Nails and Bones

            Hey there reader, how’s life been treating you? Well, I hope. Life’s tough sometimes, you know, and sometimes you can’t help but feel like you’ve just been making things harder on yourself. Sometimes you see yourself making things harder on yourself, you’re fully aware of it, and yet you go on doing it anyways. You feel like you’ll get the one-up on yourself that way, like you’ll beat everybody else to the punch by holding yourself back with both hands. Sometimes you can’t help but think of yourself as something like the man who decides he’s going to go for a walk and then promptly nails his hand to the wall. I met that guy, one day, and I asked him what made him do it. He gave me a look, his grey eyes like a pair of confused stormclouds, glistening rubies dripping to puddle at his feet, and you know what he said to me, reader?

            He told me—I nailed my hand to the wall because I like to imagine what it’s like outside. That way the real thing can never disappoint me.

            —But doesn’t it hurt?

            He laughed and smacked his free hand on the wall, and a rain of dust fell like desiccated snow all around him. —Of course it hurts, kiddo! You think I’d do it if it didn’t hurt?

            I left him standing there, whistling something it would have been overgenerous to call a song. Reader, I tell you I was profoundly disturbed by what I saw that day. I didn’t know what to make of that poor misguided man, too afraid of the door to let himself outside.

Care to step into the print gallery?

            Some time later I went back to that place, and found a pile of bones on the floor where a man used to be. He left his mark, though: an inch of metal, the blood-encrusted head of a nail driven deep into the wall. I walked away, shaking my head and whistling something it would have been overgenerous to call a song.

            I think we’ve all been that poor man from time to time in our lives, to varying degrees. Why do we do it? What ever drives us to get in our own way like that? And, more than anything, what does this have to do with reading and writing?

            Well, I’ll tell you, reader. I think it has a lot to do with the way that sometimes we forget how to use our minds… after all, there’s nobody else there in your skull with you to make sure you’re not developing some nasty little noetic habits, getting into all sorts of ruts, worrying about things instead of doing anything about them, or imagining what it would be like to do something instead of taking measures to accomplish it. This is a nasty little habit, and the worst thing is that it’s so hard to catch yourself doing it. You start thinking about tomorrow, and before you know it one thing leads to another and you see you’ve managed to make a mess of today. You start paying attention to the wrong things even for a moment, and after a few years you suddenly realize that you’ve almost forgotten all the things that were worth your attention. You start worrying about all your problems, and before you know it the very worst of your problems is the fact that you’ve turned your mind into a worry-producing machine. This is not pleasant.

            The good news is that it’s never too late to improve. The bad news is that it takes constant vigilance, it takes discipline, it takes a willingness to ask people for help… it takes, really, the opposite of everything that got you here in the first place. Maybe most difficult of all is the fact that it requires you to look yourself in the mirror and say, “You know what, I’m not all that bad. In fact, I’m an okay person. No, I’ll go so far as to say that I actually kind of like myself.” Now, that probably sounds like either the most natural thing in the world or like an impossible task, some Herculean labor… and therein lies much of the difference.

Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition but without
The illness should attend it.

            I’ve wanted to be a writer for a long time. But there is, as we’ve said, plenty of difference between wanting and doing, between wanting and being. I wasn’t particularly fond of myself, or my life, for quite a long time—several years. But always in the back of my mind I had this thought floating around, something like, “I don’t really have to worry about this. It’s okay that I hate my life. This isn’t the real me, after all. The real me is a writer!” And there was a kind of comfort in that… but it didn’t make things get any better. I was ashamed, really, of wanting to be a writer… that’s a fine thing to want to be when you’re a child, but we’re grownups here, we’ve got to choose nice boring professions that we can quietly hate for decades while we wait for a retirement that we can no longer enjoy when it finally arrives.

            And well I should have been ashamed! Wanting to be a writer is a horrible thing, it’s a nasty shadowy little half-existence. Being a writer, on the other hand, is a fine thing. It takes hard work, it takes courage, it takes determination and a lot of help from our friends. It takes the courage to make and stick with new habits, to put the best part of yourself on the line, to put the parts of yourself that you’re not so proud of on display, where people can accept or reject you as they like. So I keep on writing, and as I write today it gives me the courage to keep writing tomorrow. I hope you really are yourself, reader, or at least that you’ll find it in you to become who you really are. We’re all in this thing together, reader. For the duration. I hope you enjoy the ride, reader.