Reading “Diversely”…

I always feel late to whatever’s trending on TikTok. Admittedly, it’s an app that overwhelmed me when I first created a profile because it seemed like the videos just never stopped playing. But once I got the hang of things, it hasn’t been so bad. And recently, because I’m challenging myself to try different creative things, I’ve been watching a lot more of them to get a sense of how different people will try different things.

An interesting thing, though, is that my “Following” tab is still showing me videos from 4, 5, and even 6 months ago because I just simply hadn’t been using the app for a long, long time. So the discussion around reading diversely is by now old news for most avid TikTok users, it’s been fairly fresh for me.

And yet at the same time, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had this conversation – a person who occupies more than one privilege (cis, white, abled, etc.) suddenly feels threatened because they’re being required to consider a vastly different perspective. Happened in my undergrad days, in seminary, and even in my MFA program from a supposedly “progressive” school.

In this recent TikTok (or rather, #BookTok) discussion, creators were responding to a racist rant from another creator (who might also be an author?) who basically said that she doesn’t feel the need to actively engage with books outside her own demographic. Of course, she did not respond well to the pushback and showed her true colors – that her critics were obsessed with race, which is usually only said when one doesn’t know anything about racism or how it works.

Now, nearly every response video I had seen dissected these comments effortlessly because, like I said above, it’s nothing new. Cis, abled white folks have been saying things like this for decades – at least publically; privately they’ve probably been saying it for much longer. Some talked about the practicality of reading from more than one perspective to enhance your own, even if race isn’t a factor. Others highlighted that “diversity” should never equal “non-white”; there’s diversity amongst queer writers, disabled writers, non-Black people of color (hi), etc. It’s actually been pretty nice to see so many allies step up and educate bigoted folks about all these issues while not talking over marginalized creators. It’s taken off a lot of labor for these creators.

Yet what I have a hard time wrapping my mind around is the fact that this person (and people like her) was never placed in a situation where she had to imagine herself into the story. Somewhere in one of my journals from middle school (between the ages of 12 and 14, mind you) is an entry of where I wrote about making the conscious decision to no longer daydream about myself as a white person, and that I would imagine myself from then on as the person I saw in the mirror. And when I think back to what could have possibly influenced my imagination to only depict myself as white, I was obviously only ever exposed to white media – TV commercials, TV shows, books where every character was assumed to be white (because any non-white character who might have been mentioned was always written with a stereotype), and the fact that we had been taught almost exclusively white American history.

Even now, over 20 years later, I still struggle to cast myself into my own imagination. More often than not, I have to literally look in the mirror as I’m having a daydream just to get the right sense of myself in my imagination. And yet there are people out there for whom this isn’t a necessity – that they can simply read a story knowing full well that it was made with them in mind. The first time where I didn’t have to do this was when I read Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony… as a senior in college.

At 22 years old, I had encountered a book with characters who looked like me for the first time.

My hope for those who are genuinely reading diversely not for the sake of scoring brownie points for being seen as “progressive,” but because they want to broaden their understanding of what it’s like to be in a space that wasn’t made for them, is that you don’t make it a tourist stop. Read diversely so often that it’s no longer a novelty that you’re reading a Black author, or an Indigenous author, or a disabled author, or a queer author, etc. Because many things can change; publishers can start publishing more stories from under-represented demographics, educators can switch up their curriculums to include more diverse voices, and fewer books would get banned because of someone else’s bigotry.

But more importantly, there will be fewer kids who have to grow up like I did (and, all things considered, I had it relatively easy). And maybe more of our stories can get told.

The Right Fit? Or a Good Fit?

Job hunting fucking sucks.

Not only do I have to suddenly pretend that I care about corporate interests, but I have to adopt a certain voice that carries the intimation that I am sincere about caring about those corporate interests. Like when Starbucks customers sometimes asked me what it’s like working there, I’d be expected to talk about the great benefits, better pay, and positive work environment. In those moments, I had to forget how often it was I consoled a barista who was crying in the back, or how we were expected to churn out the same sales numbers when a couple people called out (arguably because they didn’t want to cry in the back at work… again).

Truthfully, no matter how much I’ve enjoyed a job, I have never cared more about the company’s sales or public image than about mine and my coworkers’ wellbeing. I just haven’t. And I never will.

