Danger

When I was 21, I took a riverboat down a portion of the Yangtze river. The trip on the boat was beautiful and complicated and full of dichotomies, much like all of my time in China. I'd like to say that I remembered more of the trip, but the intervening years have swept away many of my clear memories. I'm left with a series of snapshot like moments that have a measure of unreality to them, as if they were simply vivid dreams. There are, of course, memories that stand out. They were, perhaps, the most emotional moments of my four months there, which is probably why I remember them with cinematic memory.

Getting lost in Beijing after my flight landed and miraculously finding the way to the hostel. Standing on the Great Wall. Walking through the Forbidden City. Seeing the clay soldiers at Xi'an. Hiking over a treacherous trail in Tiger Leaping Gorge and watching the sun rise over the Hu mountain range.These were all beautiful, terrifying, breath-catching moments during my four months in China.

Not all of the moments are quite so picturesque or pleasant. One day I woke up with a serious eye-infection at the top of Mount Emei-Shan (an infection, interestingly, that was only finally correctly diagnosed six months ago.) My best friend ran off from the middle of a city square and left me alone at 2:00 am to find my way home. Having to knee a fellow program participant in the stomach when he had backed me up against a wall and was drunkenly trying to stick his tongue down my throat. These moments stand out sharply as well.

By far one of my favorite nights occurred during a night that was neither worthy of a travel-writer or a feminist diatribe against male privilege. It was a night I spent sitting up against the bunks on the riverboat as it drifted down the Yangtze. Another participant and I decided that we were going to write our bucket lists together. We had a bottle of Irish whiskey that someone had sent me for my 21st birthday sitting on the floor between us and we were drinking and goofing around with the other people in the room between jotting down our life goals.

The guy had huge, impossible, Gatsby-esque dreams. Mine were simple by comparison. Work for a nonprofit, write poems that were worth reading, get a Ph.D., finish my honors thesis. Every time I brought one of these up, the man sitting across from me would shake his head. Finally, I wrote "Learn how to mush a team of sled-dogs." He sighed. "Kelly, this is your bucket list. Have things on it that are worth doing." He scribbled something on a sheet in his own journal, ripped it out, and handed it across to me.

"Run the Iditarod."

I eventually let him goad me into thinking bigger, into setting incredible, impossible goals for myself.

When I look at that list now, I am delighted and embarrassed by it. I'm not the sort of unapologetically grand person it takes to do those things. I don't even want to do some of them. What delights me is the fact that for a brief moment, in a boat drifting down the Yangtze, I thought I was.

***

I've been spending more time with my friends from college lately.  We spend a lot of time talking about politics and policy, law and nonprofits. The conversations are simultaneously stimulating and soothing. They make me hopeful that if the world isn't entirely screwed over by the time my generation gets a chance to run things, there's possibility for real change. These are people who are not disillusioned by the political process or hopeless about our fate. Our conversations are refreshing. They're fun and challenging, and I never leave one without considering running for office myself one day. It's hard to be together and not dream about the future, about what my life is going to be in five years, ten years, twenty-five years. 

As a direct result of these conversations, I'm beginning to think about going back to school. Not for a Ph.D., I'm through with academia for academia's sake and not right away. The novelty of being able to do what I want when I get off of work hasn't worn off and I don't think it will for another few years. I'm thinking about law school and eventually working for Legal Aid or a women's health organization. It sounds dopey, I know, but I believe that we can make the world a more peaceful, just place. Law school, at least at the moment, seems like an incredible way of doing just that.

***

I've been trying to declutter my house lately. As I've been sorting through boxes, I found the list I made on the Yangtze River. I also found a few more versions of the list written, as I've gotten older and my interests have changed. The Iditarod is no longer on the list, but visiting the LHC at CERN has made an appearance. But one thing stays consistent on all of the lists and it's not law school or a trip to Paris. It's writing. Writing a young adult trilogy, writing a book of poems, writing a comic book, writing a memoir. These things were on that first list, they've been on the lists that followed, and they're on the list I jotted down and have hanging in my workstation. Their appearance across the years isn't unexpected. I've wanted to be a fiction writer and a poet since I was in the fifth grade. It's what I fantisize about when I close my eyes at night. 

So why do I keep making these self-negating choices? If my desire is to be a fiction writer and a poet, why did I go to graduate school for theology? Why am I thinking about law school or a master's in public policy? Writing, telling stories, scratching poems out on a legal pad, these are the things I find fulfilling, not writing research papers and sitting in a library cramming for exams. Why do I find so many excuses to keep from writing? 

I've made compelling excuses for myself. As a professional grant-writer, I spend my days researching and writing for audiences that are more critical than my worst editors, and for higher stakes. At the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is write more. I'm just getting started in my career. Later, when I get settled, there will be time to write. I'm just going through a dry spell, I'll get to it eventually. Reading these books is actually research for what I want to write. 

None of that is true. Rather, those are challenges I face, but not a single one is the true reason I don't write. The real reason, I suspect, as something to do with the quote that opens this blog and a commencement address I heard recently by Neil Gaiman. In the commencement address where he admonishes all of us to "make good art" he also says: 

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Writing and sharing my writing is intimate and self-revelatory in a way that scares the shit out of me. When I write poems about science, they're my expression of love and awe for the universe. When I write about my mother's gardens, I'm thinking about how she's made me into the woman I am and wondering what it will be like when she's gone. When I describe the heroine of my novel, I'm imagining the girl I wanted to be when I was sixteen. The things I post are, for the most part, heavily edited. I can't stand the thought of putting my heart and mind on display for other people to read, to share, to criticize. That is the real reason why I hide behind advanced degrees and claims of exhaustion.

I'm sick of it. I don't want to keep writing things and editing them until the heart has been cut out because I'm afraid of sharing too much. I'm tired to making excuses not to write when finishing a piece is one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. It's possible that law school or a degree in public policy is in my future, but before I take the LSAT or look at the Humphrey School's website, I want to spend some time writing dangerously, walking down the street naked. I want to spend the next two years writing, without self-censoring "bad" ideas and without all the trepidation about sharing. I hope that at the end of two years, I discover that I have some talent, that I can share myself, that I can make good art.

Although, if that doesn't work out, there's always the Iditarod.