This is a topic I was thinking about this morning. I have a couple of draft blog posts in the hopper I could have worked on. I’ve also got a couple of short stories, a screenplay, and at least one mushroom-growing manual in the works. And let’s not talk about the list of novels that have been started, and shelved. One of these days — I always imagine — I’ll make a nice organized list of the projects, create a special spot for them, and place all of my notes in the proper spots so that I can work methodically on each one. And maybe, maybe soon! I will.

But some of the elements of my mundane, non-writing life have been keeping me up at night, and it occurred to me that maybe they are connected to my struggles with disciplining myself to sit down and write.

I have been trying to build a writing practice for years.

I’ve read lots of books on the craft of writing, the work of writing, and I get inspired, then I try something for a very short minute, and then life happens, and it gets put back in the closet.

If I had understood years ago what I understand now about creativity, and making space for it, maybe I would have chosen a different way of life.

Maybe I would have put creativity first, and worked the other elements of a life in around it.

The Creativity Bug

I knew I wanted to write books around the age of 4 or 5, which is when I learned to read and when I also started to write. I spun stories out of everything around me, mostly nature, but also animals, and people, and ideas. I was a teacher’s dream kid back then, at least after I learned to raise my hand to ask questions, and then mostly with teachers of arts and letters. I loved school. I think the only thing I liked better than learning things or creating things was feeling loved. And my teachers — the early ones — loved me.

What I can see now, from the perspective of distance, is that somewhere along the line, the desire to be loved trumped the desire to create, trumped the desire to learn.

None of this matters — I can just hear Liz Gilbert saying — get over it! The past is in the past! Sit down and write!

And she’s right.

And/but, Liz, I’m also trying to raise a couple of kids, and provide them the right kind of space, the right kind of mindset, the right kind of discipline, to follow their gifts, to find joy in creating whatever it is they want to create.

In this parenting, it often feels like I’m brand new at a game I never learned the rules to, and that the timer is running out.

My kids are great. They are wise, and passionate, and bright and curious — but they are in the clutches of great self-conscious torment in a culture that wants to make them into consumers.

I was also a teenager in that kind of culture, but the world of 2024 has dialed it up exponentially compared to the culture of 1992.

How is this connected to my inability to put a real writing practice into place? And why does it matter?

Permission to Create

I sometimes think that if I could figure out the moment when little-kid me felt it necessary to hide my creativity away, to place it in that drawer marked, “when you’ve completed every other assignment,” I could go back there and tell her, in no uncertain terms, what she needed to do with it instead.

And if I could figure that out, then maybe I’ll know just the right things to say to my kids, the way to protect their creativity, their souls, from this culture.

It’s not as if other known and unknown creators of the past had no obstacles to their work. I could rattle off a list of modern and long-ago artists of every kind who worked their art in around their regular lives. It is do-able.

Process over Product

One thing I felt good about, as a parent, was prioritizing process over product, when it came to creativity and my kids. I always kept scads of paper, crayons, markers, paints, glue, craft items, around the house, and it was the process we focused on, not the product. No need to focus on what she made; the focus was always on making time and space for the joy and open-ended aspect of creativity.

I do believe that in all their good intentions, my teachers and school leaders, and all the adults in my life, spent a great deal of focus on the products of my creative work: whether it was a poster I created for some contest, or the books I wrote for our school’s annual book fair (highlight of the year!), or the ribbons given out to the first-, second-, and third-place students in the spelling bees.

When Liz Gilbert writes about her own success with Eat, Pray, Love, and about how dear old Harper Lee was never able to publish again after the success of To Kill A Mockingbird, it just breaks my heart. I know that feeling — obviously not from having written anything like that — but from having your whole identity tied up with being Great at the thing, and how the pressure is there, then, to repeat your success, or to top it.

Gifted

I know that’s why I had my first nervous breakdown around the age of 10, when I couldn’t handle the pressure of the Academically Talented program where I was sent for Grade 5.

I lasted about 3 weeks in that program before returning to my old school.

The thinking back then (1987ish) was that if a child was “gifted,” or in some way “superior” to their classmates, those kids should be rounded up from all the schools in the community and placed together in a little hive of giftedness.

I was buzzing with excitement on my first day. I was a little nervous, but mostly — being the adventurer I was — the idea of leaving my little elementary school, across the street from my house, and riding a BUS to a bigger, more modern school MILES away from home, meeting new, smart kids, learning different things, new, more interesting things, and having teachers who wanted to meet me and were already impressed by me — I might as well have been Young Sheldon Cooper off to college.

