You Do Not Have to Be Good: A Permission Slip

When I think about myself a year ago, I think about the opening lines of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.

I wish I had committed this poem to memory, like the poems I memorized in graduate school that still swim in my head. My poetry teacher made us memorize two poems per semester and I only remember fragments. Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” which I could never get quite right, and Anne Sexton’s “Ringing the Bells” come to mind. I found kinship with these poets.

They were doing what I wanted to do: making art out of their lives.

If, a year ago, I had remembered Mary Oliver’s words, maybe I would’ve stood stronger, not walked on my knees, not crawled. Maybe I would not have let shame shatter me in a million pieces on the floor.

A year ago this week, I printed out ninety pages of a book I was writing, though book doesn’t seem like exactly the right word. It was a mess, and I knew it. I kept saying that what I was writing was the equivalent of cleaning out my closet. I was pulling everything out, writing it all down, in the hopes that I’d be able to sort through it all, decide what to keep, and toss the rest.

I wrote and wrote, not really keeping track of anything. When it became too unruly and I suspected I was repeating myself, circling the same stories, I decided it was time to print it out so I could see what I’d written.

I printed it, placed it in a box, and haven’t opened it since.

The method I was using was, most likely, the least organized and most insane way to write. But the book was supposed to be a memoir of my family life growing up, which was a curvy mixture of overlapping stories that couldn’t figure out in an outline. Plus, I didn’t know what I really wanted to say. So, I started piecing together what I would now call “raw material,” a flutter of memories with no rhyme or reason. Whatever came to me, I wrote down.

In graduate school, we didn’t talk about writing books. I never took a class called ‘How to Write a Book’ or ‘The Writing Life’ or ‘What You Should Do When You Graduate with a Creative Writing Degree.’ Any of those classes might have come in handy or at least given me a direction to go once I had my degree in hand.

Back then, writing a book wasn’t even on my radar. I wrote poetry, one poem at a time, without much direction until I finally decided on my thesis topic: poems reinventing the women of the Bible. A poem I wrote called “Noah’s Wife” became the springboard for the whole project. But I didn’t think about it as a book and we never talked about it as a book. It was a thesis, an assignment, a graduation requirement.

Writing books wasn’t at the forefront of conversation, but craft was. How to write better, how to read better, how to critique better—these were the things we focused on. I never learned how to write a memoir or a book of poetry. I never thought about how to create a larger work, one that people might read someday. I never considered what a writing life would look like. But I could write and writing was my art.

Not long after I graduated, the internet grew into an inexhaustible resource for writers with enough advice to make your head spin. The internet told me real writers write every day. It told me I needed to build an audience and treat writing like a job. It told me that hustle and productivity were what mattered. If you didn’t have the right mindset, you’re just a hobbyist and being a hobbyist was bad. Also, implicitly, writing a book was when you’d know you arrived.

It made me question everything I knew about writing.

Obviously, I was doing it all wrong.

So, when I decided last year to write something that I hoped might someday become a book, I went against my better judgment. Even deciding to write this particular book at this particular time was borne from a sense that I needed to do more and prove I belonged as a writer.

I did as I was told. I wrote every day. I set a timer and showed up to the page. I tracked how many words I wrote and how many minutes I spent writing. I gathered my raw material but wrote as fast as I could, trying to outrun these stories, never circling back to see where I was. Everything was word vomit. No attention to craft or process, no real thought given to what I was doing.

Instead of making art from my life, I was making a mess of things.

Then, when I printed the pages and could stow it all away out of sight, I had an out and I took it.

Why? Because I thought I had to be good. Because I thought I had to walk on my knees for a thousand miles. Because I couldn’t let myself love what I love.

Because I was doing it for some of the right reasons, but mostly for all the wrong ones.

The right reasons: I’m a writer. I needed a project to work on.

The wrong reasons: I felt burdened to write about something deeply personal that I was still sorting through. I felt like time was running out and I urgently needed to do something. I wanted to prove I was a real writer. I wanted someone (anyone) to see me. I was comparing myself to other people. I couldn’t figure out what else to do.

I printed out those pages, weighed the wrong reasons on the scale of my heart, and quit.

Then, shame swallowed me up and I spent the better part of this last year untangling the mess, trying to find my footing again.

In the last month or so, I’ve been slowly rereading The Art of Slow Writing. I read it two years ago and became an advocate of slow writing—in theory, anyway. I knew that writing is a process and that it takes time. That, like all art, it’s not to be rushed. I nodded along and tucked the book on my shelf. Then, I feasted on internet advice and watched a dozen people write books in three months or six months, quickly and arduously. It made me so envious I thought I’d give it a whirl.

When I picked Slow Writing back up last month, I read it with a pencil in hand and a notebook beside me. I underlined, took notes, and saw something I hadn’t before: What I went through last year, writing and laboring in a fog of uncertainty, was normal. Amassing a monstrous amount of raw material was normal. Feeling lonely and isolated and wanting to not just abandon the project but all hope of ever getting anywhere in my life, normal.

Real writers feel all that. And real writers are also willing to give time to the process of writing, not hustling and muscling through it, but treating it like an art form. That means trusting their instincts, taking their time, and doing it the way that’s right for them.

Finally, with humility and without judgment, I can see that year-ago self for who she was: a real writer doing the real work of writing. She got tangled up in a lot of bad advice and lost her way, that’s all.

There’s still time to make art out of her life.

Still, I wish I could tell her that her value in the world is not tied to this process, that she’s not a failure, that she doesn’t have to hide. I wish I could be the cheerleader she needed who told her to keep going. She needed more support and accountability. She needed to trust her intuition and trust the process.

Maybe she needed to get off the internet with its do-it-now-and-hustle mentality and trust her gut.

So, here’s the permission slip I’ll mail into the past:

You can listen to yourself and trust your instincts. You can write however it makes sense to you and create whatever your heart desires, whether it’s this story or something else. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees. You can take your art seriously and make something beautiful from your life. And you do not have to prove anything to anyone. You are a writer. Keep going.