Between the ages of about 12 and 14, I went through a spell in which I discovered all the things I imagined were wrong with me. First one would come up, then another, then another. I wasn’t tall enough, and to my horror it didn’t look like I was going to ever be a tall person. My hair never grew really long—it was longish, but not to my waist or anything. I had too angular a face. My teeth were too small. I wasn’t very physically strong. I cried too easily. I wasn’t popular (this was largely because I was weird and also because I thought I was smarter than everyone else, but I didn’t get that at the time). Also, I couldn’t fry an egg. This drove me crazy. Everytime I tried to flip over an egg, it would get all tangled and mished up, and I’d end up with something that wasn’t like a fried egg at all, but more like a scrambled egg. Clearly, I wasn’t going to amount to much.
Each thing that came up felt important—not life-destroying, perhaps, but certainly life-affecting. And each one would leave me just trembling with self-loathing and fear, as if I wasn’t enough, would never be enough.
I used to wish I could go back to my 13-year-old self and tell her that everything would be all right, that I’d end up happy and successful. That I’d travel the world and become a professor and a writer and a blogger (that there would someday be things called “blogs”) and happily married.
But, these days, I’m thinking that going through that spell gave me something that I still have and that I use in my writing. It gave me the ability to look at self-doubt and step back from it. And, even more than stepping back, it gave me the ability to write about it. In fact, that miserable spell fed what would eventually become a writing career.
“When I was a psychotherapist, I was always amazed by the fact that each person had his or her own ‘thing,’” wrote Ram Dass in “Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita. “Each person said that if it weren’t for that Thing, their lives would be OK. If I didn’t have a nose that was shaped this way . . . If I had come from a richer family. If my parents hadn’t broken up when I was young. If I hadn’t fallen and gotten this terrible scar when I was little. If my hair were a different color. If I’d lived in a neighborhood where I’d had more kids to play with. If I’d had a more compassionate father. Everybody’s got their Thing. We get so emotionally preoccupied with the thing that is “wrong” with us that it starts to color all the ways we see the world around us.”
I think a lot about this quote from Ram Dass because I think he’s absolutely right. We all have our “thing”–or, rather, many “things”–and if we let them get the better of us, they can shade everything we do. But, these days, when these “things” come up for me, I don’t allow that. Instead, I deal with them through writing. I explore them, I complain about them, I acknowledge them, I converse with them, I defy them, I renounce them on the page. I take the “things” and turn them into stories and essays. I compost them, taking the garbage and transforming it to flowers.
I don’t have a step-by-step process for this. I can’t list the “10 Ways to Use Insecurities, Resentments, and Fears in Your Writing.” There are probably as many ways to do this as there are writers who write, and each person has to discover the best way for themselves. Instead, I’ll issue a challenge: When self-doubt or anxiety poke their annoying noses into your life, get out your pen. Do it right now! Then share with the rest of us the ways you compost the “things” that plague your life.