The Room Where I Had to Show Up

I've been writing for three years. Not for school, not for anyone who was grading it, just for this blog, and for a private document I open late at night and add lines to and then close before I can second-guess them. I know how sentences feel when they aren't working. I know what it's like to delete a paragraph that took forty-five minutes and feel nothing but relief. I thought that counted for something.

I walked into that classroom today and immediately understood that it counts for exactly nothing, and also for everything, and I wasn't sure which one was scarier. The desks were arranged in a horseshoe, which I was not emotionally prepared for, because a circle means everyone can see you, and I picked a spot in the middle because the back felt too obvious and the front felt too eager and the middle felt like I was trying to hide in plain sight, which is pretty much my general strategy for everything. The instructor walked in and said the first thing we were going to do was write something true. Not something good. Something true. And I looked down at my blank first page and thought: I have been writing things true for three years and I have never once had to read them out loud to strangers.

the first page of the notebook. always the hardest.

I wrote something. I don't know if it was true in the way she meant, or true in the way I usually mean, which are probably different things and that difference is probably the entire point of the class. The girl next to me had a really nice pen. The instructor has this way of pausing after someone reads that makes you feel like the silence itself is thinking. I took notes on that.

Afterward I stood outside for a minute before I walked to my car.

walked out into the afternoon like I'd done something brave. still not sure I had.

I had registered for this course in a kind of panicked impulsive browser-closing way, and I'd mentioned it on the blog in the smallest possible font, 'one of which I basically cannot explain', and I'd spent the whole summer treating it like something that might not actually arrive. But it arrived. I sat in the room. I wrote something on the first page. I don't have a clean conclusion for what that means yet, so I'll just leave it here: I showed up, and that part, at least, I'm sure of.