But not having a steady means of income is messing with my mind. Not only do I have to deal with judgement from others for leaving a job I grew to hate with no backup plan, but I have to juggle expenses. Tonight I had a PB&J for the third night in a row because I have three bills going out this week that will take pretty much everything I have left. And the shitty thing I’m trying not to focus on is that even if I had stayed at Starbucks, I’d likely still be in this situation because they cut my hours. So not only would I still be eating PB&Js, but I’d be way more exhausted than I am now.

So why the hell did I tell a friend who offered me a job that it wouldn’t work out? It had full time hours and even offered OT pay. “You can work whatever you want,” he told me. All I had to do was take a quick drug test (job involves operating a lot of heavy machinery), and show up on time. And it’s a job I’ve worked before, so there would be virtually no training involved. All things considered, for what I need right now, it would be a good fit.

But that doesn’t mean it’s the right fit.

I left Starbucks not just because I was tired of the entitled customers or wearing myself out for some millionaire CEO. I left because it was no longer a viable option for what I want to be doing in life. Do I wish I had something else lined up? Sure, but I actually had something lined up after I left my last job, as I did the job before that and the job before that.

All my adult life, albeit somewhat waylayed by a few college degrees, I have left one job to the next thinking I’d finally be able to do the things I want to do – I’d be able to write the stories I wanted to, or spend my weekends reading. And each time I wound up disappointed (again), that regardless of how hard I worked, we still weren’t making enough. Or I had underestimated the level of exhaustion I’d feel after coming home.

Each job offered new promises and instead delivered the same struggles. And when, in late 2017, a former manager told me that what I was experiencing was the result of “being stuck taking low-paying jobs,” I started to believe her, despite the insulting undertone. I really was stuck.

Truthfully I’m still stuck. I don’t know the formula for landing that salaried desk job that covers all my main expenses and allows me some time off to go watch some hockey games once in a while or pursue my dreams of being a published author on the side. I thought it was having a college degree, then I was told I needed more experience… or another degree. Then I got that degree and was told I needed more experience… or another degree. So it turns out I wasn’t just stuck taking low-paying jobs, I was stuck believing that what worked for others would work for me.

One positive side to unemployment is being able to catch up on the stacks of magazines I’ve collected over the last couple of years. Today I was reading through last July/August’s issue of WIRED and there’s an article on Taika Waititi, the eccentric writer/director/actor who’s churned out some incredible stories over the past few years. As the article’s author, Jennifer Kahn, highlights, Taika didn’t attend any film school, and that most of his projects are conducted intuitively. He aims for something new, something different, so when he’s working for an EP who wants something formulaic and safe, “he will agree to everything [they say] and then simply do what he wants. As he put it, ‘It’s literally me trying to not do whatever the grown-ups say,’” (50).

I’m not saying I’m aiming to be successful like Taika – that would take some serious luck and I feel like I’ve used up a lot already. But I am saying that maybe it’s time I stop listening to what the proverbial grown-ups tell me to do and simply pursue what I want to do. Start choosing the right fit over a good fit.

I guess I’m writing all of this to say you’ll probably see me doing a lot of self-promos over the next few weeks and months. Either that or I’ll cave and take another good fit and you won’t see me for a few months.

C’est la vie or whatever.

Some thoughts on publishing…

Today marks day 3 of my last residency as an MFA student. Around this stage for my seminary degree, I was feeling a little bittersweet; excited that I’d get to read what I wanted to read and keep work at work, but also a little sad it was drawing to a close. With everything I’ve experienced within this program still fresh, I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly how I feel, but I know one thing: I am not sad that it’s over.

A full review of my experience will have to wait as I’ll have to recall memories and people I’d rather forget. But an aspect that is being amplified during this last residency is the sudden and intense focus on publication, getting our theses published somewhere. And while I get why people would want to, I’m left wondering about the merits of publication. For one thing, I don’t believe that what I’ve written for my thesis is publication-worthy. And even if it were, I don’t think I’d want to submit this version. I’d want to do a complete overhaul.

Secondly (and more importantly), though, I’m beginning to wonder if publishing was ever my goal at all?

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but this program has often compelled me to consider why I’m writing in the first place. And the answer to that comes from a specific memory from when I was around 6 or 7 years old – the same memory that influenced my decision to choose English literature as my major and to attend seminary.

