after the reader is already invested in your journey.”
So, of course, I was devastated.
For clarification: this is not negative feedback. This is valuable feedback! This is positive feedback! But can I be honest? As a writer, even after writing this many books and working with this many editors, I still have an unreasonable desire – I want my first draft to knock everyone over. I want people to read my first drafts and fall backward, exclaiming something along the lines of, “This is the best thing I’ve ever read please do not change a single word or you will diminish the awesomeness you have created.”
This is not realistic. This is not ever going to happen. Never. Not ever. The first draft of any created thing can always be improved upon.
Ten years ago, when I got a similar response from an editor, it plunged me into a despair so crippling that I could not hear what she was actually saying, I could not move forward, and the project stalled. I took the feedback she gave, not as a way to improve the manuscript, but as personal criticism and reasons that what I had written was not, and evidence that I would never be, good enough.
Thankfully, I am not that writer anymore. This time, after I got their feedback, I went for a drive. I thought about what the editor said. I knew she was right, and I had felt it even when I submitted the chapters – that was one of the voices I should have listened to, but sometimes they’re so difficult to differentiate between, the helpful voices and the mean ones. I attacked those three chapters and started the book at a different spot, taking into account her suggestions. Recently, I submitted a third (or fourth?) draft of the manuscript, and I heard the golden words from my client: “I really love this manuscript.”
______
Can I tell you what I am learning?
When you don’t get something right the first time, it doesn’t mean you’re terrible at what you do – it means you’re a human being who is in the act of creating something.
When someone offers criticism that is genuinely meant to help you and improve your work, accept it. Listen to what they’re saying and not the translation you’re getting from the voices in your head.
Understand and accept that your first shot at anything will never be your best effort. This may include (but is not limited to) parenting your child, nurturing a relationship, applying for a job, doing your job, starting a business, or, yes, writing a book.
If you want to be a writer, you have to realize, contrary to all appearances, you are not engaging in a solitary undertaking. Bring trusted people along. Let them speak into what you’re creating.
Revision is your best friend, even better than the one who watches The Bachelor with you or knows you secretly still listen to Britney Spears on road trips.
______
I walk quietly in the field of 50-gallon drums. As I get older, I realize the voices are me, the voices come out of some long-ago hurt or praise or experience. I pat the lids gently, remembering the little boy who lived through the experience that birthed each particular voice.
I keep walking, to the hill beyond the field, the hill that holds a solitary tree at the top. I walk up the hill and take out a notebook and sit down, my back against the tree.
I look at the words in the notebook, a story I started long ago. I read it again, from the beginning.
I don’t know exactly when I forgot this, but yesterday I remembered: memories carry a certain weight, the kind that presses in around the temples, heavy like an x-ray apron on the chest. Like a subtle strain of asthma, they can constrict the breathing, even slow down time.
Walking into my childhood elementary school yesterday felt like walking into a cathedral, one with walls covered in the scribbles of children, the paintings of preteens. The memories were unexpected, heavy. Those long, familiar halls were quiet. I could have sat down and listened, sat there for thirty minutes and let every memory speak to me, but that definitely would have been weird. I probably would have been escorted from the premises.
Instead, I walked to the old fifth grade wing, gave two short talks on being an author in what used to be the art room. 29 years ago, yes, 29 years ago, I sat in that room and tried, very unsuccessfully, to draw the red barn across the street, the red barn that is still there, smirking at me. I once, in that very room, made a paper mache underwater scene of a person being eaten by a shark.
While I spoke to the students, I tried pushing away the memories of playing four square and kickball and freeze tag just outside those windows. I tried ignoring the voices reminding me of my three best friends and baseball practice after school (my team wore orange uniforms sponsored by Lengacher’s Cheese) and the time the creek flooded and we went home early. You know, in those days, if you had early dismissal, your parents didn’t know about it. There was no automated call, no email advisory. If you had an unexpected early dismissal, you just showed up at home, startling your mother.
I tried to tell the kids what it is like being a writer, an author, what it’s like telling stories for a living, mine and other people’s.
“If you want to be a writer when you get older, write a little every day,” I said. “And finish what you start.” And also don’t forget about shitty first drafts, which is something I did not tell them, but hopefully someone will soon, when they’re ready for saltier language.
I drove home through those same old farmers’ fields, headed back towards the city. The Amish were baling their alfalfa, slowly, methodically, the way most harvests, including words, should be brought in. I remembered every small bridge, every stream I crossed. I knew where the fishing holes were, where you could cross without getting your rolled-up jeans soiled with muddy creek water. I remember the fields that kept the cows and the one that held the bull, the one we ran through as if our life depended on it.
