From before the time I could write or read, I was dictating stories to my mother. I wanted to be a writer. There were worlds in my mind, worlds upon worlds clamouring to get out, just waiting for me to sit with pen to paper or fingers to keys to release them. Other possible career ideas came and went, but that one idea stayed fixed until the point I decided to consciously follow music. Even then, the idea wasn’t discarded. Rather it was placed on the back shelf for a time after other experiences that were to come.
Three degrees in music, four separate state driver’s licenses, many jobs and a few broken hearts later, this little spark is still within me. When things are quiet, when I am alone or still, it returns. It pulls on my heart like God speaking to John in the New Testament saying, “WRITE.” I feel my self pulling away. Is it fear? Is it this great wall that has always separated me from experiencing my life and others fully? This fundamental separation from others that I have always felt, is it the problem or is it a gift that allows me to step back, analyze and write my perceptions?
A number of people from my past have made trenchant and mainly unsolicited observations on this characteristic of mine. One was a conducting teacher who said of my work, that it was as if I was conducting from behind a veil. Early in my teaching career after getting particularly excited about something, one of my students said something to the effect of “now we see who you really are” after almost two years at that school. In graduate studies, my voice teacher was always trying to draw me out through various energy exercises and new age techniques. A therapist asked me once, “what is it that you get out of fence sitting?”
Yet, somehow this kernel inside of me that desires to write feels real when so many other things do not. I don’t know how to go to the next step, or what that next step might be, but it connects me to deep emotion inside myself even on days when I feel that I have no capacity to feel. Is it Corinthians that says that the things that are unseen are the eternal ones?
In some ways I fear that I have lost my creativity. Thirty odd years of life have brought me to a place where I no longer create worlds inside my head. What I create is what I live in and what I’ve created is what I have lived through. These are the stories I now have to tell. But this is where I stop. Be it lack of confidence, fear or simply the belief that my stories would just be an egotistical exhibition, I stop. I don’t write. Or if I do write, I get lost. I try to be too big, too epic so that I loose my way and can’t finish. What I do write feels so personal to me that I can’t detach myself from it and release it into the world and I become lost in worrying about the perceptions of others.
Is any of this related? Where is the way out of this? What is my error? How do I “lift the veil?”
