Guest Post | Why I Write.

Friends, today’s amazing guest post is brought to you by the lovely Rachel McGowan. Please read, please share, please comment. Please tell me I’m not the only one that cried while reading this. Thanks, Rachel!

~

I sat down to write today in my favorite coffee shop, like I usually do. I was rushed, like I usually am.  I plugged in my headphones, found my favorite writing music, and opened up a blank page. Next to me sat two women, in their mid-thirties. This is not an uncommon sight to see, especially at a coffee shop. We women love our coffee dates with our heart friends.

Because I’m a curious person [and an avid people-watcher], I positioned my computer so that the pair was in my direct line of vision. Their mannerisms were fascinating; their laughter was like a magnet. I knew these women had a special connection, though I couldn’t figure it out.

Then one of the women opened a journal. It was a simple blue spiral bound notebook, probably found on a sale at a grocery store. She began to read.

As soon as I heard the word “addiction”, I turned off my music.

[And yes, I sat with my headphones still in my ear, with no music playing. A good creep learns this trick early on.]

I stopped what I was originally writing, and just listened. I was stunned by what I heard.

The woman sat in the middle of this coffee shop, and read the story of her struggle with an addiction to alcohol. She sat with her friend and simply spoke the cursive words written on those pages of that journal. She read the words that described the pain she felt when her own mother was diagnosed with cancer, and how that pain led her to strong vodka. She described the moment where she was so drunk she missed her mother’s funeral. She said she was “crushed by a self-imposed crisis” and was “so unaware of God’s presence because of the way alcohol made her feel.”

She said she had gotten more DUI’s than she thought possible, and that she never had enough self-control to give up her keys when she was inebriated.

She described the way it felt to be in jail for manslaughter.  She said that you don’t know pain until you know what it’s like to kill the innocent little girl in the other car. When she got to the part about the father of the little girl reading a letter to her in the courtroom, I got chills.

Page by page, she described her nightmare of a life to her friend across the table. There were tears and laughter and an appropriate use of air quotes. Her friend cried with her, laughed with her, and listened to every word she spoke. The pen marks were sharp knives in the air, clawing at every piece of flesh they came into contact with. My heart was shivering.

When she finished, the friend who had been listening the entire time had tears in her eyes. She looked this woman in her eyes, and she said, “Oh girl. You are reading my story exactly.”

And then the friend told this woman about hope.

This friend spoke of truth, of freedom, of sobriety. She sang over this woman the melody of a life un-bound by chains, un-clouded by addiction.

The bond these women shared was based on nothing that could be seen on the surface. It wasn’t that they worked together, or shared the same love for Thai food. They had both drank the poison of substance abuse, and had both seen the ramifications of letting that addiction take over their life. They knew what it felt like to choose alcohol over literally anything else, no matter the cost.

This friend helped the woman take a step out of the darkness. She spoke life.

And I think this is why I write.

Our stories have more power than we will ever be able to understand. It is a level of power that is frightening.

It’s chilling to think of the lives we can affect by writing down our histories and reading them to the world. It is terrifying to share our pasts, to write them out, to bare our souls.

There is so much depth to our imperfect cursive handwriting, or the periods at the ends of sentences, and the world is desperate for that depth.

It is an unexplainably beautiful thing to let down that wall, to expose our insides part by part., and the world is desperate for that beauty.

It is a disservice to humanity if we silence our own stories, even when they are ugly. To speak them is to speak life, and the world is desperate for that life.

To let people see our soul comes with a crippling wave of emotion. Even though it means we might change a life, it is still the scariest thing in the world.

But it is tragically scarier not to.

Photo 219Rachel McGowan is a California-born 20-something writer, reader, dreamer, joke-teller, car-dancer and shower-singer. She loves learning from people and is passionate about the power of story and seeing good come from gross. Rachel works with college students and drinks diet cokes back to back to keep herself sane. She often writes about love, sex, singleness and relationships — and the awkward joys and struggles of them all. 

I’m Not the Story Weaver.

I am a writer. Consequently, my general outlook on life is a series of archetypes, themes, plots, summaries, critiques… there’s a lot of pre-writing and re-writing going on in my head, and there’s no switch to turn it off. All the world is a stage, you know.