Before she passed away, my grandmother was a huge influence on my creative expression. I often doodled and wrote out words on scrap pieces of paper – all of which were then hung up on our fridge. Over time, letters turned to words, and words to sentences until late one night, distracting her from her Grand ‘Ole Opry, I found myself reading an entire book (I forget the name of the book, but it couldn’t have been more than 30 or 40 pages) to her from across the room. And while I read, I saw how she lit up listening to me – the same way she got ecstatic about a new word I had learned to spell or a slightly more elaborate doodle I had sketched. It was her delight in these moments that lit a path for me in college, then seminary, and then this MFA program.

But as the past two years have taught me, it was never the degrees themselves that I was inspired to attain; they were simply the means to the end. They provided the space, time, and education to hone my creative skills (while also developing critical ones), but the creating itself was always what I wanted to do. And in a similar way to a degree indicating an achievement, getting a work published would appear to be the means to an end – another opportunity to create.

Yet I keep going back to that night I was disrupting her TV-watching; was I inadvertently striving for publication in that act of reading? Or was I sharing my joy in reading, writing, and all things creative with someone who delighted in my excitement as well as in my craft? Whether she could have expressed it or not, my grandmother was encouraging something that night and I would be hard-pressed to believe she had in mind anything other than me simply doodling away on scrap pieces of paper and falling asleep on the couch with a book on my face.

And then I come across a video clip of an interview someone did with Anthony Bourdain (RIP). In that clip, he says that he “said ‘no’ a lot, to what seemed like a lot of money.” This seems to highlight something for me that I often forget: that the integrity I have with what I do and make matters more than a paycheck or any type of clout or notoriety I might garner. In the face of a huge, honest-to-god life-changing event for Anthony, he chose to stick to who he was and keep doing what he wanted to do.

Now I’m not saying that getting published is inherently evil, nor am I saying that I’ll never seek it. But I am saying that I need to make sure my intent is true – that I submit only what I wanted to submit and not some modified version because of someone else’s influence, however genuine they may have been. I owe it to the people who supported me to honor what exactly it was that they supported.

And more importantly, I owe it to myself to believe in what I’m doing – creating things because I enjoy creating them, and then sharing them with others because I enjoy seeing how they react.

I don’t do it often enough, but sometimes I write my fiancé little love notes – in cards, emails, or even text messages. The way she lights up while reading my words is all the reason I need to stay true to who I am and who I was raised to be.

All the rest is just bullshit.

Thanks for reading.

Reading Better to Write Better…

In 2009, I took an intermediate Creative Writing class on fiction. As an English major, I wasn’t actually required to take any Creative Writing courses, but I wanted to because I wanted to be a writer (that was why I chose English as my major in the first place; I love to read and write). As a sort of icebreaker for this class, our professor had us write short essays about what had piqued our interest in this class and what kind of fiction we enjoyed reading. At the time, I was really into Dan Brown’s novels (Angels & Demons, Deception Point, DaVinci Code, etc.), so that’s what I said. And I’ll never forget her comment: “His books are… entertaining.”

So much said with three little dots.

As the term went on, she expanded more on those three little dots: that the kind of writing we were striving for in that class would not produce a Dan Brown style of anything. Instead we were seeking beyond tropes, clichés, and formulaic storylines. We weren’t going to limit ourselves to linear methods of storytelling or allow the settings of our stories with their exhaustive, verbose details distract from the emotional resonance of our characters. We were striving for human moments, not fabricated ones.

For a long time after this class, though, I had suddenly garnered the label of a literary snob – I was no longer interested in pop-culture books intended to sell millions of copies. And for a short while, I took pride in the label because to me it meant that I was willing to be challenged by what I read. But reflecting back over what I read and what I wrote, I don’t think it was about being a snob. It wasn’t a matter of “quality literature” (said with a fake British accent and while pushing the bridge of my imaginary glasses back up my nose) vs. garbage; it was about writing engaged stories vs. disconnected drivel. It was about entering into my most vulnerable state to sit with the emotions that I’d then cast into characters.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t read Dan Brown style novels because, honestly, I’ve read pretty much every novel he’s written. They’re fun to read and he’s good at creating a storyline that allows you to escape for a moment, to get lost in the story. But what I am saying is that if I’m committed to improving my writing, then I must be committed to improving my reading. If I want my writing to engage with the emotional growth of my characters, then what I read must reflect that. If I want my writing to engage with political realities and nuances, then what I read must reflect that. And if I want my writing to engage my own sense of vulnerability, then the writers I read from must reflect that.

