True and False Lives

The other day I updated my About page and mentioned that I spent about ten years leading what I called a false life.

Maybe you know what I mean.

It wasn’t an empty life.  It wasn’t a worthless or useless life.  It was just that what I was doing during those years wasn’t what I came here to do, and I knew it.

That’s what made it false.  The knowing.

It’s not like I didn’t have a clue what I came here to do.  From an early age I knew with utter conviction that I wanted to be a writer, an artist.  I knew that I had a voice, and that I had something to say.   But saying it was just too hard for me for an absurdly long time.

So I did something else.

I danced around the edges of my artful self.  I painted signs for retailers.  I painted pottery in a factory.  I played records on the radio and wrote commercial copy.  I wrote corporate white papers about things I didn’t care about, didn’t believe in.  I accepted awards and paychecks.

I danced until I couldn’t do it any longer.

And then I danced a little more.

I very much believe that nothing is ever really wasted.  Squandered, maybe, but not devoid of meaning.   And so I can glean bits of truth from those false years.  But I don’t pretend my lost decade was something inevitable, a passage I somehow had to make.

It was something I allowed.

During those years, I let fear have its way.  Fear of being penniless.  Fear of being ridiculed.  Fear of being ignored.  Fear of being great.  Fear of being me.

Maybe you know something about that, too.

But fear gets old.

And time makes you bolder.  Or so the song says.

Toward the end of those years — though I didn’t realize at the time that it was the end of anything, or the beginning; that realization came only in retrospect — I began to get glimpses of the life I wanted, seeing it as if through wavy glass, or layers of scrim.

It was like coming out of anesthesia.

I heard the world inviting my artful self to come out and play.   It had been inviting me all along, of course.  I’d just always said no.

Until one day I said yes.

And curious things started to happen.

I went to work in community radio and regained my true voice.  I went to see singer/songwriters and began to make music again.  I ventured out to poetry readings, first to listen, then to read at them myself.  I bought a sketchbook.

Most of all, I began to pay attention.

And I felt the falseness give way, and something more true rise up, like dormant seeds germinating in newly fertile soil.

It happened so quickly.

It took a painfully long time.

And then one more thing happened.

Somewhere between the community radio and the poetry readings, I became a mother.  Yet another veil fell away, along with another myth, the one that says the tethers of domesticity are anathema to creativity.  Well, maybe the normal tethers are anathema.  But who’s talking about normal?

We’re talking about art.  And truth.  And waking up from that numbing falseness  to discover that art is in the connection, in the immersion, in the deep desire of the wild heart to be in relationship with the world.

Life is always ready.

My life.  Your life.  Always.

The poet Anais Nin wrote, “The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

For some of us, that day is a long time in coming.  Which is all the more reason to embrace it when it finally does arrive.

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Related posts:

Trust the Rope, Part I

Finding Your Touchstones

Your Creative Backpack,  Part II