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Composition, words and phrases, structure, all of our own making. We were unwilling students of this new skill. With each new writing assignment, we’d whine, How long does it have to be? I found him one afternoon scribbling away at his desk. What are you doing? I asked him. What are you writing? Do we have an essay due? Don’t know. I’m not writing an essay. I’m writing a story. What sort of story? A war story. Soldiers and tanks and guns and bullets? No one writes anything more than five paragraphs! He was writing in blue ballpoint pen on regular lined paper. Can I read it? I asked. What’s going to happen next? Are you going to keep writing? How’s it going to end? Do they all die? Come back tomorrow, he said. I went home that night transformed. 
Let's Work Together
Writing was not something to be avoided. It didn’t look that hard. He was just sitting there at his desk with his pen and his paper and pulling all these people and scenes and words right out of his head. I sat down to write. Lots and lots of words, actual writing that filled up so much space. My mom came in and asked me what I was doing. The next day I woke early and cycled off to school so that, before the assembly bell, I could read everything I’d written the night before. I tried to lose myself in the story. Tried to be impressed. But I couldn’t even begin to convince myself that I’d written an actual story. In the cold light of day I simply didn’t believe anything I’d written. I’d just made them up. Letting Go
The challenges I’d placed them in were boring, or obvious, or anyway not real, since I’d just made them up as well. I was so sad and disappointed. What did he know that I didn’t? I went off to ask him. I don’t know, he replied. I just see these characters in my head and know how they should be with each other. Then I write it down. Why don’t you keep at it? But the stories never got any better. The words did not transport you into another world. Instead, they were heavy and clumsy, something the reader had to wade through to get to the end. If this was what writers did, then I wasn’t one. I gave up writing for pleasure, and for the next twenty years carried around with me the caricature of myself that I was no writer because I was no Peter. What I should have realized is that though I am no Peter, it doesn’t mean I am no writer. Making Believe
It turns out that I am neither interested in making, nor very good at making, fiction. I find no characters popping into my head, and when I try to fabricate them, I get bored of them before I can even begin to describe them on paper. Fictional worlds and people are created by artists who believe passionately in the need for these worlds and people to come into existence. While I can appreciate such artists, I am not one of them. He was a rotten exemplar of me. By not realizing this, by confusing admiration with association, by aspiring to become him, I took myself down singularly unhappy and unproductive paths. I should have stayed on my true path. It turns out that he became a poet and a playwright. He was the first artist in residence at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. This is easy to write, and so very hard to do. Our entire systems of parenting, of schooling, of social media, and of working have been designed to force you to compare all aspects of you with your peers. Your parents were given charts to compare your height, weight, crawling, pooping, walking, eating, sleeping, socializing, first word, first sentence against standardized norms. From the moment you are conceived to the moment you become an adult, your parents are primed to measure their own success by which percentile you fall into. Your school doubles down on this fetish for comparison. The grades you’re given throughout your education are derived by comparing your work against school, state, or national norms, and then pinpointing where you fall in this normative distribution. These norms locate you and define you. And, of course, determine which opportunities will be given to you, and which will not. At work, this comparison fetish becomes an obsession. How much money you earn, whether you will get promoted, whether you will get laid off, all of these will be determined by your performance rating. And this rating is determined by your organization comparing you against everyone else. Some organizations derive these ratings by comparing each person’s performance and potential. Some, fearing that too many workers will be given high ratings, demand that only a certain percentage be given 5s and 4s, and that the rest receive 3s or lower. This is called forcing the curve. It means that, even if you compare favorably with your peers, you may still wind up with a low rating. None of them serve you. Instead, by comparing you with others, they render you invisible. They use standardized criteria as the measure of you. Which is how they hide you. From yourself, and from everyone else. Of course, there are times when the pressure to compare comes not from you, nor from your parents or boss, but instead from your friends. From folks who look at you, compare their life choices with yours, and, because they feel the comparison doesn’t portray them favorably, denigrate you and your journey. These kinds of comparisons are the worst. They cut through your defenses the fastest, and are then the hardest to shake. The judgy judgments of allies. Here’s an example from Myshel’s journal, as she tries to make sense of her friends’ reaction to her juggling of work and family. We rented a house in Heavenly, beautiful Lake Tahoe.