Chapter Text
When I was eight years old I decided to become an actor. I did competitive theater, and my junior year of high school I did a monologue from White People, by J. T. Rogers. I played Mara Lynn.
I hated Mara Lynn, because Mara Lynn hated everyone. She hated Indians and Mexicans and the Chinese and she especially hated her son, and her husband, and herself. I performed that monologue for eleven months. I was with Mara Lynn, inside her, I was her, for eleven months.
From James Baldwin’s essay, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare:”
The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. […] And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer — to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not — I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.
That is why he is called a poet. (Maker) And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people — all people! — who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.
I started to win competitions when I started to love Mara Lynn as much as I hated her.
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” This is also from Ender’s Game. Orson Scott Card is one of the most infamous homophobic writers in modern science fiction. I think about that sometimes, about how the person who defined empathy for me in my childhood would spit on me if he knew who I am, what I am.
The reason I am able to believe that God loves me is that I know, even if I do not understand, that He made me. I understand how impossible it is to truly and completely hate something you make.
***
I read a lot of Isaiah, and a lot of the Epistles. Mostly I read Ecclesiastes over and over and over.
Chapter 2, verses 24-25: “A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?”
Chapter 3, verses 12-13: “I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.”
Chapter 5, verse 18: “This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot.”
Chapter 8, verse 15: “So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.”
Chapter 9, verse 7: “Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do.”
Something that amuses me: This particular book has a reputation for being depressing.
I have been reading Ecclesiastes for five years, and I am not ready to move on.
***
I love editing. I have been writing this essay for a year now, and it is horrible, but it is also a joy. I re-read every month or so and tinker, swap out words and re-organize sentences and re-order paragraphs. I love words. All I have ever wanted are words, words, words.
Someone asked me once how I know when a story is done. I know it is done when I have nothing more to say. That does not mean I am done working on it, only done writing it. There is a difference.
One more draft. Always one more draft. I want my stories to be perfect.
I am not afraid to re-make and re-make and re-make but I am afraid that I will never be able to re-make away the shape of the first draft, the rough draft, the agony; I am afraid people will tell me that my stories have potential.
***
Potential. As if a child is an incomplete human being, not worth anything in their own right but valuable for what they will someday become. As if there is ever a point when a human being could be considered “complete.”
***
When I realized that what was different about me was not simply different, but queer, it was after I had been baptized. I have not asked God about it directly. He has not brought it to my attention. It rests between us, this unasked and unanswered question.
Every day God asks me, “Is my love sufficient?”
Every day I answer, “I don't know.”
It should be. I want it to be. It does not feel sufficient. I do not feel sufficient. But my feelings are not the whole of the matter. The truth has already been written down.
In Alaska, I dreamed of dancing in the palm of His hand. Visions of a cornfield and gathering storm clouds. A stone city, empty and sterile and dark.
And God said, “Let there be light.”
And God said, “You will tell stories.”
***
There is a very silly thing we Makers say to each other. We say—Trust the process. It turns out this is a thing Christians say to each other too.
***
The artist, from Station Eleven. Her name is Miranda. She should have drowned as a child, but she didn’t. As an adult she drew a book about a world’s slow death: An inevitable sinking into the sea. I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die. I do not know how her book ends, but I know she finished it before her world ended.
The world ends, and there is no rescue mission. But, there is a little girl—a little girl who decided to become an actor when she was eight years old—who carries this book, this story, into the new world. She carries this story with her until she stops acting and starts directing. Until she has the resolve to pull the knife out of the wound and let it bleed. When she no longer needs this story, she passes it on to another little girl.
This is the point of no return. I can taste it, cold and sweet like glacier melt, like the clear mountain river forcing its way between my teeth and into my throat and into my lungs. I no longer believe there is a difference between living and dying.
***
Knowing how to swim did not save me from drowning. A person saved me.
***
Saint John wrote, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
James Baldwin wrote, “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
God the Poet, God the Maker, God the Creator. Three ways to say the same thing. The reason I am able to believe that God loves me is that every day He makes me conscious of things I don’t see.
Storytelling is about conversation, communication, communion. These words sound similar, but they are not the same. History and context are crucial. I love words. There are infinite ways to say the same thing while also saying something new.
Why tell stories? I think, for me, telling a story has come to mean, “I love you.”
Why bother to make them good? That is an even easier question, with an even easier answer. I want everybody to understand that I mean them, I mean you, when I say, “I love you.”
***
What do you owe to the forces that create you? What do you owe to the forces that save your life? That drag you kicking and screaming out of the water and take your face in their hands and lift it to the sky and say, look! Look!
That say, gently but firmly, you are not telling this story.