This is my first post. I’m not entirely sure why I am doing this. Here goes.
Over the years, I have been told by various people who have come in and out of my life that I should write. Sure, I say. I like writing. Sometimes I write good things. But for the most part, I have shrugged off the suggestions thinking that I’m not really sure I have much to say that anyone really wants to hear. I certainly can’t compete with the competent and prolific writers out there who seem to be blessed with an abundance of profound thoughts, artistically woven into moving prose. I can’t compete with the folks out there who have opinions about just about everything and who broadcast them out into the ether hoping something sticks somewhere. To be blunt, I don’t really want to compete with them.
I was chatting with an acquaintance the other day who said I just needed to find my niche. You gotta have a niche. I think that means I’m supposed to have an area of particular interest and expertise about which to share pithy insights with the world: gardening, art, the environment, local or global politics, leadership, parenting, religion or ethics. Maybe it means that I have to find that one thing that makes me stand out: the one thing that will make people want to read what I write. There are lots of things I know about. Some of them I know quite a bit about. Most of them I could write competently about. But the reality is that I’m not a niche kind of person. I’m an educated, straight, married, white, middle-class, ex-clergy, middle-aged woman, with 2 kids, a dog, and a mortgage. In the world we live in, I don’t get to have a niche. All I’ve got is white-privilege and we have all had enough of that.
But I’ve been thinking. What would happen if I let go of the pressure to corner a niche? What would happen if I didn’t write to compete for readers? What would happen if I put aside fancy prose and profound insights? What would happen if I just wrote? For me…
I’m letting that last phrase sink in – for me.
For me.
It isn’t sinking very well. It makes something in my gut go all crawly and woggley. It makes my lip turn up and my nose wrinkle. It makes me antsy.
Enter a narrative: It’s dangerous to let that idea sink in too deeply. The lure of conceit is too great. The threat of self-centredness is ever-pressing. Woe betide the one who focuses on the self, lest she slip and slide down that dark slope into narcissism. Verily she shall come to most judged and pitiable state. For the individualism of our culture turns the self in on itself. We are consumed with ourselves and our needs: our needs for affirmation, for self-expression, for personal fulfillment, for happiness… Self-care is glorified self-absorption. Taking time for oneself is a justification for laziness. Come on people. Get out of yourselves, stop looking so intently at your bellybutton. Start making a positive contribution to the world out there.
Counter-narrative: You’ve just gotta learn to love yourself. All those curves and lumps are the badge of motherhood. You are beautiful just the way you are. Look deep inside yourself and affirm the person of worth and dignity that you are. Be kind and gracious to yourself. You are entitled to do the things that make you happy. Do what’s right for you. You do you. I’ll do me. I deserve a life I can call my own.
Counter-Counter-Narrative: Individual and cultural narcissism lead to unspeakable atrocities: genocide, war, famine, generational poverty, the annihilation of the natural world and its creatures. We have learned to dress up our vanity with fancy ideas like ‘civilization’ and ‘success’ and ‘capitalism’. And isn’t capitalism really just the elevation of the self to the extreme, leaving the masses poor and wretched. Better not think about that too carefully because that would require a moderation of self-interest. And that would be bad.
Perhaps you can imagine the difficulty I have in trying to sort out what writing for me might look like when the very premise of me is problematic.
Sigh.
Having achieved the great state of middle-age, I find myself thinking more and more how to be me in a world that does everything it can to shove me down my own throat, and in a mind where individualism and self-fulfillment are naughty words that lead to self-absorption and global suffering on an unimaginable scale. What exactly is the balance between an affirmation of me as a particular person and all that is not me? Can I even distinguish between what is particular to me and what is not me when the only lenses I have are my own? Damn those cultural hermeneutics.
On the up side, this greatness of middle-agedness is pushing me over the hump to that enviable state of just not giving a shit about so many things. Given that my impact on human existence across the millennia of human history isn’t even worth mentioning, do I need to concern myself with trying to figure it out? What does a measly 80 or 90 years matter in the context of thousands upon thousands years and in the midst of billions and billions of other folks living out their own measly 80 or 90 years? Does me really matter?
Hmmmm…
Well… Human suffering matters. Global obliteration matters. The boy in my kid’s class who has to put his stoned out mother to bed at night matters. My neighbor who befriends the old ladies on the street matters. My parenting matters (to my kids at least). Courage and integrity matter. Joy and beauty matter. Freedom matters.
I can’t reduce why those things matter to a sentence or two, but there is no question in my mind that they matter anyway. And surely there is a me (and a you) in the midst of that mess who matters. If not, there is no hope. And I cannot live without hope.
What would happen if I just wrote?
For me?
This reflection is why you should write! You have put words to many of my own thoughts, and they reflect the reality we are living. But be reassured, you matter. Whether it be to many or just a few, you matter. And most of all, you matter to He who created you.