What if You Were Your Own Best Cheerleader?

When I do Write or Die, I have people write about a time they felt most themselves. More often than not, they describe themselves when they were about six years old.

After six, the hammer of self-judgement drops for many, I think, because of school and the new need to chase after the shiny, taskmaster A.

What if we had no sense of grades, of judgement? What if when we were asked to write an essay on the elusive snowy owl, instead of feeling despair when we look it up on Wikipedia and see a description we wish we could simply cut and paste because everything the teacher wants us to say is right there, complete, and anything we could write will be less than because this got published and we are just kids with a blank page?

What if we thought about the snowy owl, looked for videos about it, went past the gut-sink of Wikipedia and continued to read about this magical, strange creature from other sources? What if we got curious instead of panicked? What if we weren’t thinking about whether we were doing this project right? What if we weren’t thinking about pleasing the teacher and instead we thought about pleasing ourselves? What if instead of writing about the snowy owl, we decided to draw it and we spent an amazing hour trying to figure out how to get white on paper?

What if we lived our whole lives like the time before we knew what the grade of F meant? What C meant? What A meant? A does not mean you’re the best, anyway. It means someone thought your work was the best. How many artists and inventors and humans were scorned, were given Fs, by society as a whole for their radical, amazing ideas?

If I offered you a Tesla, would you want it? I remember the first time I saw that car. I fell in love with the door handles. They were gorgeous! I did not know a door handle could look so sleek, so sexy! Elon Musk has had to endure so much push-back on this car. If the world were in charge, we’d still be walking. No car, never mind the wild Tesla, would be on the road because as people, we are better at shooting down new ideas than supporting them.

You are a walking new idea. The thing is, you don’t have to change the world or be the best or even be someone that other people copy. This whole post 6-year old thing of striving for excellence is misguided. The pictures these days of Everest are like a horror movie. Body after body fallen and frozen because all these people thought they needed to get to the peak. They could have been with their families tucking into a nice meal right now, but no. They had to litter a spot not meant for humans with their corpse.

I am not arguing for mediocrity or for a lack of effort. I am arguing for life.

I am arguing for childhood.

For participating in a swim meet and not falling apart if you don’t get the gold, the blue, the whatever the top is. For doing something because your body or mind wants to do it in order to stretch and to reach and to fully experience what it means to be alive.

When people come to me and say they want to tell their story but they can’t because they are stuck, I know someone kicked them in the gut some time in the past and the idea of you’re not good enough or you’re not talented enough or you’re not doing this right came into the arena and messed up the flow of life is excellent and I am an integral part of it.

For thirty years I tried to write my story and I couldn’t. How ridiculous is that? I lived it! How could I not tell it?

If you try to do something, but you have someone (yourself) yelling into your own head, This is wrong. This is not good enough. You are supposed to sound like someone else, Hemingway maybe or Toni Morrison or Chang-rae Lee. You should quit because you just sound like yourself.

So many of us learn we are wrong in school. We learn a fundamental distrust of our own brain.

This is craziness.

It’s like a worm hating its body because its not an ostrich, or an ostrich hating its pink because it sees more people looking at the elephants and thinks everything would be better if it were grey and wrinkled. Or it’s like me reading Annie Dillard and despairing because I will never, ever write like her so why should I even bother to try. Who needs my wobbly voice when Annie Dillard writes with golden ink?

But if I don’t sing to you, you will never hear me, and then I will die and nothing will have happened.

It’s not about the quality of the song. It’s whether you showed up and sang.

The yoga teacher Eric Schiffman says, in his book on yoga, Keep it simple. I think that applies to everything, including your life. Six year olds keep it simple. They get up, they eat, they pee and poop, they play, they laugh, they cry, they hug, they run around, they create, and then they go to bed.

We have so much to learn from our children if we can only get to them before we start to break them down.

I understand that part of what makes human beings amazing is our desire to do what seems to be beyond us: it’s what got us to the moon, to Plymouth Plantation. It’s the Olympics. I know that with this in mind, the trail of dead bodies leading up to the peak of Everest could be argued as a testament to our spirit and will, but I’m not feeling it. There is something fundamentally wrong and broken about that line of death to me. I’m not sure exactly why.

I’m still trying to figure it out.