But I was not Sheldon Cooper, by any stretch. First of all, I was a smart kid, by a lot of measures. I was curious, I liked to read, and I had a ton of energy for those pursuits. I also picked up most new skills quickly, but I wasn’t any kind of prodigy.

Also unlike Sheldon, I was also highly sensitive to other people, and had a lot of empathy for what others must be feeling.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that I have to manage my energy carefully around others — if I’m with too many other people at any given time, all their feelings and their energy becomes overwhelming. I require a good amount of quiet time, alone time, process-and-recharge time. Being a natural extrovert, it took a long time to realize this about myself.

Ouabache — pronounced Wabash — was my New Gifted School, and there I encountered my first experience of being a gifted little fish in a pond full of other gifted little fish.

Before I noticed the “Mediocrity Not Accepted Here” banner at the front of the room, before I nearly lost my mind trying to keep up with pre-algebra, and before I accidentally spilled my calligraphy ink on the carpeted floor at Ouabache — I was already having misgivings about the program, and that was because of my friends who weren’t chosen to attend.

Before Oubache

I had a very best friend in the fourth grade. Crystal.

Let me tell you about Crystal, and how much I loved her.

Before the fourth grade, my “friends” had been an assorted gaggle of kids at my mom’s daycare and random kids in my classes. But no one special.

Well, I take that back. In third grade, I sat next to Jason D., and we both had a love of castles and knights and dragons, and we both loved to draw those things, obsessively, and I sure did look forward to drawing with Jason every day — he had amazing markers — until he got sick and had to be kept home the rest of the school year.

But in fourth grade, there was Crystal. She had been at my elementary school, but we’d never had the same teacher, so I had not known her.

In fourth grade, everything opened up. That was the year we got to start playing an instrument, and the violin found me. Crystal also picked the violin! That year, all of us graduated to the Pod, where the Big Kids got to go. The Pod was a separate area of the elementary school where 4th and 5th Graders got to snub the little kids by casting off the old days of paste and having to go to the nurses’ office for a new pair of pants if you had an accident.

In the Pod, there was carpet. (Hey guys, did we have AC in the Pod? I can’t remember.)

Suffice it to say, we were Kings of the School.

Crystal and I had the same teacher that year, and we sat next to each other, and suddenly, the whole idea of a best friend made perfect sense. She loved to read. She loved to write. She loved to spell. Just like me! Nothing else mattered except that we had the best teacher ever — Mrs. Dorothy Plummer, from Maine! — who told us in no uncertain terms we could be book authors someday, if we wanted to.

Crystal and I had sleepovers on the weekends, we had our own little book club, and we looked forward to every day.

I can still see us as little girls, her with long blonde hair in two braids, big smiles, getting perfect scores on our spelling tests, skipping to orchestra together, silent reading time, the year I discovered the writing of Louisa May Alcott, when Crystal read Little Women and I read Little Men. (That’s another story.)

When I first learned about the AT program (I think it was technically called “Academically Talented” program, or AT, for short), I remember mom and dad being a little concerned. They liked having me at school right across the street; they would have to send me farther away for junior high, but that wasn’t for another year.

They didn’t know if this newfangled academic program might do more harm than good. I’m sure they were proud, but they also wanted to do some research and get some feedback about it. Dad especially distrusted things like that — and maybe his gut was telling him something we all knew deep down: humans shouldn’t be separated by perceived “ability.” It felt wrong.

And also? Crystal didn’t get picked.

Which was, in my mind, impossible. We were basically the same person, and I did not want to leave her. I felt there must be some kind of mistake, or that if there was some kind of a cutoff, some kind of numeric determination, she had maybe been just a tiny half point behind me or something. It made me sick, deep in my stomach, kind of the way I felt toward the end of each spelling bee, when it would just be a couple of us left up there, often me and her, and I just wanted it to end so we didn’t have to be ranked. It was also something that couldn’t be discussed, because it caused painful feelings. It also occurred to me, later in life, maybe she was chosen, and her parents chose not to send her. I just don’t know.

I don’t remember how it was decided. I guess the excitement and adventure — along with assurances from Ouabache that it would be some kind of a disservice to me if my parents didn’t send me — made it seem like a reasonable idea. After all, Crystal and I could still see each other, still have sleepovers, still hang out.

You’re not so great

I don’t remember exactly what the last straw was, in the AT program.

