Taking Up the Pen, Again

This past Christmas, I received one of the most precious, and most challenging, gifts ever. My younger sister Tori is 13 years my junior and she’s just finishing college this year. When she was in high school, Tori interned for me as a social media intern, and for years hence I encouraged her to pursue a career in brand or PR because I saw in her a knack for communications and marketing. It took Tori a while to come around to this type of study, but she eventually did and in May she’ll be graduating with a degree from UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Over Christmas last month, she decided to return the favor by giving me a stack of blank moleskine notebooks and a challenge ‘to write.’ Tori saw in me something I saw in her: a knack and an unfulfilled calling.

And so here I am, writing for the very first time in a public forum in-I daresay-about a year. It’s been one of my longest periods of life without writing. I was the girl who always had a journal near-at-hand, and who blogged throughout much of her twenties about everything from film to storytelling to her favorite non-fiction authors. Yet, for some reason or another, this past year I stopped writing and somehow along the way I lost my voice and my sense of day-to-day passion.

This post, the first of many I hope, is a challenge to myself to make writing a regular practice. And it’s a challenge to you, readers, to not give up on a dream or a calling when things get hard or life takes an unexpected turn. You see, readers, last year was a big year of change for me: it was my first year of marriage, it was my first time setting aside a professional venture to prioritize family, and by gosh it was also my first ever journey through a pandemic. I know it was a wild year for you, too.

Life twists and turns but we can’t lose that thread of story that was written into us from the day we were knit together in our mother’s womb. We must keep writing. When we lose the plot, we must strive to find it again, even if it means stepping back and stopping mid stride, and even if it requires a great deal of work.

We must keep writing. When we lose the plot, we must strive to find it again, even if it means stepping back and stopping mid stride.

As I write this post, i’m reminded of a powerful scene from the film ‘Where’d You Go Bernadette?’ where the main character Bernadette Fox is lamenting to an old professor over coffee about some of her career failures and the fact that she feels stuck. Says Bernadette, “it’s like failure has got its teeth in me and it won’t stop shaking.” Up to this point, the viewer has seen this shaking firsthand in Bernadette’s overall disposition and day-to-day mini catastrophes. Meanwhile at this pivotal moment, Bernadette’s professor courageously stops her mid-rant and challenges her by saying: “People like you must create. That’s what you were brought into this world to do Bernadette. If you don’t, you become a menace to society.”

How true that is for many of us, really. The fact is that many of us have a part of us that’s like Bernadette Fox. Bernadette spends a lot of the film hiding from her story, and living in a version of life that’s much smaller than the one she was made for. It takes tremendous strength and resolve to do the work that’s required to live into one’s story well, to keep writing and not put down the pen. And it requires a sort of gentle honesty, too: a willingness to accept our failures at the end of a day, and start anew the next not knowing just where we’ll land. Yet we see in Bernadette’s story a turning point: a decision to pursue adventure anew and give herself permission to step again into the unknown. That is the act of creation, and it’s the sort of thing we were made for.

What will you create with me this year?

As I take up my ‘pen’ yet again to create, pages still wet with virtual ink, my question to you is this: what’s the story you’ve been hiding from lately and where do you need to take up the call to adventure yet again? In a year like 2021, the year 2020 plus one, we need big stories-we need new beginnings, we desperately need to create. What will you create with me this year, as I begin writing anew and together we turn a collective page in history?