Reading better to write better often means reading from those writers who aren’t well known and have unconventional storytelling methods. Some of the most inspiring books I’ve read have been ones that subverted tropes, had no formulaic sense, and weren’t told in linear fashions. Without trying, they changed the way I think about writing and while I don’t know if my writing is now a better quality for having read those books, I know that it is more engaged. And that, to me, is quality writing.

So, what are you reading?

Where is my commitment, really?

With the return of the crisp, fall air here in Portland, I was reminded of a time when I thought I’d give up writing. It was the start of my senior year at U of O and I was fulfilling an elective requirement by taking a Creative Writing class in fiction, and things were not going well. Not only was the reading load much larger than I had with any of my English major classes, but I was struggling to get what the instructor was trying to teach us.

Oh yeah, and I had the Swine Flu for a couple weeks.

But I had written a short story that I really put a ton of effort into. I can’t remember too many details now, but it opens with the main character having a nightmare and then it snaps into the present day (because he woke up). This was honestly my first attempt at writing fiction (definitely more of a non-fiction writer), but I thought it was really good. I was trying to utilize the dream scene to showcase the main character’s fear of losing his older brother in Afghanistan. And his fears were supposed to stand out in sharp contrast to his family’s treatment of him; they ignored his concerns about his older brother and simply assumed he was doing alright.

If I had written this brief description out beforehand, I might have had a better grade in the long run, but I had written the final draft and simply handed it in after a short proof-read. And the next week, I received some of the worst feedback I’ve ever had. Not only had my instructor written all over every page with her green-inked gel pen, but there was nothing positive in her comments. And then, right after the transition from the nightmare to present-day reality, there it was.

“Wow. This is one of the worst cliché’s I’ve ever seen.”

This, of course, was followed up with a one-on-one meeting with her wherein she assumed that I had too much going on outside of school and heavily recommended that I simply drop out.

No questions about my other grades.

No tips for improving my time management skills.

She just told me to quit.

Now, obviously I didn’t. But the walk home through the late-October air that night was one of the longest of my life. And when I got home I wrote for nearly three hours in my journal, venting about the audacity this instructor had to say the things she did. The ten years since that feedback haven’t really improved my perspective on what she said and why, but I recognize one error I made in my anger: I ignored the context in which I wrote.

A few nights ago, I picked up a Lyft passenger in Beaverton heading to a night club downtown where was DJ-ing that night. While on the way, he recorded himself for his Instagram account saying where he was playing that night and that it’d be cool if some his fans could check him out. When he was done, he said that he hated recording himself and I said that I’ve always hated the sound of my own voice. We spent the next ten minutes talking about doing creative stuff and how it’s really difficult sometimes to put something together. And when I told him that I was in an MFA program, he said something that has stuck with me ever since, “I think the danger in some art programs is that we learn to create to meet assignment requirements and deadlines, rather than allowing ourselves the creative freedom to make mistakes, be messy, and try something new.”

Ten years ago, I was a horrible fiction writer, but it was because I was trying to meet an assignment rather than trying to share a story. Yeah, it was specifically a fiction class, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the creative process required that story to be fiction. It probably would have helped to write a memoir about how I was afraid for my older brother’s life while he was in Afghanistan. It would have helped to write about how I hated everyone treating me as if I had everything together, as if I hadn’t been crying myself to sleep at least once a week terrified that I’d eventually get The Phone Call. It would have helped to try a different method of creation to free my mind to create something that someone else would have wanted to read.

Now that I’m in the middle of my third 25-30-page packet for my low-residency creative writing MFA program out of PNCA, I realize that I don’t want to limit my work only to get a grade – that my whole purpose in this program is to learn how to be creative beyond school, beyond my usual creative forms. Like I learned first-hand ten years ago, maybe what I need instead of a memoir is a poem, or a short sci-fi thriller, or maybe I need to create a comic book, I don’t know. I just know that my writer’s block and Imposter Syndrome are much harder to deal with when I’m stuck in only one form of creating.

That Lyft passenger also said something else that I’ve been milling over. I had mentioned that I wanted to get back into shooting and editing videos, but was struggling to just jump in. He then gave a really cool analogy for how he approaches his work:

“Okay, so imagine taking a pottery class where the whole grade will depend on each student creating their best clay pot. But half the class spends all their time working to create a single clay pot while the other half create a clay pot every single day. During the final week of the class, the instructor asks everyone to stop what they’re doing and create a whole new clay pot by the next day. The class that spent all their time working to create one will panic – they were trying to get it perfectly the first try. But the half who created a pot every day got right to work and now have a breadth of experience in how they went to shape the clay. They’ll have a much easier time handling the final assignment because they were committed to the process, not the assignment.”

