Anne Lamott, in her famous book “Bird by Bird,” talks about how writing allows you to reflect about anything and everything. She talks about how it’s important to write down our stories, if we want them written, noting that it doesn’t matter where you start. Perfectionism, she says, gets in the way of all of it.
It’s good advice, well-loved for a reason. And yet, I’m sitting here finding it hard to think of things to write about. I have a lot I could say, about a lot of different things, but right now I want to write about something that is not the thing I’m thinking about all the time. I want a break from the things unfolding in my life. I understand why some stories are not yet ready to be told.
So, taking Anne Lamott’s advice, I could instead write about the way the light has changed in the early mornings, the differences I see between the dawn in June and the dawn now, in late August. It reminds me of how in England this summer just after the solstice, the days were so long that I wanted to wake up early and stay up late. Maybe I could thread that back to the time I was in Alaska in the summer, when it was daylight all the time; I remember coming out of a late dinner at 11:00 at night, and it felt like evening was just beginning. Maybe then that thread could carry us to the summer I was in Iceland for a bit, how my sister-in-law and I walked to our terrible Airbnb against twilight’s yellow-blue darkness even though it was nearing midnight.
Maybe too I could talk about the details of each place, of each time. How in June, here at home, my heart leapt to see the world outside at 5:30 because it meant summer was coming, coming coming. I could tell you how in England one morning, I took a picture out an old stone window at 3:30 to catch the beauty of the rising sunlight. I could tell you that I was in Alaska for a marathon; I could tell you that I often still dream of the neighborhood pool outside of Reykjavik. Maybe I’d want to tell you about the red knit hat I bought on that same trip but in Scotland, how I think about the woman I bought it from – in her 70s, missing several teeth – more than I would have predicted, all these years later.
I could tell you that I have a picture of myself in that hat, on that trip, and am stunned now by how lovely I looked, which I did not know at the time. From there, maybe I could write about body image and appreciation, and the process of getting older, which is a gift and an adjustment in all sorts of ways. I could say something about lifting weights, or why I can no longer run marathons, or why I ran just the one, back when I could. I could write about the limits of our health care system, and the frustration about how women’s health is researched, or not. I could say something about the buzz around perimenopause and what it’s like to be a woman at mid-life, though I could also say something about how I am determined to live a very long life, and so perhaps I haven’t yet hit the halfway mark.
There are all sorts of things I could say, it seems. So maybe, just maybe, I will. It won’t be perfect. It never is, though, is it? Not in life, not in memory, and not here in words, either. No matter. Today I’ll take Anne Lamott’s advice.
The Wandering Introvert 