Where does this longing come from, this longing only memories can bring? Is it a wish to revisit the past? Is it a desire to be at a point in time where you know what will happen next? Is it that time filters out the filthy grounds and leaves only the flavor?
The city rose in front of me, and then our row home. I walked in to my current life, a life I love. But I was also reminded of this: memories will cling to you like burrs, and you have to pick them off, one by one. I spent all night doing that. It was not a wasted evening.
That’s me at the far right, 20 years ago. Yes, I had blond hair. There’s no rational explanation for that.
Twenty years is an eternity. Twenty years is yesterday. Twenty years ago this month I was a junior at Messiah College, finding my way, losing my way, finding it again. Twenty years ago I was twenty years old. How old I felt! How experienced and worldly-wise! (Twenty years from now will I look at my 40-year-old self and chuckle, shake my head, feel such grace towards the youngster I was at the time?)
I played on the soccer team at Messiah and it was one of the greatest joys and disappointments of my life. On one particular Saturday in October, 1997, we were slated to play our arch nemesis. Campus was alive and plans were made and friends prepared to travel to the away game.
More importantly, after the game, I had a date.
A real, live date with a beautiful girl named Maile Silva, a girl who I had five classes with that fall. We both loved Modern American Lit and Counting Crows and Li-Young Lee. She was a dream, to be honest, and those blue eyes. Those blue eyes. She was so sincere, so earnest. So beautiful. Did I mention that?
Twenty years ago this month, Maile and I went on our first date. I raced out of the locker room when we returned from the away game, and I jogged, breathless, to my friend Karen’s apartment to pick up her keys so that I could borrow her white Honda (Civic, I think?) and take this girl Maile on our first date. Later, Maile would tell me she was horribly ill all day and almost called it off. If she would have, would I have asked her out again? Who knows. Who knows the twisting road we all will travel, where it leads, where it dead-ends, where we are left without it and must plow our own way through.
I picked her up and we went to a diner (which has since burned down) and then to a bookstore (which has since gone bankrupt) and finally to a movie theater (which has since closed). We are, literally, the only thing that has lasted from that night.
We saw the movie Gattaca. I remember the thrill of holding her hand, our fingers slowly touching. I remember, a few weeks later, kissing her under the lamp light at the side door of the Miller/Hess dorm, her friends giggling and watching us through the window three floors above.
* * * * *
This Saturday, we’re taking our six kids back to Messiah for homecoming where I’ll be selling copies of The Day the Angels Fell. I can’t wait to show them our favorite spots (although I don’t want to play the college up too much, because there’s no way we could afford the tuition these days).
Would the 20-year-old me even believe it if someone told him what his life would be like when he was 40? Six kids? Married for 18 years? Making a living as a writer? A novel published? Not making much money at all? A friend of Muslims? Driving around strangers to make extra cash? Traveled to Istanbul and Sri Lanka and Iraq and lived in England?
Would any of us believe it, if we could peer down a 20-year hallway? Would any of us recognize the self we are always becoming?
* * * * *
Twenty years is an eternity. Twenty years is yesterday.
* * * * *
Where were you 20 years ago? What about your present self would surprise you the most?
The weekend was long and tiring, filled with wonderful things and busy things and fewer spare moments than I would have liked. This is life. We are still learning.
Our 8-year-old is probably the most passionate and insistent one among us. When the weekend brought not enough sleep and too many “we’ll see” answers, he started falling apart. Personality clashes. Frustration. An early bed time on Sunday night.
After getting the 3-year-old in bed, I curled up on the floor beside the 8-year-old (he insists on sleeping on the floor). A simmering sense of having been terribly wronged emanated from him. His pillow was wet with tears. I lay down beside him in the dark, only the night light on, and I pushed the hair back from his eyes. I pushed it back again. It became this methodical movement, a tenderness. His pillow was wet with tears.
“I don’t think this is about bed time or having a snack or being bored,” I said quietly, and he softened. He sniffled, a sob-tremor shuddering through his body. “This is about not getting much playing time at the football game today, isn’t it?”
He hesitated. His defenses crumbled. He nodded. When he spoke, his voice came out in stop-start, haltering fashion.
“Why…does…everyone…underestimate…me?”
