I left something behind.

When I was in Missouri last month, I left my laptop cord behind. 

I was teaching undergrads at Truman State University in Kirksville. I had a great week; the kids were avid, the constant howling of the wind and sheets of ice were novel, and a couple of alums made sure that the small town showed me a good time. 

On my last day in class, I packed up in haste while handing out my business card and having a dozen conversations. I somehow left my laptop cord in the classroom. You know how it is when you lose track of something small yet terribly consequential? I knew the minute I got home that I had screwed myself over. I worked around it. 

I worked around a lot of things on that trip. I've told you in these letters before that I'm afraid of flying. I do it anyway, because I want the glory and adventure and joyful reunions that traveling brings. But every time I get on a plane, I face down my own most difficult anxieties. Leaving Kirksville saw me on a twin-engine Cessna to St. Louis. Not a smooth commercial jet, but a tin tomato can containing myself and a pilot, airborne above the Heartland. I took one look at that plane and everything inside me said NO. I'm never getting to St. Louis. I'll walk home.

I faced the fear. I left it behind. 
The Truman gig was a big step for me. I love teaching creative writing, but the question of whether I'm qualified to do it always dogs my heels. I have no MFA, no PhD, though a lot of my friends have done this work. I've seen them struggle through it, persevere, change dramatically through the course of their studies. I've seen their obscene tuition bills and their stacks of undergrad essays to grade. I always ask myself when planning a lesson or a lecture, what would one of my brilliant friends do? How would they handle this? How have they been prepared to do this work in a way that I haven't, and what can I take from the example they set in how they think and how they break those thoughts down for someone else to follow? 

My most well-educated friends are often also my kindest. They reassure me, time and time again, that I lack nothing that's required to do this job. After all: writers write, and most writers can explain how they did it. They remind me that publication is as good as those letters that follow their names atop their CVs, and that creative writing students typically respect the former more than the latter. My friends are good people, and it's their voices I return to when I feel like an impostor standing in some pretty big shoes. 

So when I lectured at Truman and the kids took notes, when my name was on the door of my office, when someone turned in a paper addressed to "Prof. Elison," I breathed through that certainty that the fraud police were just outside the door. I entertained the notion that I'm a fake and I have no business teaching a college class. I took every argument I have tried and failed to throw at my brilliant friends who encourage me to fearlessly be myself, and I left them all behind. 

This spring, I'm grappling with more changes. My series is ending and my next book is a new thing, a new genre, and a new voice for me. I'm reaching the point in my career that Neil Gaiman described in his "Make Good Art" speech, wherein he likens making art to sending out messages in bottles, knowing that you will probably never hear anything back. I'm getting a lot of bottles back these days. I'm finding myself unable to say yes to everything, even things I'd really like to do.

I am sometimes immobilized by the idea that if I ever say no to an opportunity, the magic that suffuses my life will break, and because I refuse anything I will lose everything. It's a superstition. It's born out of a lifetime of scarcity. It's left over from a life that isn't even mine anymore. 

And I'm leaving it behind. 

This past February marked the end of winter for me, and not just because I got out of the ice rink of the Midwest and returned to the foggy beginning of a San Francisco spring. As the year's shortest month came to a close, I made some big decisions about my life and my career. I watched the cherry blossoms start to open as I planned for one hell of a fruit harvest this summer. I gathered up the last of my shed winter skin: my insecurity and my insufficiency and the fear that always tries to keep me small. 

And wouldn't you know it... in my haste to pack up, I left it behind. 

I hope you're lightening your load, too. Here's to spring. 

Barking with the dogwoods, 

Meg