A pledge

This post of Jessica's has inspired me to come out of the closet.

I write.

I write a lot more, and a lot more honestly, than appears on this blog but most of it remains locked between the black covers of my Moleskin notebooks. On occasion, in the past, I sent my writing out into the world, and on occasion the world welcomed it; usually the world failed to notice one way or another but the world wasn't completely indifferent, not all the time. But it's been a long time since I told my stories to somebody other than myself.

I believe I can use language well. I know I have a strong sense of place. I've created people out of wholecloth. But I'm afraid to share my stories; I find it hard to believe that somebody will read what I have to say. That comes from a childhood of invisibility, of not being listed to, from impatient parents who told me to hurry up and finish when I was trying to tell a story, from a mother who said to a daughter who started writing stories the day she learned to wield her first pencil, "I don't give a shit about writing." So I did what any child with a sense of self-preservation would do: I learned to hide my writing and to diminish what might have been a gift. It's a pattern so deeply ingrained that even though I blog pseudonymously I still have one (safe) personality for my blog another (riskier, more honest) for my journals, my journals that will never see the light of day.

But Jessica has inspired me. I don't know if I'm ready for a writer's contract, but I'm ready for a change. I'm ready to start exposing myself in my writing, to stop hiding, to stop listening to my mother who first of all was wrong and second of all is dead. I'm free, free like I was on those summer vacations to run wild and to play in the old barn of my imagination, to jump from the loft. I don't live in my mother's oppressive house anymore. I live in the old barn, on sagebrush hills, in an old innertube floating down Trail Creek. I live in West Yellowstone, in the Lamar Valley, at Oxbow Bend. I live at Henry's Lake with a strange stray loyal black dog who will always protect me and who will follow me anywhere. I live on the shores of Swift Current Lake with my brother valliantly hurling a piece of styrofoam into the wind. I live at the foot of the Swiss Alps, in the mineral green water of the Aare in full flow, on the cobblestone streets of the Old Town. I do not live in my mother's house anymore.

And it's time to stop writing as if I did.