old words

Finding Old Words

Tracy and I are cleaning out our basement.

I was going through a box and found a whole bunch of stuff from graduate school - my course evaluations, class reading lists, student and faculty rosters, and stacks of my own writing.

Holding this heavy pile of paper in my hands, I truly understood how much time had passed. They were like historical documents.

Standing there in my basement, surrounded by holiday decorations and empty mason jars, I started to read - words that that I had once typed and printed out - and felt like I was reading someone else’s work.

Was this voice my voice?

It was a thrilling discovery.

The two years I spent in graduate school were not happy days for me personally, but they were the best years I’d ever spent academically.

Graduate school was the first time in my life when I felt that I was in a program, on a campus, in an academic environment that was a good fit for me.

Those two years grew me, nourished me, fed me as a writer.

Currently, I’m immersed in non-fiction writing, but the box of words I discovered was fiction - early drafts of my thesis, which was a young adult novel, and earnest short stories.

I didn’t feel any sort of nostalgic sadness or bitterness about not having become a full-time published novelist, as I had imagined I would. As I shifted through the papers, I felt alive.

I didn’t feel the ache of failure that sometimes shows up when the past comes knocking.

I felt excited and intrigued, as if I’d re-opened a doorway that I’d forgotten about and re-discovered a whole wing of my interior life that had been closed down.

Cleaning out our basement - I mean really cleaning it out, mercilessly - is going to change our lives. It’s already shifting the energy of our home and changing how we feel in our bodies.

Cleaning out the basement will lead to cleaning out the rest of the house, finally putting to rest what needs to be put to rest, letting go of everything that’s pinning us down, making space for energy to flow.

It’s not a metaphor.

These stories I found shouldn’t be living in a box in the basement. I’m bringing them back up, into my studio space. I’m making room for them.

They might have work to do yet. They just might have something to say.

Because it’s never too late to be who you came here to be.

It’s never too late to resurrect a creative project.

It’s never too late to become fully alive.