My 2018 goals: The results

For my last blog post of 2018, I wanted to go over what I accomplished this year.

My biggest goal for 2018 wasn’t writing related at all. It was to go back to work full-time.

Mission completely and totally unaccomplished and kind of abandoned for the time being.

In my first post of this year, I said, “Although I’ve worked ludicrously hard on my memoir, I worked ludicrously harder for my MBA. I want to put all that time, energy, effort, and tears into a fulfilling business career.” This is still true.

I still wonder almost every day why God has me doing this work instead of something else, but I know it’s all working toward some larger plan. I recently joined the board of a literary arts nonprofit that’s in flux and I was named Treasurer, so this appears to be a way to start flexing those muscles again. I’m not being paid, which stinks, but I realized my reason for wanting to go back to work was to prove to myself that I can do the work I’ve said I could do for nearly 12 years, and just haven’t been given the opportunity. This is my chance to show what I can do. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Otherwise, in 2018, I wanted to publish 5 essays and 2 short stories. Mission accomplished! (Well, one story was published, but another was accepted and will be published in hardcopy in summer 2019, so that counts to me.)

Here’s my 2018 babies, in chronological order:

“You Are Not a Real Writer,” Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, March 21, 2018

“Why, As a Millennial, It Was Vital for Me to Own a Home,” Blavity, March 28, 2018

“July 11, 2008,” Past Ten, July 9, 2018

“Who is deserving of my spare change?,” Fathom Magazine, September 11, 2018

“I Help You,” Cosmonauts Avenue, October 4, 2018 (Fiction)

“The Right of Way,” Lunch Ticket, December 7, 2018

I also wanted to go to some great summer workshops, and I did! My time at Yale Writers Workshop, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference was PHENOMENAL, and all of them made me a better writer, step by step.

The thing I did this year that I’m most proud of was giving my first public reading! First, at Bread Loaf, then in DC (photo above)! It was surreal to bring my work to life in front of people. It’s a necessary part of being an author, and though it was a little nerve-wracking, it was great, and I’m looking forward to doing it again!

I’m still toiling with my 2019 goals. I’m almost afraid to make them because so much of life changes. Just when you expect things to go a certain way, then BANG, there they go, in an entirely different direction. This phenomenon has taught me about the difference between patience and surrender. Patience implies that you know what you’re waiting for—to see a doctor or hairstylist or the like to act on an appointment you made. Surrender implies that you’re just trying to make it out alive, hands up don’t shoot.

That sounds a lot more negative than I intend for it to, but I hope you get the picture. I don’t know what’s next for me. I keep trying to make things happen, and they’re not happening, so I have to surrender to God’s plan for me. It’ll be great, whatever it is. I just have to have my hands up, knowing He won’t shoot, but that He’ll overwhelm me with purpose and blessing. That’s my prayer for 2019.

Merry Christmas, all! And happy new year! See you again in January.

The Right of Way

My last essay of the year was published on Friday!

Remember when I got hit by a car earlier this year? The experience was actually pretty transformative. Sure, I’m a writer, and a memoir one at that, so I write about a lot of things about myself and the weird things that have happened to me, but this was the first transformative experience I felt I could write about in real time. I wrote that blog post about a week after the incident and I wrote the essay only a few weeks later.

I think this is the first time I felt that writing really helped me feel better about something immediate that happened to me that sucked, but hadn’t been stewing for years and years and years. And it felt great to get it out, almost like therapy. I knew I loved writing for this purpose, but I never knew it could feel so immediate.

So, huge thanks to Lunch Ticket for publishing this, my last essay of 2018. Here’s to hoping I’m more productive (and fruitful $$) next year!

Heavy Voices

Last night, I finished this book, Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon, and I *loved* it. I was super stoked when it came out because I’m a huge fan of Laymon since I read his essay, “You Are the Second Person.”

Me and Kiese Laymon after his Heavy reading at Politics & Prose in DC.

What I love about Laymon’s work is his voice—I honestly feel like he’s talking to me (or, in the case of Heavy, his mother), like from his mouth to the page. I seek to write more like this and gaining confidence in my voice has been an ongoing process. It’s ironic that this is something I struggle with because, as a Writing Center tutor in college, the thing I would tell people most was, “Stop making such a disconnect between the way you speak and the way you write. Good writing sounds like someone is talking to you.”

This obviously isn’t always the case with academic writing. My business school writing professor told me my memos were “too conversational.”

“But I’m having a conversation,” I said. “I’m just doing it on paper instead of in person.”

I just didn’t get why I had to speak differently on the page than I did in real life. It wasn’t like I was using slang in a professional memo. And wasn’t the content of my message more important, anyway?

I think some of that got lodged in my subconscious. Or at least something did, when I started learning to write essays. When I read them, I realized that many sound kind of the same, reflecting on some type of trauma in a voice that’s melancholy. I tried that, and it worked pretty well. But then I realized that’s not always my voice. That’s my grief voice, not my work voice, or my impostor syndrome voice, or my bougie Black Millennial voice.

All that being said, I love that Laymon is brave enough to write the way he speaks, and I pray to God I get to work with him at a conference one of these days so I can talk this issue over with him.

One of my primary concerns is that my voice isn’t heavy enough, that it doesn’t hold traces of my past trauma. You’d be surprised (actually, you probably wouldn’t) at the number of people who’ve told me they thought I grew up in some sort of stable, two-parent, Cosby Show home type of thing. Which couldn’t be farther from the case. Sure, my mom wasn’t turning tricks for rock or anything, and she quite professional and often brought that demeanor home, but I’ve had my fair share of knocks, though people don’t think I sound like I do. Ultimately, I sometimes wonder, especially as I read these great Black authors in this renaissance we’re in, if I’m being all of myself. I know I am, but I sometimes wonder if I should be something else, too, more raw than I really am.

The thing is, every time I went to a new school and thought I could reinvent myself, me always wound up showing up. That is to say that, anytime I think I’m insufficient and try to be something else, I can’t. At the end of the day, who I am winds up being enough. Something pops up that tells me I’m cool the way I am, which is to say, not all that cool. And I have my own way of being that is perfectly okay.

This is why workshops like VONA are so important to me. Of course, I had great experiences at my other workshops, but there’s something about getting feedback on your voice as a Black woman talking about your experience as a Black woman in a very white world (in my case, the South, during my childhood). There’s a level of validation that an environment full of writers of color provides that you can’t get anywhere else.

Of course, I have to remember to be confident in my voice regardless, but these workshops help *a lot.* Looking forward to my next one!