This advice would have spoken volumes ten years ago, but it’s especially helpful now. Because I didn’t apply to this MFA program to write a few packets and receive a degree. I applied so that I could learn better ways to commit to and amplify my own creative processes. And it matters more that I’m creating rather than what I’m creating – everything can be ironed out toward the end of the program or 20 years from now when I finally figure it out. But if I’m not committed to the process, I’m not only going to waste a ton of money in student loans, but I’m going to spend forever trying to write that one, “perfect” piece. And I will never be prepared to write anything new.

Thanks for reading and write on.

In the Bag: Part I

In an effort to help narrow my focuses through this MFA program, I’m starting a new blog series titled, In the Bag, discussing what I’m currently reading/working through, and a few notes about how each book I read informs my writing practices. “In the bag” is a nod to my golfing days where some players’ clubs (clubs being carried in golf bags) were highlighted so amateur golfers can go out and buy them to make them feel like the pros. But it also brought attention to strategy, which is similar to what I’m hoping to do here.

Except with a book bag.

My MFA program, not surprisingly, challenges students to stretch themselves creatively – trying on new methods and forms to see what would fit their creative expression the best. And the overwhelming majority of our required reading is a list compiled together with our faculty mentors (mine being Walidah Imarisha) that is intended to help us explore and learn new ways of writing. As we go along, we’re asked not to summarize the book’s contents, but rather its presentation – the way words are strung together on the page, or maybe how the author flits back and forth from the present to a point in the past, or maybe even how the author breaks out in poetic fashion to describe certain, significant moments of their lives. Once we’ve done this, we’re to connect these works with our own, and/or even imitate their work.

So what’s in my bag this week? Well, not a whole lot. My fiancé and I are still in the middle of the moving process (we don’t even have a couch at this point), and our schoolwork hasn’t been given the attention it adequately requires. But I’ve been bouncing between Assata Shakur’s An Autobiography, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir.

Assata has an interesting back-and-forth layout where she starts in the immediate aftermath of one intense moment (the turnpike shooting), but then in the next chapter she starts with her earliest childhood memories. She alternates between these two timelines from chapter to chapter and it makes for an interesting way to piece her story together. In my own project, I have a method of alternating between certain strands of events – back-and-forth between moments of processing my own racial identity and then moments of encountering racism – but her style is more clearly stated. I love this book because not only am I learning more about an often terribly (and intentionally) misunderstood figure in american history, but I’m also seeing a different way to tidy up my own writing.

Roxanne’s book is less about informing my writing practice and more about giving me more accurate information as a backdrop to what I’m working on. “The history of the United States,” she writes, “is a history of settler colonialism – the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft,” (2). This framework of US history is radically different from what I was taught in school. There, we were indoctrinated with american exceptionalism – that, more or less, “we” were the good guys of the world, chosen by God. Dunbar-Ortiz adds, “Those who seek history with an upbeat ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that such a conclusion is not visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society.” This book will definitely help in debunking american mythology.

I first read Coates’ Between the World and Me not long after it came out in 2015, when I was just starting my thesis research on an Indigenous Jesus (hi, yes, I went to seminary). Back then, I wasn’t as able to delve into personal experiences as much as I am now; it had to be all “objective” academic b.s. So reading Coates was incredibly refreshing – even if the subject material wasn’t (and shouldn’t ever be) happy-go-lucky. And I’m only a chapter into The Beautiful Struggle, but it’s right in that same visceral vein – describing his realities not as he would like to remember them, but as he does remember them, grit and all. It’s a reminder that for my own project, I can’t shy away from how I remember things – because a lot of the shit I went through was gritty and harsh. And when I sit down to retell the stories, I should not sugar-coat anything.

Later this week, I’ll be starting a couple other books as things start to ramp up for school (I have my first packet due two weeks from tomorrow). But this is what I’m reading for now. And even though it’s been hardly a month and a half into this program, I can already feel a huge difference in the way I approach my writing. These authors (as well as the 14 other books I have in the queue for this semester) will have a huge impact on me and my writing.

Anything you’re reading do this for you?