Of all my very vivid memories of all my early school days, down to detailed scenes from Kindergarten, first, second, and third grades, there exist holes in my memory of the AT program.

At Ouabache, I remember trying to make friends by acting silly on the playground for attention. I remember someone telling me that my glasses made me look like a bug with weird tiny eyes. I remember trying to understand a tesseract, while reading A Wrinkle In Time (and feeling most certain that everyone else fully understood the concept, and that I probably wasn’t smart enough to get it).

I remember spilling the ink..

For some reason, being in a school with carpet always felt like the height of responsibility: “We are trusting you,” the adults seemed to be saying. “You’re not some little third-grader anymore; big kids don’t spill, which is why YOU can be trusted with carpet.”

Calligraphy was a special opportunity for us, in the AT program. My new classmates and I were given this very special class — I remember it feeling solemn and important — with old-fashioned special pens and ink pots. A different teacher came to us for the experience.

Our desks were covered with newspaper, and we were given art smocks to protect our clothing from the ink, which “will stain!” our teacher promised.

The atmosphere was electric with the very special, grown-up activity we were about to do.

That damn little pot of ink.

The newspaper, stiffly stretching over the edge of my desk, out beyond the actual surface of the desk — I can see it now — so that when I picked up the little pot of ink and moved it a little further to the edge of my desk, it found no surface, only the edge of the newspaper, and promptly fell straight to the carpeted floor, where it spilled everywhere, leaving a big, black stain that would never, ever come out.

I have a vague memory of myself on my knees crouching over the stain in a panic, tears welling up in my eyes, looking up at my astonished classmates, imploring anyone to help me rewind the tape.

“You are in so much trouble,” we all seemed to be thinking.

The Prodigal Smarty-Pants

When I returned to Terre Town, my old school, there was no fanfare. My old classmates hadn’t missed me. I don’t remember how my return was explained.

I had missed picture day while I was away, and my new fifth grade teacher, Mr. S., in his funny, sweet, goofy way, had me stand before a brightly-decorated bulletin board while he took a Polaroid, which he then added to the other photos on the wall. I was back in the fold.

Mr. S. was great. He was the kind of teacher who wore Groucho glasses to make us laugh; we played a great game regularly, that he called “Eraser Chaser,” a kind of relay race from the back of the room to the front, where teams would compete to answer math problems on the blackboard.

I was given some extra work, on the side, to make up for the fact that my smarty-pantsness was not being “challenged” in the regular school, and I didn’t mind. I liked worksheets, and research projects, and extra reading. What this did for my social life, one can only imagine.

I don’t remember how things were with Crystal. And this blankness of memory haunts me a little, even now. We must have still had sleepovers. We still had spelling bees. We still loved to read, but maybe the magic of our fourth grade friendship got lost during those three weeks at Ouabache.

I know I lost something.

I hadn’t gotten in trouble for the ink. It was an accident. My teachers, if they said anything, may have simply warned the others to be careful about where to put their pots of ink. I was in such a state by the time a teacher discovered the mess, I don’t think there would have been any point in punishing me.

It was probably shortly after that when my parents and I had a sit-down meeting with the Ouabache teachers (in which I sobbed that I didn’t want to stay there any longer), where the teachers not-so-gently discouraged my parents from sending me back to my old school; to let me overcome this anxiety by pushing through and finding success. But the decision had been made. I would not go back. I think even if I changed my mind at that point, my parents would not let me go back. The new fear that had found me, the fear of failure, had left a scar.

It wouldn’t be the last time failure sent me running for the hills.

And once Failure sets up shop inside your heart, once those little voices become part of your running internal commentary, the job of identifying them, arguing with them, pushing them down becomes an exhausting daily struggle.

Would I have overcome it, had I stayed? Maybe. It’s a question that still — nearly 40 years later!! — eats at me.

Would I have been more interested in going to the Indiana Academy for high school, like a couple of my friends ended up doing? Would I have been a better student in university, had I stayed? Would I have overcome the fear of failure, the fear of ink pots, the fear of being trusted with carpet, the fear of not understanding a term in a book…? Would I have passed the bar? Would I have even bothered with law school?

Those answers are lost to time. So, Liz Gilbert, after all that meandering through the past and through my struggles, here I am, in 2024, trying to write, and trying to raise a couple of mentally-healthy humans.

My goal, for myself, and for my own children, is to continue to identify those lying voices of judgment and failure, and to put them back where they belong, so that we can be free to create, and to enjoy our gifts, whatever they are.