What I haven't told you

 

I told you how I started making art, when a surprise pregnancy, at the height of my business career, propelled me into an identity crisis and I went in search of who I really was. I worked through The Artists Way, discovered a love of art in my past and built a new identity around that. I hung that idea high and called it my North Star. The stories I told around that idea supported it. I talked of my love of art and how my wicked art teacher took that dream, stomped on it, and sent me fleeing into the business world. But that is not the whole story. I didn’t leave out parts of my story to lie, I just brushed past them to connect with my creativity.

I didn’t tell you about the literature classes I was taking in high school. Beloved teachers taught my literature classes and they opened the world of literary criticism for me. They most decidedly were not like my wicked art teacher, they supported and encouraged me.

I didn’t tell you there were always stacks of books piled up next to my art supplies.

I didn’t tell you I majored in Comparative Literature as an undergraduate or I spent four years reading and talking about books with the hope that I would end up teaching literature, work in publishing, or become a literary agent.

I didn’t tell you that I was too afraid to take the next step after getting my degree to pursue those dreams of entering the publishing world. I needed to go to New York City, and I was too afraid to go alone, to go to a city that had a high crime rate (I graduated college in the early 1990s when NYC was experiencing high amounts of crime). If I am honest, I was also afraid of poverty. It was expensive to live in New York. During college I worked in an office and was already making good money. I chose comfort over books. I became an accountant and, later, a business consultant.

I didn’t tell you that, a few years after graduating, I quit my high paying job to work in a bookstore with the hope that it would open the gateway to my bookish dreams. The shop laid me off after only a few months, partly because they didn’t need so much staff, partly because, I think, I was too enthusiastic and career-minded for the store manager’s tastes. Within a week of being fired from the bookstore, I was back in the office, making a good living. It was as if my foray into books never happened. (Well, I did end up meeting my husband during that little career detour, but that is a story for another day.)  

I didn’t tell you that I never stopped reading or analyzing what I read. I read a vast number of books every year and have belonged to many book clubs. If you want to talk about books with me, I will happily spend hours doing so.

I have certainly dropped hints over the years. Breadcrumbs that revealed my love of books include blog entries about what I am reading and stories about building my personal library. But I haven’t told you how these past few months of writing and reading have shifted something inside of me. I have reconnected with the wide-eyed, literature loving co-ed inside of me and she is beyond thrilled that I am exploring writing, embracing books, and publishing again. I think about offering editing services to self-published authors, drafting book reviews for magazines and newspapers, hosting online book clubs, and teaching online literature classes for people who didn’t get to take literature classes. I think about becoming an author. I am thinking about building a Little Free Library in my yard so I can become the librarian of my neighborhood. I feel like I am in vortex of possible literary ideas, with books swirling around me, and I just need to reach out and take one, open it and start reading.

So that’s what I haven’t told you. What haven’t you told me?