My picture experience the other night was interesting. I’d like to use the word “enlightening,” but I don’t know that if it taught me anything more than that there are some things I probably still need to deal with. To be less vague, I found quite a few photos of my first marriage that I thought I’d chucked, and it stirred some things within me that I imagine I’ll be working through in the next few weeks.
In my search, I stumbled upon this photo of me at a journalism awards ceremony a decade-and-a-half ago. That night I bid on a Boston Globe coffee mug and won it for $8. I had it for years. Did I really want to be a journalist?
I took a News Writing 101 class as an elective for my degree my junior year of college. In high school, I had always wanted to be on the paper, but didn’t know how to ask, even though I was in the top 3% of my class and took every honors course offered, except for physics. Asking for what I’d like or want — or even need — has never been a strong suit of mine.
The editor of my college paper came to me because of an article I’d written for the class and asked me if I’d be the news editor for the paper that next year. After my previous post about awards, it shouldn’t surprise you to hear that I was stunned. I told myself that it must be because it was a small college and they didn’t have a lot of choices.
Eight months later as I sat in this beautiful hotel to collect my award for a story ironically written about how my college had fallen off the top ten best schools list, I was in awe of the whole experience. “Maybe I could be a journalist,” I thought.
I remember driving by The Globe on my way to the children’s museum in Boston when Babs first learned to walk and I needed the sanity of getting out of the house and she needed to run. I was writing for a little paper that was more like a journal, really, funded by John Templeton as an experiment.
I remember editing something written by biochemist and Dean of Clare College at Cambridge University Sir Arthur Peacock. Sir John Templeton. Sir Arthur Peacock. It was surreal. And I didn’t pay attention to it. I ignored it as a coping strategy.
I e-mailed Frans de Waal at Emory University. He e-mailed me back. I e-mailed Dr. Bernie Siegel. He called me. I e-mailed the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman. Yep. He e-mailed me back, too.
There was this sense that I was having some out-of-body experience, like it wasn’t really me interacting with all of these incredible people. I remember when my boss (the managing editor) told me that Arthur Peacock had called him to thank him for the wonderful job we had done editing his piece — that I had done. I stopped dead in my tracks. “Oh, shit,” I thought. “He actually read that?!”
I remember my boss looking at me sadly at one point and saying, “Angie, you have no idea how amazing you are; do you?”
And the truth is: I don’t. I don’t think I’m amazing or anything more than just another person on this planet. Does that mean that I don’t believe in myself? Is it supposed to be this way, or am I supposed to understand on a deeper level my own uniqueness? Not separateness, but difference — an appreciation for my talents and unique, irreplaceable soul.
I look at this picture, and I see a pretty, 22-year-old girl with big hair and enough talent to garner her an award right out of the chute.
I think that I have a decent amount of self worth. So how does that idea co-exist with the disbelief I seem to have as it relates to my own talents and being deserving of awards? Or do I downplay what is recognized about me to try to limit jealousy and criticism?
I tell people that I don’t like to write. Yet I’ve been writing for the better part of my life and have funded several cool things (like the trip to Disneyland earlier this year) with the proceeds from my freelance work.
I’m not sure how I ended up so contemplative on this Friday evening. Oh, that’s right. Those photos. The photos that have been sitting there patiently waiting for me to come and deal with them.
I don’t know what the answers are, but I find myself with quite a few questions. Here’s hoping peace and enlightenment for you in the journey of your own questioning. Maybe the answer is truly, as Rainer Maria Rilke says, to just live it.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.”
