Bird by Bird
I am a dreamer. I am an artist. I am a storyteller and a writer. But I am terrified to start. The blank page, the unblemished canvas always seem insurmountable. I teem with ideas, goals, fantasies, and yet when it comes to taking that first step, I find that I am so afraid of failure that I cannot even try in the first place. I care too much about what other people think of me, about how I must seem to those I interact with, and often, I have a hard time being myself. Being true to myself.
I went to a wedding earlier this summer where I hardly knew anyone. I felt free and uninhibited and for the first time in a long time, I felt myself radiate. I glowed intensely from the core of my being with joy, happiness, and all that is me. I can’t remember the last time I let my guard down entirely and allowed myself to show. I knew I needed to latch onto that feeling and liberate it in my life.
Hence, this blog. It has been a dream of mine to start a blog for years. For our first wedding anniversary, my husband gave me a book, Blogging for Creatives, (to celebrate the traditional gift theme of paper). We just celebrated our fourth anniversary last week. It has taken me this long to work up the courage to mar the blank page.
Anne Lamott has a great story that was my final push to initiate this. She says:
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
This is my first bird. Tomorrow will be my second.