But it’s the endings I’m not good at. I’m a total sap when it comes to endings. Mostly, I envision that the story actually comes to an end, a resolution. I often realize much further on in my writing and reading that this is a false assumption.

Lately, I’ve begun to wonder about our fascination with the fairy-tale ending. We began by expecting it, and now we’ve become disillusioned with it, naturally.

But where does the fallacy lie in “happily ever after”?

Is there no such thing as happiness?

Or have we made a bad habit of ending the story at the wrong part?

So the prince and the princess get married… and???  What comes after that? What exactly constitutes the “happily ever after”? A fairy-tale prince or princess would never be unfaithful to one another. The prince would never be a deadbeat dad. The princess would never become a bitter, self-conscious old woman that drives her prince and her children crazy. They would never lose the castle, the talking livestock, and the pumpkin carriage in a faulty investment. They would never bicker or become alcoholics or abuse their kids. They would never die of terminal illnesses.

And yet, here we are. We live in a dichotomy of pure joy and pure tragedy. We find love and we find hate. We can’t get rid of the evil stepsisters and the villains; quite often we are our own worst enemy. We make the best decisions we’ve ever made, and then we screw it up.

Maybe it’s the ambiguity of it, the elusive “happiness” that leaves us confused and frustrated and empty when we try to live in the “ever after.” The brokenness wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did, and we can’t see how it could ever be right again. We have no pre-text for what to do when we screw up, so the “happily ever after” plan is eradicated.

Or maybe it’s that we’ve totally abandoned the possibility of redemption.

I yearn for the easy answer, the redemptive ending. I wish I could tie the strings of all our loose ends together so that our lives would never unravel as they so often do. I keep finding myself trying to weave it all together, tightly, to make it mean something, to make our stories and our selves whole again.

I think it’s better if I just stop trying to rewrite the thing. Life is beautiful and gripping and horrific and triumphant and tragic enough on its own.

I’m not the Story-Weaver. I need to just keep reading.

The Shrinking Margin.

Picture 1-1
If only there existed a magic button for my life, one that I could press to give me that time and space my mind needs to feel rested again. Today I find myself feeling cramped and small and crazed, oppressed by my insecurity. Oppressed by my inability to juggle and format and finish the things I need to do. Do you ever feel that way? This is how I’ve felt intermittently for the last few weeks.
Summer is my favorite season, because I feel an exuberance in the warmth of each day, an unquenchable need to celebrate life in all its green and flourishing glory. Each wedding, party, cook out, firework, each slice of watermelon and ice cold beverage wet with condensation is a joy to me. I don’t want it to end.

I don’t want to miss it.
And so I struggle in this paradox: in a season that I should celebrate and relax and enjoy the lengthened days, I find myself so overcommitted and busy that the days feel like they’re flying by without me. My calendar and my mind are so full that I have no space to breathe and enjoy it. I find myself living in the margins of my life, which are shrinking by the second.
It’s no wonder, then, that when I think about writing, I’m too worried about whatever else I should be doing to feel at peace with my creativity. For me, writing is a process of roaming through the recesses of thought and imagination, of exploration and rabbit holes and contemplative ideas. And I haven’t made time or space for that recently. So when I sit down to write, and I turn inward to my thoughts and feelings, what I find is a mess – much like the explosion of laundry that has barricaded the path from bed to my closet. Not an inspiring landscape to live in.
Perhaps a three day weekend to celebrate independence is as close as I will get to that magic time and space button, so long as I don’t try to cram it full of going and doing. I won’t be checking my email. I won’t be looking at the time. And I will try my hardest not to think about the coming work week or what Ithink someone else thinks I should be doing with my time.
It is my time. It is my life. No one else can create it for me.
Time to breathe. Time to think. Time to restore rest and writing for me.
To celebrate, here are a few links from around the www that have inspired me this week:
Why Todd Henry hopes to die empty.
Two recent sources of inspiration and motivation: Jeff Goins and Darrell Vesterfelt. A great quote from Jeff’s talk with Darrell about the inherent narcissism that comes with being a writer:
“Because writing is an internal act, as is any form of art. And the journey of looking inwardly to bring something out can sometimes be hindered. We can look inside ourselves and never get out.”
And after the concert I went to on Monday, I can’t stop listening to The Swell Season again.
For all my single ladies out there, keep believing. We have entered the era of The Return of the Nice GuySwoon.
Speaking of nice guys, I married one. Yes, this is a shameless, mushy plug for my music man Matthew Jason. I’m abundantly thankful that I married an artist, someone who understands the roller coaster ride of creativity in all its awkward, crying, mascara-streaked glory. [Obviously, we’re talking about me, here, not Matt. My husband does not wear mascara.] He lives to play his heart out, and he always inspires me to keep going. [Fan him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter. It would mean a lot to both of us.]
[Image found here.]