Closing the Distance…

Going into this MFA program, I was nervous about a number of things. For one, it’s been three years since I’ve been in school, so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle the academic rhythm. But one of the biggest things I was nervous about was the particular style of this program. You see, unlike my seminary experience, this program involves extensive amounts of creativity. I hadn’t allowed myself to be creative in a long time – possibly 7 or 8 years at least. There was a tiny bit of creativity with writing my research papers, but not really. Those essays had to cater to an innumerable amount of rules and format regulations that were often subject to change. And the content was produced by the quality of research I’d conduct. So those weren’t creative pieces; they were, in some respects, simply passing along information I’d uncovered in dusty old books at the George Fox library.

There just didn’t seem to be a lot of crossover between my seminary days and the MFA days that lie ahead. But in the effort of writing a whole new 18-page essay, I had spent the entire weekend before the due date of the 17th doing all sorts of digging through old journals and essays. My topic was a particular aspect about myself, which is both easier and harder to write about, but I needed more details. Some of the moments I wrote about have been forever seared into my brain, but some of them are a blur – happening so fast that I only remember snippets of sentences. And on the second day of digging through stuff I had long buried – both in my closet and in my mind – I had realized that I was still doing the academic rigor I did in seminary.

The difference now is that I’m researching myself.

Again, this is both easier and harder. The easy moments practically pour out of my mind and onto the page as I recount every relevant detail or emotion I felt as the events took place. Like a Bare Naked Ladies song or LOTR quote, these memories slip out almost subconsciously. The only work I really have to do is make sure they’re craftily pieced together.

But the difficult moments are another beast altogether. Sometimes it isn’t about the lack of details remembered; it’s that you remember them all. Like when my step-dad threatened my mom with violence and my older brother and I had to hide under our beds in our shared room, occasionally getting up to check through the cracked door if he had actually done anything yet. Or the day my grandpa came back from the hospital without my grandma, telling me she’d never come home, and how I’d played street hockey by myself every day for a week because I didn’t know how to be at home without my grandma. Even though the details aren’t fuzzy, the pain is still there. And when you’re digging through forgotten journal entries, you don’t really know how difficult it will be to write about it all.

Yet after this project, I’m nervous for a different reason. Researching myself – specifically the moments where I began and continued to process my racial identity (both Indigenous and not, both white and not) – involves, in some ways, exposing many of my deeply-guarded truths. These are things I once vowed never to share with anyone. But as the days go on, these are the things that keep me up at night if I don’t begin to walk through them again. These are things I buried deep within myself with the naïve justification that they were merely the adversities that framed the person I was becoming. Yet that naïveté was mixed with a hopelessly evangelical lens of the world, which only hardened the soil under which these memories were buried.

One of the side effects of evangelicalism is to make you feel completely detached from the world – that nothing in this world has any long-term impact over your life. Because whatever happens in your life is God-ordained – be it neglect, abuse, or what have you. Your eternity is guaranteed in heaven, they say, if you only believe in (their version of) Jesus. Part of unlearning evangelicalism involves recognizing that we are not detached from this earth – that in fact we are no more separated from this world than water is separated from the ocean. And with this revelation comes a sense of awareness – of both self and others. Writing as an evangelical was writing as someone who was unseen – these words I wrote weren’t my words, they were God-breathed because God had inspired me to write them. This is the logic I lived by. But it was a logic that allowed people – often including myself – to never see the real me.

In his book, We Were Eight Years In Power: A Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about his increasing notoriety after publishing his essay “The Case For Reparations”:

The adolescent in me loved the attention and admiration. The senior citizen in me loved the financial security that came from the fame, since it meant the payoff of old debts and the possibility of a respectable retirement. But the part of me that I most identified as “me,” the part that felt the truest, was mortified. I had come to love the invisibility of writing – the safe distance between my face and the work. The distance was closing. (161, emphasis mine)

Though the reason is different, I feel the distance closing. And this is what makes me nervous. Through my evangelical days and even through most of seminary, I had shared in that same invisibility of writing. I could write endlessly about biblical passages that I thought best expressed God’s love for humanity. I could wax poetically about how Jesus undoes so much damage, and how we’re all being healed if we follow him (whatever that means). But I couldn’t talk about certain memories not just because they were buried, but because I didn’t know how to handle them. I didn’t know how to write about them.

And now I’m compelled to tell the stories I never should have buried. Maybe someone reads them and relates to them, maybe they don’t. Nevertheless, I have to write about them.

I have to close that distance.

