Now I Have Proof

"Why don't you write anymore?" At last, a clear answer to the question.

White Sands National Monument, New Mexico, February 11, 2024. The vastness of this beautiful place perfectly matched my feelings of vulnerability. Amazing.

Oh, hello. It’s me. Sporadic Stacy. Popping in once a year, maybe twice, to share some thoughts.

I don’t write much, I know. I’m not sure I have ever fully given myself permission to think of myself as “a writer.” To my core, I’m an editor. I am more comfortable standing just outside, helping people see their words and thoughts, to approach them again with precision and intention. To help them double-click on a half-expressed notion, to catch themselves in a leap of logic that begs questions, to craft their message so more people can be let in to their experience.

Creating understanding is, to me, the greatest result I can achieve, and that starts with helping the writer understand themselves, whether they are a journalist stacking facts or an essayist weaving personal tales.

My dear friend, Margit, knows my editing intimately, my having done it for her company, for her website/community conversation TueNight, and for her own writing. And she once said to me, “You edit from a really deep place.” Which is possibly my my most favorite compliment ever.

I see you.

That’s what my editing is. I see you, the writer, and I see you, the readers. I want us all to feel known, and to succeed at the life’s work of knowing ourselves better. My theory is that we succeed as humans when we can tolerate being known, deeply known, and experience that vulnerability as safety — and then extend that grace to as many other people as we possibly can.

But I digress from me and my writing, which is what I came here to write about.

Insert self-effacing chuckle.

So, yes, me and my writing, or my not writing, specifically.

I came here today, moved to write for the first time in many, many months. Why?

Turns out there are two specific reasons, which are quite clear — even if they are somewhat in opposition.

First, the easy one to offer up:

I came here to write because I am experiencing great vulnerability, after many, many months of something that felt like peace.

Peace meant I wasn’t solving, wasn’t hurting, wasn’t trying to lay a bunch of tangled existential inquiries smooth into a straight line I could understand. I had the great joy of daily small problems, a few overarching forever problems (like having any money at all for “retirement”), and a whole lot of contentment and internal quiet.

This bears repeating: A whole lot of contentment and internal quiet.

Whoa. I did it. I got there, y’all! All of you kind, lovely people who have been reading my work for decades know that I’ve been on a couple of different intertwined hell rides of loss and more loss — and I wrote through all of those. (And started Filling In the Blanks as a place to write about how we recover and learn from loss.)

But it’s slightly disorienting to learn that my life of writing was tied to a life of living, struggling, suffering, being, becoming.

The reason for my new vulnerability is the same old reason: economic insecurity, being unemployed, being a few more years older and looking for work, again. Being at a low cash ebb because of my son’s college expenses, and having made decisions based on the bonus I was sure I was receiving on February 15.

Except, by February 15, my company was effectively gone. Poof! Entangled in complex legal proceedings that essentially stopped operations. (I’ll speak more about that in a future post, because it is a very large can of worms.) But the point is, it was completely unexpected, out-of-the blue, and there was no warning, no severance, no vacation pay, no nothing. Not even clarity that we were officially “severed.”

*exhale*

(Is it perverse that I enjoy the fact that I can’t just lose my job in a regular old layoff or something? That it has to be some extreme, arcane experience? It just seems… fitting somehow.)

The second reason I haven’t been writing, aside from not feeling vulnerable and lost, is that the need to broadcast and be visible has been quieted in me. I am still absolutely certain that I am overflowing with great advice, whether on what to put in your garden or how to improve your brand visibility. Catch me in person and good luck getting me to stop telling you all great things you should be seeing, doing, reading, knowing, being.

But where I used to believe that being in the “conversation” had merits, now I’m not sure. I know when I was very visible online, I was single (so, externally focused more so than I am now), and in a job in the public eye. At that time, I felt like we, collectively, were helping shape an honest conversation about the pleasures and perils of being a woman managing when, how, and whether to become a wife, mother, Boss Lady in our convoluted, unforgiving, patriarchal culture.

But things feel pretty shouty and performative these days. Less earnest. More divided.

And I think: what do I have to offer in this? Does my megaphone just create more cacophony versus adding to self-understanding?

I didn’t know how to answer that question. And so I didn’t write.

But here I am, again. With questions, still.

So maybe I’m not writer, per se. More a seeker, a wonderer, a wanderer. I trust that habit of kind of drifting about, and how life points you toward questions.

And so when I feel the urge to write, I shall, instead of thinking about whether I should. Writing and inviting you to share in my uncertainties, which have always been my calling card. ❤️