I haven’t written in quite a while. Life has been hectic and the time to sit down and formulate complete thoughts into digestible sentences has been scarce. I’ve also lost a bit of confidence, either through unexpected critique or my own repeated insecurities. Writers, as creatives, often feel a moral obligation to be vulnerable, because that is what they would expect from others. Vulnerability, however, is rarely received without its skepticism, misunderstanding, or undue justification.
It has been an interesting lesson to learn - that even in circles where we are told to be vulnerable, to bare our hearts with compassion and to be merciful toward one another as Christ was merciful to us, we’re often not only afraid of vulnerability, but downright enraged by it. I’ve had to come to terms with my own rage at my vulnerability, and my own misled expectations that others will not only value that vulnerability but share it.
Earlier this year I took a writing course through Oxford university. Their online resources have loads of classes and I would encourage anyone to browse through them. They have courses on all sorts of interests. I took a Writing Lives Course. It is designed to help people write more clearly and thoughtfully about their own experiences. It was a wonderful ten weeks of writing, learning, editing, and receiving feedback from my peers and instructor. It not only motivated me to keep writing, it confirmed what I have long believed about writing - others do value vulnerability and reading real life stories convicts us to engage more and more with compassion and mercy in this corporeal world.
I would like to be more disciplined about writing. I have a few ideas mulling around, a few paragraphs roughly written that I hope to share soon. I would like to write more about health, mental and physical, about home, about being a TCK myself and now being mother to one.
There is so much more to write about and I would like to resign the part of myself that is timid, overly cautious, and overly aware of others’ critique or opinions. Instead, I would like to embrace a bit of truth that I’ve learned this year.
I have been uniquely made, distinctly created, and the words I have to share don’t come from a void, but perhaps from a unique Creator. If my stories of being a TCK, or struggling with health issues, or feeling out of place, can reach and encourage simply one other person, if my small and inadequate reflections on God can point one other person to prayer in their moments of darkness or confusion, it will make the writing worthwhile. It will make the stripping down of pretence and self satisfaction to simple truth and exposition all the more meaningful.
More is coming - so if you enjoy reading what I write please keep coming back to this site. For now, here is a piece I wrote for the writing course mentioned above.
One of my peers told me it was his favourite piece from the entire course. I was delighted with his comment and also deeply humbled. He has already written his full memoir about growing up during the Troubles and the thought that my few words on loneliness could speak to him was astonishing and reassuring.
Assignment 10
Loneliness. The pesky ever present accompaniment to loss and change. At times I hardly feel it. And then there’s that persistent question, bringing loneliness to the surface over and over again.
‘Where are you from? Where did you grow up?’
‘Angola.’
‘Oh, where’s that?’
‘It’s a country in Sub-Saharan Africa.’
‘Ohhh - wow! What was it like?’
I struggle to piece together words that validate a much loved home against a conflicted landscape.
‘It was… different. I grew up around a civil war and the long lasting effects of that war. We didn’t have a lot of electricity. We didn’t have Internet at first. I heard gunshots a lot. I also saw a lot of beauty, and —‘
‘Wow! Sounds like a fun adventure.’ People always say that after I bring up the war. I wonder if they know what war looks like. ‘Bet you’re glad to be back in America!’
Back? I’ve barely lived here. They’ve misunderstood.
‘Angola is my home.’
‘Well… it’s not really is it? You’re American.’
The loneliness settles back in, loneliness not from being alone but unknown.
I knew Angola as home. When we left, pieces of me ripped off, clung to the land, to the war, to the loss and the guilt and the sorrow that was never mine. I was an outsider and begged to be let in. Now, many years and countries later, I stay on the outside. I’ve left too many times. I know loneliness too well.
This loneliness is born and fed when I remember the pieces of me packed away in various basements and attic spaces - my childhood books stretched between the Atlantic Ocean, my school memorabilia reduced to one box in Mississippi, my flat in Cambridge with hidden bits of an old, unreachable life I cling to because it helps me feel whole.
I keep Portuguese books with hopes my child will know the language I love. I have Scottish artwork and Oor Wullie on the shelves because I must not forget the first home. I make Texas style fajhitas because I want to belong to my grandparents. I find myself exhausted at playing a cultural kaleidoscope - never knowing which one really fits me because they are all a part of me while I barely belong to them.
This is a loneliness born out of too much change. Too many pieces of myself scattered across an ever changing world. I am an expat where I call home and a foreigner where I was born.
There are memories I will never know how to share, places I can never revisit, and points in time that seem to belong to a different person altogether. My life is full and lovely, and still, I find I’m carrying these identities and this grief all on my own and that, in itself, is quite lonely.