Don’t Think. Just Write.

“Just write.”
I was sitting in my advanced composition class, my last semester of my senior year of high school. Our teacher, Mr. Z., bore a stark resemblance in appearance and character to Mr. Forrester, which I loved. Sometimes I wondered, was it intentional? He never implied it. Years later, I think it was his best attempt at invoking a passion for writing in his students without making himself vulnerable by saying so. Mostly stoic, slightly sentimental in subtle ways, he never embellished praise over our work in the classroom, but we could see the hundreds of photos of past students he had taped to his cabinet year after year. Yet he was revered in ways that made the slackers straighten up, and made introverted writers like myself believe that even if my classmates hated my essays, his opinion was the only one that mattered.
His snow white mustache twitched in amusement as he stood before us and  repeated the phrase.
“Just write.” 
I looked around the room. Every eye was fixed.
“Don’t think; just write.” 
The cogs collectively turned. Is he telling us that we don’t have to try? That he appreciates a lack of thought? That the grades don’t matter? Or better yet, he won’t grade us? Please elaborate before I screw up the assignment, I begged silently.
Thankfully, he explained himself. The rest of his speech I don’t remember word for word, but that moment is forever echoing in my memory.
Except for weeks like this when I’m caught up in a frenzy of checking my blog stats and reading from writers that are way better than myself and drafting post after disappointing post that quickly coagulate into rotten, useless garbage as soon as I have written them. It all stinks. 
I’ve read several posts this week that have given me pause for writer’s reflection: What am I doing here and why? The posts I read, while convicting, while true, while inspiring, exposed my deeply rooted insecurities, making me even less sure that I wanted to answer the question. I don’t want to admit that I’m doing it wrong.
With the world at our finger tips online, it’s too easy to get caught up in being creative for the purpose of gaining readership and reaction – affirmation – especially through blogging. So much so that I rarely write just to write, but more often write about writing to gain readership and response from other writers.
When the blog stats tick up and then down and then dwindle there in that sickening flat line, I wonder where the vitality in my writing was lost. And then my insecurity spins wildly out of control and I question who I am and why and how I’m trying to do this thing called writing.
There, I admitted it. Step one is done.
Step two: How do I get myself out of this mess?
I tried to write it out all week long, battling against the part of me that says, if you blog about this, aren’t you bringing yourself back into the cycle of writing to be read? Nothing I wrote felt real to me when I went back and read it.
Looking through my arsenal of half-written posts that have never been published, I found the beginning of this draft that I abandoned a couple of months ago, with only his words,
“Just write.”
And I am that seventeen-year-old girl again, standing in front of my peers, essay in shaking hand, worried that what I’ve written and am about to share is completely worthless. And somehow, six years later, he’s still reminding me, quietly, in few words but in many, many ways, it’s not. With a steadying breath and his words reverberating in my mind, I tell myself,
Don’t think. Just write. 

Less is More.

The less I watch T.V., the more I read, write, think, create
and do.
The less takeout I eat, the more I enjoy cooking, eating and
being healthy.
The less I spend, the more I save. Time, energy, worry, money
and future.
The less negative tweets and statuses I read or write,
the more positive engagement I consume and share.
The less I sleep in, the more I get done in a given day.
The less I dwell and fret, the more grateful and motivated I feel.
The less I freak, the more I pray.
The less I scurry, the more I achieve.
The less I schedule, the more present I am.
The less I argue, the more I understand.
The less of me, the more of You.
I’m just trying to make space.