Chasing dreams, even when they change…

There was a time in my life where I only wanted to be a professional golfer. I started playing the game the summer after my freshman year and I never looked back. I quit baseball because it wasn’t about having the best players on the field, but instead about which nine players were the coach’s favorites. But golf was based entirely on one’s own merit; you either qualified for every tournament by playing well or you didn’t.

And I worked my ass off to make sure I’d play well every round.

Only after playing the game for 8 months, I made the JV squad my sophomore year. And a year later, I made varsity and first team all-league. I also placed at the state tournament where we took second by only 6 strokes as a team. And in my senior year, I did all of that again and, at one point in the tournament, was in a tie for the outright lead.

I thought the magic would continue at the University of Oregon. Casey Martin had just been named the head coach and I knew there were open tryouts when I got there. And since no school had asked me to play for them, I thought the only way my dream had to continue was if I made the team at U of O.

But, as I had crashed and burned at the state championship, I crashed and burned at the open tryouts for the Ducks.

So my dream of becoming a professional golfer was gone.

Not long after that happened, though, I started to recognize my knack for proper spelling and grammar. Then in my English 104 class, I noticed that I was one of a few students who understood what the professor was talking about when he dissected the novels we’d read. Shortly after that, I started to journal a ton – thousands of words a day – for the rest of my freshman year at U of O. I kept the same journal going all through my college career, and all through my seminary education. At a 9-point font, single-spacing, and half-inch margins, I amassed over 800 pages – far more than a million words total. By the end of my freshman year, though, it was clear what my new dream would be: a professional writer.

The one drawback was that I understood that within an evangelical context – meaning, I thought I would follow the likes of Donald Miller and Tony Kriz (“Tony the beat poet”). But when my church closed its doors in 2011, I lost the community where all my thoughts had been formed. Sure, I still had some folks to talk to about theology, but it wasn’t the same. And while I wandered from church to church, I suddenly felt the urge to continue my education. Not even 2 years after that church closed, I was accepted to George Fox Evangelical Seminary (now Portland Seminary).

And that’s when the evangelical lens began to break apart.

Okay, honestly, that lens was pretty well cracked by the time I got to Portland, but the first few weeks had finished it off. And once I developed the skill sets necessary to form my own theological views, I didn’t see how I could possibly fit within evangelicalism. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t become a professor. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to have my own classes to teach, papers to grade, and area of expertise to, well, be an expert in. And since I loved the biblical literature, I thought that’s where my path would take me.

But there aren’t PhD programs in Oregon – at least, not any one that I would want to be in. And while I was accepted to Brite Divinity down in Texas for their Master of Theology (ThM – a stepping stone to a PhD) program, I couldn’t afford to move down there. I deferred enrollment for the year that I was allowed, but still couldn’t come up with the extra funds to make the move.

And after nearly 30 years in Oregon, it’s really hard to leave.

I had to decline their offer.

So, for the 3 years since I graduated seminary, I’ve been adrift. I’ve been going from job to job, living paycheck to paycheck – and often failing even at that. I’ve had more panic attacks than I care to count, and we’ve nearly been evicted every month for almost a year straight. And all this under a Trump (train-wreck) presidency. It makes it really difficult to feel like I’m still chasing my dreams, especially when they change so often.

But what hasn’t changed is that I tend to work harder when it’s something I’m passionate about. I was never passionate about retail or driving people around Portland for Lyft or Uber. But I am passionate about writing. I am passionate about helping people find their voice. I am passionate about creating, preserving, and re-telling stories that inspire and transform us into better versions of ourselves so that we can be better people to the ones we love. And I have a chance – maybe even my last – to make something happen out of that.

I write all this to say that my dreams have changed quite a few times within the last 15 years. But I also don’t know how to stop chasing them. I don’t know how to give up, walk away, or let it go. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do,” Kirk says in Into Darkness, “I only know what I can do.” In my case, though, I can honestly say that I’ve tried doing what I’m “supposed to,” but it hasn’t worked. So why not try the things I’m passionate about?

Reality is beginning to set in that I’m about to be back in school – something that I had thought was done. But there’s a lot more at stake this time around. This time, I’m trying to stay financially stable. This time, I don’t have a faith community to support me. This time, I’m really putting my talents to the test.

This time, I’m even more certain of the type of person I want to be and the type of things I want to spend the rest of my life doing. So if I fail at this, I really, truly will not know what to do.

All the more reason to work my ass off not only to prove that I belong there, but that I can and will succeed once I graduate.