Is doubt even a writer's worst enemy?

This post was sparked by Positive Writer's Writers Crushing Doubt contest, which deadlines on June 1, 2016.

One of the first jobs I applied for straight out of college at 19 was an opening for a speechwriter for the chair of a multinational advertising agency in the Philippines. To be considered, I had to draft a speech on women's suffrage. So I did. There were just two problems:

1) I had never written a professional speech in my life.
2) I had never cared for politics and must've been either absent or daydreaming when they discussed in history class the period leading up to women winning the right to vote.

Make that three problems. Google had not yet been invented, and as I didn't know where the nearest library might be in my parents' rural rice-paddy-converted community where I had moved back post-graduation, I clearly did not have the resources (translated: diligence) to research my speech.

Some time later I received a call to retrieve my writing sample. I asked the receptionist what the executive had said about my speech.

"He said, 'It's unacceptable,' " she said blandly.

Ah so. I took it as a sign that I was not put on this earth to be a speechwriter, and went on my way. Over the next two decades I landed jobs writing for a fertilizer corporation, a children's magazine, and after I immigrated to California to join my Mom two years after graduation, a small-town newspaper, a regional newspaper, and finally, the president of the Turlock campus of California State University and the chancellor of the Merced campus of the University of California.

Yup. Somehow despite my inauspicious beginning, I ended up ghostwriting speeches for campus executives for a good 10 years of my career. And not just their speeches, but memos, articles for publication, letters of commendation, condolence and recommendation, social correspondence, donor solicitation, sound bites for the press, tenure evaluations, blah blah blah. If they wanted something said on paper, I was their voice. Or rather, my voice was at their disposal. 

Two weeks on the job writing for the chancellor, who was an electrical engineer, he asked me to write a speech based solely on the PowerPoint slides he had presented two months before he'd hired me to a gathering of fellow engineers. The trade journal needed to print his speech, but he had delivered it off the cuff and now was pressed for time to meet the deadline. (And it didn't help that English is his second language—but that was job security for me.)

The slides were gibberish to this Literature major. There was a reference to a book in one of them, so I started there. I tracked down an online preview of the first few pages and the table of contents of that book, did a little mind-reading about what pithy points he might've extracted from it, and went from there. Where the slides were just too esoteric, I left blanks in the draft for him to fill in, which he gamely did.

Because that speech was one of a mountainous pile of tasks demanding my attention, there wasn't time to get angsty about it. If there had been, it may never have been written.

A deadline. That, it turns out, has been the antidote to any stirrings of doubt that might have poisoned my productivity as a professional writer. The longer I have to complete and turn in a piece of writing, the worse it is for me. Maybe that's why I habitually procrastinate—hmm, that could be another blog post:
"Is procrastination even a writer's worst enemy?"
I've noticed that a commonality among fledgling writers is the question of identity. "Am I a real writer?" Pishposh. Perpetually pondering this is a monumental waste of time. If you write, you are, and if you doubt that, just ask Jeff Goins at goinswriter.com. You might currently earn your living doing something other than writing, but identities are formed in layers. We shed or acquire those layers by choice or force of circumstances.

Another tripper-upper for writers: the need to Stage. "Before I can write brilliantly, I must have sharp pencils. Or a decluttered desk. Or a rented space in an office building. With white noise on the headphones. Or a sunlit table and mocha frappuccino at Starbucks. Or the beach. Or a laptop that doesn't freeze." So much bull. For the love of Gouda, get on with it already. Fuck the muse. (The last three sentences was a script I ran through my head each time I sat down to write. As mantras go, it wasn't very uplifting, but it got the job done.)

The most important thing we must have as writers is our own voice. With a voice, we have certainty. If we haven't developed a voice (because we are too timid to write furiously and passionately as though rabid dogs were chasing us), we can't convince ourselves, let alone the reader, that we know what the hell we're writing about.

Which brings me to how my story ends: I lost that job writing for the chancellor. And in ceasing to write for someone else, I found my voice. Yay me.

Faith and popcorn

If you want to appreciate something anew, take yourself back to when it wasn't the status quo. When the entire world hadn't heard about it. When there was no network, no written manual, no early adopters touting it on social media. Then ask yourself, "If it came to me now, would I have recognized its power to change my life? Would I have leapt without looking around to see who else was doing it?"

Not talking about my cellphone.
We just watched "Risen."

I grew up hearing about the persecutions, the lions in the arena, the trail of miracles witnessed firsthand by those who lived in those times. But Christianity was already an established, centuries-old tradition when I became a born-again Christian at 16 in a country predominantly Christian. Would I have chosen it for my personal belief system if it had been so new, so untested? With the dangers to life and limb looming over me? Knowing my skeptical and scaredy-cat nature, likely not. It would take a personal encounter like that of Saul on the road to Damascus (and like the fictional tribune in "Risen").

But still I choose it, every day. Because what I choose is not a religion or denomination or affiliation. I choose to keep a relationship with God, awaiting each new way the Divine chooses to reveal Spirit to my spirit. Sometimes it comes by way of a humbling moment, when the woman next to me in the theater, whom I had just judged as a bit of a glutton for the size of her popcorn bucket, pours popcorn into an extra cardboard tray and offers it to me.

