What does it take to be sure? Do you have to build a religion around your choices? Cheryl Strayed strikes me as the kind of person who’s done that. She changed her name to “Strayed” after she cheated on her husband in the wake of her mother’s death. After my father died, I poured a beer on top of my head and announced to a room full of drunk Oakland hipsters that it didn’t matter what I did, nothing any of us did would ever matter, we’d all be dead some day and nothing about us would last[…]
All I did after my dad died was fly home and lie around my mother’s house, crying. When I was finally exhausted by all that crying, I started ripping out the ivy and the kudzu that had taken over my mother’s backyard. If I wrote a book like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, it would have to be about an epic battle against overgrown vines, waged day after day in the same scrappy backyard in Durham, North Carolina. Every page would just be me, sweating and swearing, covered in dirt and bugs. After four hours of this, I would stop and take a bath. Then I would sit and try to write about my father. I wanted to create something brilliant out of my sadness, but the words refused to come.
Vines, my book about mourning by pulling on ivy and kudzu all day, would never hit No. 1 on the best-seller list. Reese Witherspoon would never agree to star in the movie based on the book. Even if she did, no one would rave about how affecting it was to watch her yank on kudzu, covered in dirt and bugs.
It would be nice to be the kind of person who did things like hike thousands of miles instead of just digging furiously in the dirt […]
What does an unsure person have to offer this world? What does an angry, fearful person have to share? Do I need so many words? Should I be asking better questions?
I don’t know much. I think I need a lot of words sometimes, to figure out where regrets and insecurities might add up to some rough approximation of acceptance and hope. I need to work the numbers until they make sense. Some days I feel like an also-ran, a has-been, a never-was. Sometimes I don’t want to do anything but read good books. Sometimes I’m exhausted by the fact that I require a steady flow of exercise and green vegetables just to keep my fucking head off the floor.
And then a cloud floats in front of the sun, and a crow swoops by my window, and my dog curls in a ball and tucks her nose under her tail, and I know that all I can do is try. All I can do is choose to believe that a sloppy, uncertain person has something to offer someone out there.
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annaxmalina
2087
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