Tell me a story

I feel like I don’t have enough stories to tell. I have been happily spending a lot of time at the keyboard or with a pen in hand these past few weeks, and I am telling you. I don’t have enough stories to tell.
It has felt very positive, these exercises of writing muscle. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed since my graduation from college in December. Up to that point I had been glued to the computer chair typing furiously night after night. I was never without a feminist theory, literature, political science, sociology, or some other liberal artsy type subject to write about. Of course I wasn’t always passionate about my assignments. I sometimes resented the hell out of them. What I wasn’t always aware of, though, was how much I was truly benefiting from them. I wonder sometimes how many words I wrote throughout my long and sordid college career. I wish I had thought to keep track.

My difficulty lately has been introspection. My life is very routine at the moment. I get up, go to work, come home, wait for my lady to get home from work, watch something on TV, and hit the sack. Interspersed into each day are periods of reading, knitting, taking pictures, or tap-tapping away at the computer. I am accomplishing a lot of wonderful things, but I’m not experiencing as many things as I would like to.

Tonight as E headed out the door to traffic school, her punishment for a speeding ticket last month, I jokingly shouted “Make a memory!” Not surprisingly, she’s not at all thrilled about the four hours she’ll be spending learning the rules of the road tonight, but I bet she comes home with a story. There will be some creepy guy sitting in the back of the room, or a lady who keeps nodding off and trying to pretend its not happening. The instructor will make some ridiculous comment, or she will have to give some awkward explanation of how she ended up in the class.

She’ll have a story. I need stories.

I’ve been stewing about this all day, not wanting to write about knowing what to write about — how excruciating. While I was trying to inspire myself towards some sort of angle, I pulled down my old, beat up, pocket sized edition of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. I used to workshop my writing with this little book day after day. It has been years since I’ve looked at it. In the introduction, she writes:

“I went home with the resolve to write what I knew and to trust my own thoughts and feeling and to not look outside myself. I was not in school anymore: I could say what I wanted.”

That is such a simple resolution: Write what you know.  Somehow I feel like I even doubt what I know at this point. So much of my adult life has been about constant, churning transition that I have barely stopped to smell the roses. I do have history, though. It is a sometimes chaotic, sometimes heartbreaking, often  miraculous history.  I have known, and still do know, some remarkable characters. Sometimes I feel like so many things are happening in my life that I hesitate to catch up with old friends — I always have too many new things to explain.  Too many new decisions. I’m always a bit aflutter.

I will try, as Goldberg directs, to write what I know.  Just as my mother always told me that no one can argue with how I feel, they also cannot argue with what I truly know.  There’s a good foundation in that.  A good lesson. Maybe even a good story.