Look for ways we are one, not how foreign I seem to you

Do you know why labels like "dumbass" and racist remarks are factually wrong? It's because they put a wedge between human beings that doesn't exist. It's a prefab wall, imagined by ignorant thought and spoken by a mindless mouth.

In the visible realm, the spoken word is only a spray of saliva droplets. Yet for all its misty constitution, it has the power to damage. Think of Agent Orange, the herbicidal weapon blamed for half a million Vietnamese children with birth defects. Careless words can be toxic.

Case study: Last night, getting off the dance floor, I heard a stranger call after me, "Sayonara."

Sounds innocent. Well intentioned, even. I considered the source: a young man, early 20s, among a group of exuberant 20-somethings who are a rare sight at the nightspot in town that caters to the mature crowd. (It even proclaims it on the outside wall.)

I can understand why he might have chosen to say it. I'm mistaken by the Japanese as one of them, so imagine how much more convincing my seeming Japaneseness looks to a white guy—the phrase "you all look alike" comes to mind.

Maybe he was seeking a connection. Maybe he meant something like, "Hey, I speak your language. I know one word, but at least I'm trying." Clumsy, but not uncommon in the younger set.

I pretended I hadn't heard. Because how it struck me in that moment wasn't kind.

I felt like while I had been enjoying myself among friends, someone had been sizing me up and putting me in a box with a label that looks different from those of the rest of the crowd. A big fat yellow label.

It was the first time I registered that I was among only three Asians there that night—literally a minority. And that's never a comfortable feeling when it's externally imposed. Not to mention it was the wrong label! I'm not Japanese, I'm Filipino. If you're gonna stick a label on me, at least get it right. If you don't want to make the effort to verify, shut up. If you don't know that Asia is a big continent with many, many different cultures, stay 100 feet away from me, because I'm just here to dance, and I'm not your f*cking high school geography teacher or cultural exchange student.

OK, rant over. Peaceful mind resumes.

What's that you say?

"To a hammer, everything looks like a nail." (attributed to everyone from Abraham Maslow to Mark Twain.)

To which I retort,

"Like a hammer, ethnicity can be used to build a solid structure, or whack somebody to death on the skull."

And I attribute this pithy quote to someone called vox_rowan, who left a comment on A Complete Guide to Hipster Racism.

As you can tell by now there's lots of baggage weighing me down about this. Immigrants like me often live through "start-up pain," as a friend of mine calls a new experience. Our lives in the United States are marked with episodes like the time my husband's side of the family had a houseguest from Arkansas who, on the ride to the house, categorically stated, "Like should stick with like." Then he met me, and was on the bus home the next day.

But I'd like to think that after living more than half my life here—nearly three decades now—the "otherness" of me is a non-issue. It is to me. It only becomes an issue when someone decides that the person I am is based solely on my ethnic (to them) appearance. I am not "ethnic" among "my people"—hello, I'm just another woman. Some people really ought to travel more often, and not just because cruise food is excellent. There is poetic justice in the fact that Americans in the Philippines will always be referred to as "the foreigners" no matter how long they've been expats. I recommend traveling to those people who use that term, too.

I don't mean we should all ignore the obvious details—that this person is tall, this one Asian, this one has two left feet. But do we have to open our mouths and make it the very first thing we say to someone? Could we maybe take two breaths, in and out, and refocus? Find something we have in common, even if it's just, "I'm here with my friends, too. We like to dance." Then we're not inadvertently putting distance between us even as we attempt to make small talk.

What makes this little case study a bit more nuanced is this: In the lead-up to last night's thought-provoking non-incident, I had been grappling with the yogic philosophy that we are all one. How can that be, I thought, when everything in my Christian upbringing had pounded in the exhortation to be "set apart" from the world, to keep my spirit sacred. The world, per my worldview, was just itching to soil my heavenly robe.

I get the oneness with God idea. My spirit is a shard of the divine, and when the container that is my body breaks, it will flow back to the Creator (Consciousness, in yogispeak). I asked my friend and meditation teacher, Dennis, about this failure of mine to understand the concept of oneness with all created beings.

To his credit, Dennis didn't launch into a sermon. He simply suggested that when I look at a person, I seek my Self in that person's eyes. That resonated with me. I get the Self with a capital "S" bit. I know there is a core in me that remains unsullied by circumstances, poor choices, and lapses into selfishness. Being reminded that if I have that core, other people do, too, set me at least on the outskirts of the town called Everyone is One.

Not long after I posed the question, I received a quite unexpected key to the city straight from the mayor. Coming out of a 15-minute meditation session about two months ago, I had opened my eyes halfway when a blanket of knowing wrapped itself around me.

I could see myself the way God sees me. That is the simplest way to put it. It was just a glimpse. Over in a nanosecond. But what a life-changing instant.

When I am being the person God sees me as, beloved beyond measure, fearless, radiating the very love I receive from the source of love, that's how I see other beings, too. There is no room in this perfect being for less than perfect relationship with all.

Too bad most of us who have had such a moment cannot extend it automatically for the rest of our lives. We have to do a little work called meditation to clear out the blinders, and that work must be done regularly. I hear some people are born knowing, having done the work in previous lifetimes, and some have practiced meditation so faithfully that going into a deep state has become a skill. 

But that's why labels and racist dismissals are factually wrong. Because they are so surface-based.