I sighed. My heart broke, for the thousandth time. As each of my children gets older, I am struck fresh by the realization that this world will hurt them and many times there’s not a thing I can do about it. Raising six children, raising one child, raising any amount of children, caring for anyone outside of yourself, will render your heart a shattered mess. Of course, this is not always a terrible thing, because as Leonard Cohen said,
There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.
* * * * *
It’s probably the question that lies at the foundation of our subconscious. It explains why so many of us have responded to life the way we have. This question can drive us up a mountain or plant us face first in the dust.
Why does everyone underestimate me?
It’s the question I asked myself when I didn’t make the starting team in college, when I didn’t get accepted to any of the MFA programs I applied to in my early 20s, when I didn’t get that job or this promotion, that agent or this book deal.
Why does everyone underestimate me?
Feeling underestimated is one of the worst feelings out there because it usually means we weren’t even given a shot. Failing is one thing, but kept entirely out of the game is another. Missing the shot is one thing, but never getting to take it is another.
Why does everyone underestimate me?
* * * * *
He fell asleep in minutes. I spoke to his coach on the phone later that night. There were some misunderstandings, some chaos on the sideline. He will get his chance to prove himself.
If you’re feeling underestimated today, I see you. I hear you. I can only encourage you in two ways – keep going, and whenever it is in your power to give someone else a chance to prove themselves, do it. Give them that shot.
We all deserve it.
* * * * *
How have you dealt with feeling underestimated? What have you done (or what are you doing) to move through that?
As Bob Dylan sang once upon a time, “The times, they are a changin’.”
Have you ever felt your life slowly going in a new direction, even a good direction, but you still felt hesitant about the change because of the unknown variables? Maybe you had the opportunity to take a new, better job in the same company. Maybe you were offered a raise that would require a little more responsibility. Maybe you felt compelled to step into a new volunteer position or start creating in new ways. These changes, sometimes they can percolate up into your awareness in a gradual way, almost unnoticed.
But then, suddenly, you see what’s happening. And you’re not sure what to do. Should you resist? Make the leap? Allow things to continue unfolding, or make some hard decisions?
This is how I have felt for most of the summer. My writing life has been changing, not due to any conscious choice on my part, but due to new circumstances. For most of the last seven years, I have blogged almost daily. I did take almost a year off at one point, and this year I only posted once a week or so, but for the most part, blogging has been a huge part of my writing life for almost a decade. Over a thousand posts. Over half a million words.
Then this summer happened, a whirl wind of new things. It has contained the lead up to the launch of my first novel, The Day the Angels Fell(you can preorder it on Amazon, B&N, ChristianBook.com, or from your local bookstore – it’s even on audio!). I’ve been working on a co-written book that I love, one that included a trip to Iraq earlier this year. I’ve got a serious, in-depth revision coming up for the sequel of The Day the Angels Fell (coming out next summer, which you’re going to love). And (this is the fun announcement), I’ve signed on with Revell to do my fourth traditionally published book, a work of nonfiction, one that will come out at the end of 2018 (you’ll hear more about this one in the fall).
Writing my own books (and selectively taking on co-writing projects) has been the writing life I have been eyeing up for at least the last seven or eight years. And while I’ve made a good living during that time by co-writing, this year and next will be the first years that I release my own traditionally published fiction. I’m thrilled about it, and it’s thanks to all of you and your support that it’s even happening.
But when good things start to happen, when these positive shifts start taking place, there are always things we have to set to the side. We simply can’t do everything. Blogging is one of the things, at least in the short term, that I have to put down. But you know what? I didn’t know it, not for sure, until I read this post by Tsh called “Changes.” Turns out, she’s going through a similar season in her writing, and reading her post helped me navigate my own thoughts about change.
I’ll still be floating around Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. I’ll still be sending out the occasional email newsletter (which you can sign up to receive HERE). I’ll still let you know when my books are coming out. But I won’t be blogging much, if at all, for the rest of this year – and yes, this means a pause on the ever-popular Rideshare Confessional series (but I’ll still be driving for Uber and collecting stories to share later).
Hitting pause on my blog-writing makes me a little sad, but I want these books to be the best possible books they can be, and I only have so many words.
You’ve probably heard the amazing quote by Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
I think my writing life is going down a similar path. Sometimes, we have to be willing to lay aside things we enjoy in order to go deeper into the things we’re called to do. I couldn’t be more excited about the books I’m writing for you. Now, it’s time for me to focus on them.
* * * * *
Is there an impending, necessary change in your life you’re hesitant to make? Leave a comment below – I love hearing from you.
