Gates of Lodore

A few years ago, my New Year’s resolution was just simply to hold the mantra, “You have to do things you’ve never done to receive things you’ve never received.”  I was growing frustrated with the way I kept assuming that a new job (in the exact same field, with the exact same responsibilities) and a new place to live could somehow fix the life I’d somewhat grown to despise. 

Maybe if I just do these same things somewhere else, it will feel better. 

To likely no one’s surprise, it never did. And so that year of the mantra resolution, every time I faced a decision, I tried to veer toward the thing I’d never done just to see what would happen. My life did not change overnight, but little by little I noticed that things were beginning to shift. This odd resolution is no small part of what led me to move into a camper full time in 2022, start a new job (albeit, still kind of the same job I’ve worked for the last six years at three different places), travel around the West, and ultimately plant some much-craved roots back in Colorado. 

Even after the new year, I held onto the mantra. I later found myself taking a Reiki course (because why not?), then a death doula certification course even though I had no idea if I was ever going to do something with these skills. All I knew was that if I took one more online class in “How to run Facebook ads,” or “ Marketing metrics for nonprofits,” I was going to chuck my computer into the nearest river, crawl into the woods, and never return. I was desperate to do things I’d never done.

Coming Home

Late September marked the 1-year anniversary of stepping back into Colorado after several years away and I knew the moment I laid eyes on the dusty Book Cliffs last fall that coming back was precisely what I was supposed to do. 

It’s as though I’d been carving a little groove for myself all those years into the sandstone and had finally slotted into it. I see now that this indentation, this tiny channel of structure, is necessary for my well-being and especially my creativity. 

One morning a few months ago, I woke up and realized it was time to put energy back into my creative life. I was secure, I had my groove, and I could take leaps without fear of rolling like a marble off the edge of the world. I put the intention out there, told the universe, or god, or the empty void that I was ready, and within a week, a few creative projects had more or less landed in my lap.

Specifically, I’d received a scholarship to attend a 5-day storytelling course on the Green River through Freeflow Institute. I had not produced a video story since grad school and I had never done a multi-day raft trip. But to receive things I’d never received, I had to do things I’d never done. The mantra held.

Somewhere, Utah

I had absolutely zero expectations for this trip because I didn’t have time to create expectations. My day job was bearing down on me with urgent regulations announcements expected from the Biden administration any day, I’d just started one night a week as a hospice volunteer (doing Reiki and death doula work, wouldn’t ya know?), I had a dozen tasks to finalize my Colorado residency (including multiple trips to the DMV), and I was maxing out the mental load that I could carry. All I could mentally manage for this trip was to show up where Freeflow told me to show up and bring what they told me to bring. 

Which is how I found myself pulling into a desolate stretch of BLM land at 11pm on a Thursday on the outskirts of Vernal, Utah. This is where the Freeflow team told me I could camp before our check-in the following afternoon. The car thermometer read 90 degrees as lightning shot across the night sky. The GPS had more or less crapped out, confused that I was basically driving through a field and so I pulled the car off a sandy dirt road and sprawled on my sleeping pad in the back of the jeep. I stripped down to my underwear, and went to sleep sweating.

The next morning I worked frantically for a couple of hours from the public library before heading out on a run to explore some local petroglyphs before our pre-river meeting. I ended up talking with an older woman on the trail who was very interested in my upcoming trip.

“Where are you putting in?” she asked. 

“Oh, um. I’m not sure.” I said.

“And where do you end?” 

“Uh, I don’t know that either.”

She asked a few more questions that I couldn’t answer then paused before saying, “You don’t know much about this trip at all, do you?”

“No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.”

But that afternoon I showed up where I was told to show up and by the following morning I was on the river, location and whereabouts be damned. 

Despite barely knowing the instructor of the course (the wonderful Ed Roberson, host of the Mountain and Prairie podcast) or the other students, or having any idea about our raft guides, the next five days would prove to be some of the funniest, dreamiest, and most inspiring days I’d had in a very, very long time.

Part of the reason I didn’t bother with the labor of expectations was simply because I’ve done a handful of these creative, storytelling courses in the past and they all tend to follow a general structure and theme. I’ve always enjoyed them greatly, so I wasn’t particularly worried. I’m also well-versed in sleeping outdoors and being dirty, cold, and tired for days at a time and so assumed there wasn’t much that could surprise me.

My only expectation was to utilize this course to get myself back on track to take my creative life more seriously.

Becoming Un-Serious

For the last, I dunno, 30 years, I’ve felt I must be serious to succeed in life (my mom has told me that even upon meeting me as a BABY adults described me as “intense.” Just picture that. An intense baby.). And when it comes to writing and telling stories, nothing seemed more serious to me. Steeped in a culture of Kafka-esque people who said things like, “Kafka-esque,” I couldn’t shake the feeling that art was no laughing matter. 

But within several hours of launching down the river, it was clear that something about this course was different. I was laughing. We were all laughing. By day three my stomach muscles ached from giggling so hard and my cheeks were sore. We talked about serious things like water rights and dams and conservation and climate change and social activism and STILL found ourselves howling around the campfire.

By day five as we wrapped our final session, I wondered if perhaps my problem with creativity wasn’t that I didn’t take it seriously enough, but that I took it too seriously. That I refused to put anything out into the world if it wasn’t absolutely perfect and utterly emotionally moving, which meant I rarely produced anything at all.

Upon arriving home from the trip, I came back to one of my favorite snippets from Ira Glass (a clip I watched over and over again in grad school, ironically never quite understanding the point) finally seeing what he was getting at. He says this:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

Hearing this again roughly eight years later hit me like a wave. I am acutely aware that what I’m making is kind of a disappointment to me. So I become obsessive over every single essay. I rework them for months, years sometimes, producing absolutely nothing else in the meantime. 

Publishing an essay once a year, once I find it perfect, I believe is actually a form of quitting. I thankfully never gave up altogether, but I’ve never had the guts to do what Ira follows with:

…the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

Notice that he doesn’t say every week you’re going to work on one story. He says you’re going finish one story. 

It’s the finishing I’ve always been afraid of. If I say I’m not finished with something, then maybe it can’t be criticized, you know? Oh, you think what I made is bad? Well, I’m actually not finished with it yet.

What a load of bullshit I got so good at telling myself.

I came out of this 5-day course wondering, What if I just commit to finishing something regularly and stop obsessing over writing perfect, lyrical essays that Milkweed will surely want to publish into a gorgeous collection, then nominate me for a Pulitzer?

It’s a practice I’ve wanted to take on for a long, long time. So here I am, taking on Ira Glass’ suggestions in real time.