I Am a Words Person

One of the books I'm reading right now is Donald Miller's "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years."  Donald Miller's writing has played a pretty important role in my life: "Blue Like Jazz" was one of the three most important books I read in college.

At the end of part three, Don is telling the story about meeting a remarkable man who writes down all his memories.  He has, Don says, more than 500 pages of his own memories.  As I've written here before, memory is extremely important to me, and I was really struck by the idea of writing my memories down (alongside realizing, as I scrolled through pictures recently, that memory is one of the driving forces in what makes the facebook so popular).

Reading "A Million Miles" is pushing me towards something I've known for some time but been too afraid (and too lazy) to admit, even to myself: I think I want to be a writer.

My last semester at Yale I read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.  While the main themes of the story lean more towards dystopia, bioengineering and pharmaceutical corruption, one of the things that really stuck with me was when the protagonist is forced to go to a "low-level" university while his friend goes to the highest achieving school there is.  The reason they are split up?  Crake is a science and math genius.  The protagonist is a words person.

I am a words person.  I love to dwell on the resonance and symbolism of words and their meanings and their multiple meanings.  Even though I knew from the start that my preaching class in seminary was taught from the perspective of a preacher who sees himself as a poet (rather than a herald or a prophet, as described in Thomas Long's book) I didn't expect my own style to emerge poetic at all (I don't know what I did expect).  But when I think about my own style, I think of it as the poetic.

I wrote a lot of poetry in high school; you can find some of it out there on the internet without even trying very hard.  It's probably embarrassing.  But it captures my attempts at self-expression, my attempts to put emotion into words.  I won't say it was ever a precise attempt, because it certainly wasn't that at all; again, I'm not seeking to hide from my own laziness at any point in this confession post.  I couldn't even post here once a week during Lent!

This weekend at a TFA summit in Raleigh, I attended a breakout session on Social Entrepreneurship.  It was fantastic.  The presenters talked a lot about hard work.  They talked a lot about reflection.  They talked a lot about ideas.  They talked a lot about possibility, potential, creativity, and even a little bit about joy.  I love all those things (well, again, except maybe hard work).  Even more exciting, albeit daunting, was this: Christopher Gergen, when asked how he became a social entrepreneur and why, said that for most people, their 20s are all about purposeful exploration.  It's when you get to your 30s that you want to be building something.  I'm still in my 20s.  One of the things I know I want to purposefully explore in the next few years?

Being a writer.