This year for Christmas I asked for An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo, Poet Laureate of the United States. I’m an avid reader and a proud lit. major, but I’ve never asked for a book of poetry in my life. 

If I could take you back in time, I’d drop you into a college classroom in the basement of a cold building in Springfield, Missouri. You’d see a 19-year-old version of myself yawning and rolling my eyes as we discussed Yeats or Plath or Frost. I hated poetry. I loathed it. I often skimmed or skipped my poetry reading assignments, and let my thoughts float away during those long-winded discussions.

Now let me drop you into my life a year or so later. This time you’d find a 20-year-old version of myself sitting in a poetry writing class. I'd be at a tiny desk in a second-story classroom, with a small window in the corner and a big whiteboard at the front. 

Shocked that I ended up there? I know. Me too.

But my degree plan required me to take one creative writing class and so I chose poetry as the least painful option. I lacked the confidence to write anything longer than that, and I thought perhaps I had enough smarts to write a few lines of verse and get it over with.

I didn’t flunk out of the class or fall madly in love with the genre. I also didn’t discover myself as a writer or even come coasting out with a solid B. What I actually did was become stifled for the next 15 years or so, because the professor hated my work so much that he held it up (literally, on an overhead projector) as a model of what NOT to do. Every other week, which is how often we had to turn in a poem for his review. 

People tell me now that maybe he saw something in my writing. That maybe he was envious or otherwise intimidated, as he’d published a lot of his own work (most of it dark and depressing) and that perhaps I was able to write what he couldn’t. Of course I can’t say if that’s true or not, especially since those poems are stored on floppy drives and are inaccessible without some major effort. But it’s nice to think about it that way on my really bad days.

I went on from that class and I never wrote anything until my late twenties outside of some sparse journaling and some tear-filled personal blogging. It wasn’t until I approached my thirties that I began to realize my violent emotional scribbles were actually birthing a writer. And from there I discovered that I’d actually written some poetry along the way. In fact, I’d even written a rhyming poem called "I Don’t Write Poetry." 

How had this not registered in my brain? 

I think it’s interesting how sometimes the things we’re most repelled by are actually the things that are truly “ours” once we get past the wall of fear. I started to realize I was a sleepwalking poet only a few years ago. I called myself a sleepwalker because I’d written poetry without seeing it or knowing it was happening, and it wasn’t until I’d flipped through my scribbles a year or five later that I’d noticed patches of words emerging from the page and forming verse.

So these days I have a new thought about my college experiences: that maybe I actually took the poetry writing class because it was part of my DNA, not because it was the easiest way through. And maybe I actually ran away from Wordsworth and Keats because I was deeply afraid of my own abilities (or lack thereof). 

I think as we try to figure out what we’re here to do, we can sometimes find clues in those things that we turn away from or avoid - especially if they keep popping into our lives from around this corner or the other. For me, my "thing" kept resurfacing in my writing without my even being aware of it.

​Do you have anything like that happening in your life?

I’ve also learned that when we claim to hate something, it’s often because we’re afraid of it. We’re afraid of its affect on us or we’re afraid of its latent power. We’re afraid that maybe the “thing” will be our undoing or conversely that the “thing” will be a rocket that launches us onward to success. And then we recoil because of the intensity of what that might be like.

Last night I was flipping through a special black notebook that I keep in my nightstand to jot down my creative ideas. It contains some of my most important musings from the last four years, and it turns out that in 2016 I wrote a helluva lot of poetry (that I didn't particularly notice at the time). And you know what? Some of it was crap. But some of it was really good - maybe even profound. 

The other part of this story is that my first-ever publication credit ended up being a poem that was selected for inclusion in a literary anthology in 2017. I sent just one poetry submission to one publication, and it was selected from the masses. Easy as that, apparently. What was I so afraid of? 

