Now listen Maxine, I wrote this eight months ago, with no idea I’d need it today.
How to Start Over
Don’t look back. Like the angel said to Lot’s wife, turning around will only slow you down, not because of those few seconds but because of what those seconds hold - memory and images and all the ways that maybe that old thing wasn’t so bad and what about just staying a little bit longer and before you know it, you too are a pillar of salt. Trust me, I have been every kind - kosher, sea, pink himalayan and also Morton which contains iodine, a thing I still don’t understand why I need, but which seems to be a very big part of the branding. That one glance turns into doubt which grows like pokeweed and the next thing you know you’re all tangled up and tell yourself maybe now is not the time to do something new.
Look forward. Not ahead because that implies a certain level of knowledge and orientation; a sense of where you’re going and most of the time when you’re starting over you don’t know. All you can do is turn your feet in a different direction. Maybe it’s the “right” one and maybe it’s not, but honestly what does that even mean? In 2014, I oriented my blue Pontiac Vibe west and drove until I ran out of land and the only thing I meant to do was stop for awhile but I wound up staying three and a half years and I thought I was spectacularly lost, but halfway through I figured out that I was starting over….again.
You know how parents tell children that if they get separated they should stop and stay still so they can be found? That’s what I needed to do. Sometimes starting over looks like retirement, or graduation, or a new baby, or an empty nest, and wow you’ve been waiting for this and isn’t it great to do all those things you’ve been planning to do and also, whew wait a minute, this looks more like a suspension bridge in the Amazon without all that infrastructure and was this the right thing or should I go back to….but, wait a minute, I did always love cooking and there’s a class at the community college or a line cook job that’s only two days a week, or a friend of a friend who knows about a job, or a neighbor who also just had a baby/sent one to college, and before you know it, wham bam thank you ma’am, you’ve started over and maybe it’s the thing you want to do and maybe it isn’t but now you’ve got a little momentum and there’s paved road instead of a suspension bridge and it could be sooner or it could be later, but it’s actually going to be ok. Just keep swimming.
The above can be applied to all of us as we seek to re-orient our lives in a post-shutdown world. Sometimes it’s nothing but tiny, awkward steps, often in the dark, and frequently driven by nothing more than a hunch. Today I’m applying it to myself because I’ve been thinking about writing this for so many years and this week, my gut and God were like, WE ARE PROVIDING NO NEW INFORMATION UNLESS YOU DO WHAT WE ALREADY TOLD YOU.
In 2014, when I oriented my blue Pontiac Vibe, it was for something called The IRL Project. I did a Kickstarter and raised money and left behind a whole life in Kansas City with a very ambitious plan to interview people and write a book about the intersection of who we are online and who we are in person. I failed.
In hindsight, I did pretty much everything wrong. I felt selfish and embarrassed asking people to donate, under-budgeted as a result, and generally played small and scared all the way through. The one thing that worked was the subject matter. I’m still proud of every word I wrote for that project, despite the fact that so few people read them. Twitter was a different place back then and I'm forever grateful for all I learned from the participants I followed there. I’m sorry for those I didn’t get to meet but today I can accept that it just wasn’t in the cards. Whatever that experience was about (and honestly I still don’t know) it didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. The shame of that failure haunted me for years. Kept me hiding and head down and feeling like I couldn’t start any artistic project unless I could guaran-damn-tee that I’d finish it exactly as promised* and 100% on my own.
And then I spent eight years learning, healing, paying attention. I saw countless people raise money for things that didn’t turn out as they thought they would. Watched artists begin projects and abandon them halfway through because they realized they weren’t going to work. I saw entrepeneurs shrug after raising millions of dollars for companies that went belly up a few years later. I began to understand that this is what we do in community - hold and help through the good, the bad, the unfinished, and the occasional victory lap. If one of us goes off a diving board with a spectacular belly flop, but comes out of the water grinning because, OMG I’ve always been afraid of the diving board, does it help us all be a little more brave? I’ve decided the answer is yes.
About a year after that face plant, I speed-wrote a short little essay about Beyoncé’s Formation video and posted it, without a bit of fanfare, to the same Twitter account where I’d been begging people to read my work…and almost a million people found the page. You make it and you put it into the world and after that, it ain’t up to you.
One of the reasons I took a break from NLM was because I felt like the Universe was giving me this bit of instruction, at exactly this level of vehemence.
So I took the hint and did that. I took care of myself. I wrote scripts and rewrote them and moved into a new apartment and got a new job and got myself stable and peaceful and happy in a way I could not have imagined was possible. And now I believe it’s time to saddle up again, to be brave and put new art into the world.
More on that tomorrow, but for now I want to ask - what new and scary thing is calling to you?
*My friend Becky Blades has a new book coming out in November called, “Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas.” Talk about a new way of seeing the world!
SO excited you're writing again and honored to get to read your pearls of wisdom! And my kids and I love that video and say "Worry 'Bout Yourself" to each other all the time! Can't wait for part 2.