My lovely writer-friend, Maegan Langer, has written a great little post over on our joint blog (www.threegnomes.blogspot.com), titled "Love Your Darlings Before You Kill them." You really must go take a look at it. I did. And like any good writing will, the post gave me a shaZING moment, wherein I saw myself. Saw, not just a writer unwilling to embrace the uncooperative, bratty-child-ness of her writing, but also a person unwilling to accept the uncooperative, bratty-child-ness of herself. And as Maegan points out, less dramatically, there's tragedy in that. Or at least a whole lot of stress.
The suggestion of the post is that we ought to love our writing mistakes and frustrations and weaknesses, the same way we would love our own children. Who definitely come with all of those things. So why, my shazing said to me, if you can accept those things in your children and your writing, can you not accept those things in yourself?
Why do we edit our lives as we go, making sure no one knows about our mistakes? I've a friend from the South and the tales he tells of "hidden family secrets" make my hair stand on end. Not because his are horrifying (which they aren't), but because of the edict of perfection under which he and his friends all grew up. No one was to know that anything ever went wrong in his family. And that was the rule for everyone. Which should have made it easy to figure out that everyone had some slobbering thing hiding in their closet amongst the skeletons. And yet they didn't. And neither do we, most of the time.
The thing about it is, if we could just pull our imperfections out of the drawer, shake them a bit, and look at them in the light of day, we'd probably find that those were the things that helped build who we are. Which is a good thing.
We are transparent beings. Life is designed to reveal us to ourselves. And it is happening to everyone, so who cares if we're not perfect? As the Great Maegini said in her post, Let it be.
I love how you write Janiel, you put things so perfectly. This is something I've been wrestling with a lot. I think this is why writing class can be so painful at first, because it's like someone else going into your closet and airing out your imperfections in front of a group of relative strangers. It's like "Oh, hey, THAT was in there? Oops." and "Well I used to think that was something fashionable to wear, but now that you mention it, it does look rather skeleton-ish. Darn."
Oh, man. ISN'T writing class painful? Only at first, of course. *cough* Wonder why it is so hard to believe everyone feels these things.
Thanks for your kind words. 🙂
Your title was taken from the book by Kobe child murderer website..
Yikes! Thank you for notifying me! I knew nothing about that site when I titled this post years ago. I was just playing off of the movie “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Wow. I’ve changed it. Appreciate your kindness!