Sufficiently Humbled

I don’t know about you, but doubt has long been an obstacle to achieving authenticity in my life and in my life’s work. I use the word ‘explicit’ in a sentence and doubt if it means what I’ve intended: Explicit means clearly stated? Or does it mean clearly obscene? Someone cracks a window, and doubt slips in. It oozes through a poorly sealed door, and now I am prepared to believe that, despite decades of study, I know nothing of words nor their meanings, let alone the feelings that spawn them. I say ‘someone’ because it is easier to blame others for the way we fail to trust ourselves than to acknowledge we are the ones who left the door open in the first place. Sure, ‘Someone’ with a capital S questions us, challenges us, dares us to doubt ourselves, but they only succeed in shattering our sense of self when, first, we hand them the hammer.

The absence of all doubt, however, the inability to carefully examine our intentions, our beliefs, and our words—especially our words—is equally dangerous. When we aren’t willing to entertain the possibility that we have, in fact, used a word incorrectly, misspoken and harmed someone, erroneously reported information, failed to empathize, seasoned our stories and our interactions with malice—held fast to a self-serving belief that disadvantages, discounts, or devalues the experiences of others, we become the hammer. As writers and as people, we have that gift of ambidexterity. With insecurity on the left and arrogance on the right, each hand is as capable of destruction as the other.

Lots of clichés have been written about fear, probably because fear is a monster we can all agree exists. Okay, maybe not out loud, but in our secret hearts, we are all afraid of something. And if we were really being honest, we would admit that fear makes us the monsters. We self-sabotage. We lash out, plug our ears, withhold concession and affection. If we trust ourselves too much, write our truths too much, listen with our minds open too much, we might discover we are wrong. We might be rejected in love and in our work. We might feel ridiculous, humiliated, uneducated, and in all the most important ways, unmasked, vulnerable, and seen. But if Explicit can mean to state something clearly and it can mean to warn consumers about ‘obscene’ lyrics or other language, couldn’t Surrender mean something more than weakness? What if Surrender were a synonym for Authenticity? What if Surrender meant letting go, freeing ourselves from whatever keeps us at war—from the battles we wage against ourselves and from the ones we wage against each other? And in that letting go, we claimed a new kind of power.

All my life I have battled with sidewalks. I fall on perfectly smooth pavement, and I can’t even type the word Cobblestone without wincing. I fall when I am not thinking of every step I take. When I look up too much or think too hard, when I am wandering blindly through the caverns of my mind. Jumping ahead or traveling back in time when I know I should be paying attention to the present. When instinct rings my ears, a tinnitus reminding me to observe, to bear witness, but I ignore it, drown it with the song of my own circumstances. Then blood gushes from my knees and I am returned to Earth, sufficiently humbled. I used to think I was being punished. That I thought too much of myself and needed to be grounded. That my thoughts themselves—my words— were foolish, too full of fancy or love. That, generally, I was just too damn much. I still think that sometimes but only when I have forgotten to close the door tight.

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