Notes from Week One

I play guitar and sing. When I was 20, I played one of my first open mic nights. I did my three songs and stepped down. There was a dude there, an older dude who played guitar in a band, a real band. He said to me:

Yeah, uh, keep it up. Keep practicing guitar. I really admire a singer who can play her instrument.

This seems completely innocuous now, but at the time, and for too long a time after, I made it mean:

I can't play guitar. I will never be good enough. Voice is my instrument and that will never be enough; I must be an act to have an audience. The music scene is a boys club. There is no place there for me.
~~~

I did an erotic writing worksop when I lived in Northampton, MA about, hmmm, 6-7 years ago now. It was very powerful for me; I wrote wildly uninhibited pieces and shared them. It was a really good exercise to write about sex. It forced me to give myself permission around an obviously taboo subject and embrace whatever came out or came up in the process. I was writing from a place of pure pleasure and constantly reminding myself, Go ahead, write it! What's the worst that could happen? That permission is an act of self-love and essential to authentic expression in any medium. I treasure that lesson! The leader was a huge champion of my creativity and though we've lost touch, I miss her and think of her so fondly.

Connected with that workshop, I spoke with a woman who had some of her erotic writing published. I thought maybe I'd be interested in getting some of my writing published - someday. I asked her about her experience. How did she do that? Did she have an agent? I was completely naive about such things (still am) but it felt safe to ask, fresh out of the arms of this wonderful workshop. Well, her response sort of felt like a bucket of cold water in the face. She basically told me that not just anybody can get published, that you get rejected a lot before you maybe get accepted, that pulishers aren't just looking for the same old hackneyed thing that most people submit...on and on like this. She never answered my questions. And, she offered all this without ever reading a word of my writing.

I took this really personally at the time. Maybe I only heard what I was afraid I'd hear, since I have always had this resistance to asking for help. But I pretty much made it mean that my writing was not good enough to be published, and that there was some magical, mystical formula to getting your words in print that I would never have access to because I was not cool, educated, credentialed, connected or talented enough. And I never would be.
~~

Today, I can honestly say that the echos of these creative buzzkills are oh-so-faint. I do not believe what I heard them say. Now I believe that anything is possible. It's just a matter of setting my mind to it! (Now I'm just trying to dislodge the block that prevents me from setting my mind to it, damnit!)

On a lighter note, an incomplete list of who I'd be in an alternate life:

A farmer's wife and mother of 6 in Ireland
A boho writer/photographer in San Fran
A singing/dancing sensation on Broadway!
A Buddhist Nun
Natalie MacMaster