The lesson in all of this is to invite the "thing" into your life that you find yourself running away from. Invite it in like I invited in An American Sunrise, which arrived wrapped in paper and ribbons on Christmas Day. You may discover what it truly means for your life once you stop and take a hard look.
------
My first book, Halfway There: Lessons at Midlife, will be published in spring 2020. To be notified when it is available for purchase, sign up for my mailing list.

Have you ever sat around and pondered what you might like your second act to be? 

Maybe you’ve never even thought about it beyond a dream because you feel constrained by the life chapter you’re in. Maybe you feel too old or too beaten. Maybe you lack the courage, or maybe you can’t even admit to that yet.

But who says you can’t rewrite your own book? Become your own hero? Change your life story?

I think often about what I want my second act to be, actually. I recently turned 39 and I’ll tell you what happened when I did. I was laying alone under my fluffy down comforter with my back propped up against the headboard, as I always do because my husband is a night owl. The clock on my phone had just hit midnight and so the date had flipped to November 10. 

And as all of this happened, I decided to text my husband to tell him that I was officially a year older (I know, I know…but he goes upstairs to unwind at night and it’s just too hard to hear each other). I wrote my text and hit send, and then I just stared at the phone for a bit. Or maybe at the comforter? I don’t remember because I was really staring through whatever physical form was in my gaze. 

This was all broken by the sound of his feet on the stairs and his squishy house shoes moving across the living room floor. He’d come down to wish me a happy birthday and to give me a hug, and I looked at him with one of those brave, fake smiles. And then I cried. 

Not a disgusting, loud cry but more of a whimper with a quiet tear. And then it changed into a timid sob that I tried to beat down lest it turn into an all out bawl. “I don’t know why I’m crying,” I’d said to him with my face pressed into his chest, “except that I’m getting older and time is passing and I don’t want it to run out.” 

Or something like that. It was late and my memories get jumbled these days when I’m up late.

I have a second act in mind that I hope I achieve before my days run out, but I’ve been reading a lot lately about how to stay present and find contentment right where I am. I'm realizing that anything I dream about for the future or am haunted by from the past are all constructs. They’re all things that I hope will happen but that don’t exist, or things that happened before but are over now. What's real is what's happening right at this very second, and that's where my focus should be most of the time.

And this is sort of how I’m approaching the whole idea of having a second act. It might eventually exist and I can strive to make that happen, but I don’t need to pine for it or bemoan my present circumstances such that I can’t ever be happy in the “now” because I’m not yet where I want to be. Think of how much life you waste on negative feelings about a future that hasn't even been written (or a past that's long gone), while not being fully present in what is actually your life.

I think that one of the keys to a successful second act lies in thinking about it from the perspective of how you can contribute to the world. It's not about bettering your own existence, although that should be a natural byproduct of getting onto the right path, but it's about what you can do with your talents and vision to help make the world better. It's the reason you came here at all.

And then once you figure that part out, you should work diligently toward that dream if you didn’t get it right the first (or fifth) time around. This requires putting a strong intention out there, working hard, and waiting to see how life unfolds. This is also where it's important to listen to your gut as you make decisions.

These days I go through this process by first asking the universe for help in attaining my dreams. I put them out there on a regular basis, making sure my asks are for a greater good and not for my own personal gain (financial or otherwise), and then I continue making small efforts toward achieving those goals. 

​In between all of that I take time to get quiet. I watch. I observe. I listen for direction and stay alert for feelings in my gut. I pay attention to doors that open, or to people who show up, or to situations that occur. I look for ways to use each experience to work toward the dreams that I have.

​I also try to make peace with whatever happens to be my present story, because I know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be even when some days feel like utter catastrophe. 

Life provides us with clues to our purpose and quiet guidance for our lives every single day. We just have to learn how to listen with our hearts and spirits instead of with our ears and minds. I’ve only recently learned how to do that, and my life trajectory is starting to change. That second act is finally on the horizon and I think I'll get there soon.

​Are you ready to find yours?
------
My first book, Halfway There: Lessons at Midlife, will be published in spring 2020. To be notified when it is available for purchase, sign up for my mailing list.