You cannot rise if you never fall.

The only perception that matters is the one you have of yourself.

Self portrait, March 2021

I live a double life.

It’s not a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation, thankfully, more of a secret part of me that doesn’t show up in my normal workaday existence.

For ten years now, I have been a closeted writer. I have submitted my reflections and essays and even book proposals for publication, and there is a small segment of the world that has become acquainted with my innermost thoughts and feelings.

When I began writing for publication, I lived by the assumption, the expectation, that my closest family and friends would rally with me. I imagined they’d ask me about my creative work, encourage me, even support it by reading what was deemed good enough for public consumption by my editors.

Quickly, I learned this was not going to be the case.

At first, I would offer my enthusiasm in conversation, but a variety of responses taught me that the people with whom I was sharing the deepest part of me either didn’t believe me or weren’t interested in knowing my most authentic self.

A typical interaction might begin on a lunch date with a friend. She asks me, “What’s new with you?” which I interpret as an open-ended invitation for sharing the ways I have blessedly begun working on The Book of My Heart. “I am on chapter five,” I tell her, and she slowly nods. I continue, “It took me several years just to get to the point of creating a chapter outline, so the fact that I am in the thick of writing the first draft feels so good.”

She doesn’t congratulate me. Not much. She forms a forced smile, then squeaks, “Well, that’s good.” Nothing more. She takes another bite of her food and averts my gaze.

I want to tell her more, but I sense that is not the direction she’d like to go here. In the past, I have written on hard topics, I know, such as grief and the frustrations of raising a medically complex child. These are not the types of discussions people want to engage in during a casual meal. Therefore, I have mostly learned to avoid speaking about my work. Mostly.

From time to time, the topic will turn up, however. A few years ago, I attended a Christmas party for the company my husband, Ben, worked for at the time. As I gathered with his coworkers and their partners around the table, each stranger offered the expected question to break the ice: “What do you do?”

I was last to share, and I said, “I am a writer.” No one said a word. I glanced around the table as they sipped their wine, cleared their throats, and looked around at anything, anyone, except for me. Immediately, embarrassment and regret arose in me. Maybe they think I’m one of those wannabe writers, I thought. Maybe they don’t realize I’m a published writer, a real one.

“I’m a published author,” I continued. Still, no response. A few nods in my direction, but the tension was palpable, and I still didn’t understand why. One person politely asked, “What do you write about?” This was the dreaded question, the one I avoided, but I answered honestly. “Grief mostly. And other topics on Christian spirituality.”

Conversation killer. It dead-ended there. People stood from their seats, excused themselves to the appetizers and bar, and I was left in the wake of perceived rejection. Or real rejection, I wasn’t sure which.

Because this has been my overall experience when speaking about what I do - and what I do spills from who I am - I no longer share about my creative work. Not with people who live in my neighborhood or at family gatherings or when at dinner with friends. Only here, only in this space.

When a reader approaches me at a live event at which I am speaking, I am baffled at the ways they offer feedback on my writing. I forget they are talking about me, about an article I wrote maybe five years ago or a book published when I was in my early thirties. Surely they must mean to say this about someone else. Surely it’s not me.

This is why I doubt myself. It’s where the Inner Critic has her heyday. If the Jeannie who cooks for her family of seven, washes their dirty underwear, wipes their noses, fills out medical paperwork, and drives them to hang out with friends is just an ordinary woman with an ordinary life, then I guess I will play that game.

Maybe I am ordinary. I’m okay with that. But I also know that I am a writer. My imagination has always been my inner sanctum, since early childhood. It has been my escape, my form of dissociation, my means of conjuring a life far removed from the one I really live.

It is painful to know you have to keep a secret you don’t really want to hide, especially from those who claim to know you best and love you most. But I have, for many years.

This is my form of falling, of failing. I question everything I put to the page on a daily basis. Will anyone care? Who reads this drivel, anyway? Why do I keep doing this? There’s no point. And so on.

I tell myself these things, because I desperately want them to be fallacies. I have sought the validation from the people I have known most of my life, and there is none. So I am learning to build myself, to construct a realistic view of who I am and what may be a true talent - writing - from intrinsic belief, not external affirmation.

It still stings, though, because I really am finishing up chapter five of my memoir, which consumes time that I used to spend on other, visible things, like washing dishes or getting my hair cut. Holing up in your home office when everyone else is at school or work doesn’t easily translate into evidence of productivity.

The hidden ways we weave what matters most to us pave the way for our reconstruction. I am rebuilding myself, my life, and I am doing so by allowing myself to fall in the eyes of others, maybe even in the eyes of the world.

Because I know that I cannot rise if I never fall.

YouTube short "You Cannot Rise if You Never Fall"