I am a writer

(Capability + Courage) Challenge = Fearlessness

The Power of Sharing …  is the article I’m supposed to be writing right now.  This is what happened instead. 

The Power of Sharing

The Power of Challenge

A few months ago, I lived in fear. I knew it.  I hated it.  I almost hated myself for allowing fear to keep its grip around my feet, hands and neck.  I felt powerless. 

I fully believed that I had all of the information, knowledge and experience I needed to turn my life away from poverty, foreclosure and looming homelessness.  But I didn’t make that turn.  I couldn’t.  Lack trumped hope and will every moment of every day.  I felt defeated.

I lacked the smiles, safety and respect of others.  I missed others’ belief in me.  I felt alone.

My belief that I had what it took to return my life to solid ground was wrong.  I lacked Challenge. 

True, I had challenges every day.  Even with my head buried in the sand, I knew they were there.  They came in the mail, down the phone and into my email inbox whether I acknowledged them or not.

I also could not hide from the voice of a new challenge.  The voice had a faraway pitch that I could neither hear nor ignore, and spoke to me through the women in my life.  Within the small span of several days, I heard “Women’s Resource Center” and “Challenge” three times. 

I got the message.  I found courage sufficient to break through my medieval wall of shame, reach for the door and accept whatever Challenge might be. 

It turned out that for me, the challenge within Challenge was reaching across the threshold of shame with acceptance of the Unknown. 

Experience soon revealed, with its characteristically twisted sense of humor, that my Unknown was a Known.  In Challenge, I said out loud and to other human beings for the first time, “I am a writer.”

Now, it’s one thing to have known this since I was a child, to have used words to underpin my education and career as Anything But a Writer, and to wear—for four decades—the hair shirt of a frustrated writer who doesn’t write.  How many times had I inwardly and outwardly laughed and scowled at the knowledge, “Writers write.” 

And that was my illusion of safety.  As long as I didn’t write, I wasn’t really a writer.  Being a writer was one thing.  Believing I could Make A Living as a writer was a presumptuous, arrogant, self-indulgent, unattainable self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.  And my responsibility to Make A Living was an atomic element of my upbringing and being.

Writing, apparently, is a sub-atomic element of my being that has a trumpet blast for a voice, once found.  And the voice of my writer has triumphantly trumped the generations-deep Scots Irish Midwestern Presbyterian reverb of personal responsibility. 

Ah, what the Hell.  I wasn’t making a living anyway.  I was, in fact, getting buried by my past and present efforts to make a living. 

When I spoke the words “I am a writer” aloud, I heard those generations turning and shrieking.  I might have picked up some faint shred of respect for my courage, but I wasn’t’ sure. 

But that was it.  The sky didn’t fall, no biophysical catastrophe sparked spontaneous combustion, and none of my Challenge fellows gasped all of the oxygen out of the room.  They accepted me and what I said with smiles and interest. 

In hindsight, it is tempting to see this as a simple moment.  I know better.  That small moment was the sum total of all of my experience and the prophet of my future.  My dad taught me a favorite saying, “God, don’t grant me luck, grant me timing.”  The name of that moment was, and remains, Timing.

My Challenge experience was a challenge to accept the challenge I’d been given before birth: Write.  To accept this challenge, I had to first accept that I had the right stuff—capability and courage—all along.  I was missing the catalyst of Challenge. 

As catalyst, Challenge did not judge, threaten or scream “Just do it!”  It gave me a rhythm of reliably safe space, free of judgment, bills and bill collectors. 

Those women in my Challenge class wove their fingers together between clasped hands and laid their shared strength before me as a bridge over my sucking vortex of grief and shame.  Every time their power saw me safely to the other side, they allowed me to stop, turn and lend my own strength for the next of us about to fall.  No matter how many times I needed their strength, it was always there.  It still is. 

I still live under the threat of foreclosure, but I do so without fear.  I am now two to three hundred monthly revenue dollars away from re-writing my mortgage. 

I have replaced fear of success with a joyous vision of myself accepting some public accolade for something I’ve written—maybe an award, an interview or even a check.  When that public moment occurs, I will share one truth: the moment belongs to my teachers, and exists only because women had the courage to walk into the Women’s Resource Center of Sarasota County, accept Challenge, and re-gift me with Timing. 

You who keep the heart of this community treasure beating ensure that Timing awaits every woman with the courage to accept Challenge.  Don’t stop doing.  Don’t stop giving.  Don’t stop believing in me. 

PS:  Thank you, W, poster boy of the Great Recession, for the Great Recession.  It gifted me the poverty and shame I needed to bring me to the Women’s Resource Center and this moment.  My gift to you and your colleagues is a warning: We will not go gentle into your good night.  We don’t forget.  We speak.  We share.  We write.  We have Timing.

Note to self…new title…Power