stomach-churnyness

Hello, dear friends and strangers.

Never thought I'd say this -- but I'm thrilled to be back in school!  Thrilled, and slightly terrified, though I've learned to welcome this stomach-churnyness.  It's always a sign that growth is near.

I'm taking Intro to Creative Non-Fiction this quarter, and while I think it will be a genuine stretch, it will also be such an opportunity to grow.  I'm reminded once again of what a strange person I am.  I got ridiculously nervous attempting to come up with good lies for our classroom icebreaker, 2 Lies and a Truth.  (My friends, The Neck-Splotches, returned in full force to welcome me back to a new quarter and my perennial self-consciousness.  Justin didn't exactly help when leaned over and said, "Hey, buddy, you're turning all red again," but I deferred strangling him til a later date).  I'm doing my best to avoid thinking about the fact that coming up with 2 lies makes me nervous -- and trying to bravely embrace the thought of in-class writes and small-group critique.

It took me til this very moment to appreciate an exercise we had to do in my last class that wrangled me into a better writer.  We were instructed to divide our paper into a 2 x 8 column.  Column One: What I Think This Poem Means.  Column Two: Why I Think This.  Michael put a poem up on an overhead (yeah, he's old-fashioned like that), but placed a piece of paper over it and only revealed a line or two at a time.  In fact, our first writing about the poem was before he had shown us any of it.

Let me start by saying, Poetry isn't really my friend.  I don't think this is because we wouldn't have grown to like each other had we met on our own terms -- but I was given a negative impression of Poetry early on by someone else, and it has forever poisoned our relationship.  Whoever introduced us intimated that Poetry had a secret that she would never ever divulge, at least not to a person like me.  I'd ask her questions.  I'd listen closely to her words.  But it would all be a big huge tease and I'd never understand in any kind of meaningful sense what the hell she was referring to.  She'd share the secret with others who were much smarter and deeper than I was.  She'd merely mock my efforts, however, and I would be left to feel like -- well, like an ass, basically.

In short... this wasn't my favorite exercise.  Responses ran a little like so, as he showed us more and more of the poem:

What this poem is about:

I don't know.

Why I think this:

Because Michael hasn't even shown us the title yet.

What this poem is about:

Um... someone's grandfather.

Why I think this:

Seemed like a good guess.

What this poem is about:

(blank)

Why I think this:

(blank) 

What this poem is about:

This poem is about aliens.

Why I think this:

No idea.

I'm sure I wrote something down in at least a few more of the 16 boxes, but many of them were along the lines of how screwed I was.  Once the poem was fully uncovered, I understood the basic gist of the thing, but I was too furious with my well-meaning prof for conspiring with Poetry to care.  I glared at the poor guy out of my tear-filled eyes and yearned for class to be over.  Had I looked around at the other students around me, I'd have realized that I wasn't alone, but I was too immersed in my own embarrassment to notice.

A month or two later, I was able to laugh about it with some of those other students and appreciate what the exercise did for me.  1)  It made me horribly uncomfortable.  2)  It forced one more piece of me that needs to be certain of the right answer to die.  Painfully.

As I go into this new class, one I desperately want to perform well in (this particular area of creative writing is the one I came back to school for, and I really don't want to discover that I totally suck at it) -- I'm trying to remember to give myself permission to be really bad at this at first.  To not know what I'm doing.  To be totally afraid of messing up, yet have enough courage to throw my stuff out there anyway in hopes that I'll be even a tiny bit better at this once I come out the other side.

For me, it's usually the fear of not doing something well that prevents me from doing it at all, so I'm trying to move forward anyway, splotches and nervous guts and all, and see what happens.  I think back to being in school nine years ago, and being paralyzed, unable to write a single word on that white screen.  From here, even a crappy paragraph seems quite a bit like victory.

So.  To being scared!  To growing anyway!  (Cheers).