Me Vs. Myself

Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind...the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.  --Mary Schmich 

I was talking with my mom on the phone last week and she asked me how my writing was coming.  I told her that I’d been researching literary journals over the past month, trying to familiarize myself with the writing market, hoping to submit some of my poetry to journals this autumn after being coaxed by my poetry professor to “send off my babies.”  

I’ve been polishing up a few poems, getting them ready to send off, and as I continue to revise them, I keep thinking how they will be received by others, whether they’ll be accepted or rejected, and what that all will mean, if anything.  This is part of an artist’s life--creating work that means something to you personally, then putting it out there for the world to see, vulnerable to rejection, and not letting the feedback get you down if it’s bad, or not getting too cocky about it if it’s spectacular.  

My mom listened and then told me this story about a professional speed skater (not sure about his name) who recently spoke at my dad's company. This speed skater has won all sorts of national and world championships, but each time he went to the Olympics, he fell and did not win a medal. The painful, takeaway lesson of his story is that when he was competing at the Olympics, he would look around at all the other skaters and get psyched out about whether or not he was better than they were.  He said he lost hold of the belief that the only important thing was performing the very best he could--regardless of all the other skaters around him.

Such a simple lesson.

One that we all too often forget, constantly caught up in a sea of comparison.

I recently ordered a book from Amazon called The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo.  We read excerpts from it in my poetry class this summer, and I liked Hugo so much that I ordered the whole book.  As I was reading on the flight to Vegas, the following paragraph struck me--something that’s closely connected to the story my mom shared with me...

Oh, and to offer a little context first, Hugo is talking about a guy named Roethke, who was his first and most influential poetry teacher.  He writes,

“Roethke’s love of prizes, rave reviews, and applause would sometimes prevent him from emphasizing to the student the real reward of writing--that special private way you feel about your poems, the way you feel when you are finishing a poem you like.  Yet he knew it, and in rare moments it showed.  Once he said to me, that nervous undergrad who wanted the love of the world to roar out every time he put a word down, “Don’t worry about publishing.  That’s not important.”  He might have added, only the act of writing is.  It’s flattering to be told you are better than someone else, but victories like that do not endure.  What endures are your feelings about your work.  You wouldn’t trade your poems for anybody’s.  To do that you would also have to trade your life for his, which means living a whole new complex of pain and joy.  One of those per lifetime is enough.”

Hugo also writes,

“Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand.  When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you’ll find there is no reader.  Just you and the page.  Feel lonely?  Good.  Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication.  If you want to communicate, use the telephone.”

What I love about Hugo’s points is that we all--whether we are writers or painters or speed skaters--need to stop worrying about other people--whether we are better or worse than them--whether they’ll “get” us or not--whether what we have to offer is good or bad.  

God made us in the unique way He did for a reason, meaning that you and I have something to offer the world that no one else can.

We need to keep offering it regardless of what people do with it.

(I am preaching to the choir here).

As my professor, Frank, says about rejection:

“Everyone gets rejected! You are not alone!  I get rejected all the time. Poets with award winning books get rejected all the time. Shakespeare, if alive today, would probably get rejected now and again. Success in publishing in poetry ranges from unpredictable to completely erratic. You may have a dry spell of months, even years, and then find that everyone wants your work. You may find instant success and keep it. Nobody may ever appreciate your work in this lifetime and then in the year 2070 you will be a superstar.”

It seems to me that the more we look to outside sources to define us, to give us our worth, to tell us what we need to do or how to do it, to tell us whether or not we have what it takes, we are in trouble and we've missed the point.  

Bill Cosby once said, 

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

And as Steven Pressfield says in his book The War of Art--

"We’re not born with unlimited choices.

We can’t be anything we want to be.

We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny.  We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become.  We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it.

Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

If we were born to paint, it’s our job to become a painter.

If we were born to raise and nurture children, it’s our job to become a mother.

If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice of the world, it’s our job to realize it and get down to business."

So...all of this is to say that in the end, I know the race is long, and I know it’s with myself.  The race is marked by this long, baffling process of becoming myself, and of learning to be comfortable with who I am and what I have to offer, regardless of how the world receives it.

***Oh...and if/when I receive piles of rejection letters this winter/spring, remind me to come back to this post for encouragement, will you?