Show, Don’t Tell.

Did you know China restricts TikTok to show children only educational material?

Is that true?

I could look it up.

I just learned that I didn’t understand what woke meant.

I do now.

Because a friend I adore, with whom I jumped on a trampoline in my bedroom just a week or two ago, shared a TikTok on Facebook, now I know what “woke” means:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRo4mdpg/

The most important thing I learned, earning an MFA in the art of creative nonfiction…

I have a Masters in the Fine Art of Creative Truth, y’all.

My therapist laughed when I said I don’t lie, I tell the truth creatively.

And I saw my degree in a whole new way.

My skill set, which I felt so conflicted about using before…is the art of using fiction to create the experience of truth.

Show, don’t tell.

In order to exchange ideas, we must feel free to mess up.

If we are free to mess up, we can collaborate.

People aren’t geniuses.

Genius happens when free minds collaborate.

Did you know writing is only about six thousand years old?

Did you know wealthy men in mesopotamia six thousand years ago realized they could use the written word to manipulate illiterate people?

I read the Bible in college as an honors student, just before I almost gave up on life.

What I remember most about that class, is not that I almost flunked it.

Building tension by telling you the opposite of what you expect.

I could make it funny now, or I can turn it sad.

In that moment of built tension, you were vulnerable.

With me.

I was vulnerable and you were engaged, so you felt vulnerable with me.

You felt compassion.

Com means with; passion means powerful feeling.  You felt my feelings with me.

We were telepathically linked by the magic of the digital written word…

Thoughts made visible.

That’s all writing is.

Thoughts made visible so they can be repeated by another, who never needs to meet the original thinker.

The Original Thinker.

Creative Writing is the art of becoming an Original Thinker.  A Creator.

An influencer.

Someone who amplifies thoughts by having many minds, in many voices, repeat them…exploring them…collaborating and creating genius.

Genius is not rare.

Diamonds are not rare.  Their value is completely inflated, and those who own them want to keep their value.

You own your own genius.

And it works best in free collaboration.

Too much freedom can paralyze, make it impossible to decide.

So we live our lives, never knowing which moment will be our last.

If I die in my sleep tonight, it will be with a smile on my face because I spent my day playing with my children and loving my partner.

The grief is always there to catch us when the next Beloved falls.

Great heaving quakes hiccup into sighs.

Then we’re meant to rest enfolded in the arms of someone who loves us.

I tried really hard to be an atheist.

But I’ve held a grieving daughter in my arms as her father.  And I told a mother how her son was murdered as he showed me, when I meant to only have fun with my cards and a new friend…and she told me she already knew those details and showed me a photo of her son’s face.

Just before the second time I almost gave up on life, I flunked my World Civilizations Honors seminar, changing the course of my life.

The one moment from that class still so vividly emblazoned in my mind 23 years later, is of another chubby white girl with an A-line bob in Walmart clothes loudly, proudly telling our professor, “I’m not buying it!”

He’d just finished a two day lecture on historical theory about the original writers of the Bible, and showed in the Old Testament, which we read for class, evidence of a priestly class writing one style, and a couple other styles, irrelevant at present.

“I’m hearing it, but I’m not buying it!”

She and I,  potential future Karen’s of America…she was raised to believe the Bible was the literal word of God, and I was…not.

I was not the Karen in that moment.

I have my Karen moments.  I’ve learned to love my inner Karen, and someday soon I’ll write about why but for now, let’s conclude this telepathic journey with 🥰 to that adorable teen who stood up for her faith against the elitist educator who makes so little, he, like me, and maybe her, will likely die in student loan debt.

I could simplify this story by pretending I’m talking about myself in the third person.

But why?

I miss that girl. I want to know how the last 23 years went for her.

And I want to know if she votes.

Did her college adventure change her faith?

Does she have kids?

Does she buy them bulletproof backpacks and cry at work?

My mother was 23 when my father tried to murder her, with the gun his sister sold him, in 1984.

I haven’t read the Bible in 23 years.

I am Pagan, and proud of it. I bought the most recent, best rated translation of the Bible this year.

It’s not my most important goal in life, reading the Bible.

I want to understand my mother. She grew up singing gospel in a church where girls weren’t allowed to wear pants or cut their hair.

She converted to Buddhism in California when she was 23. The United States Air Force flew her from Andrew’s Air Force Base to a base in Death Valley, where they saved her life with blood transfusion and surgery.

In 1984 I turned 3.

I’m playing with the idea of reinterpreting Orwell’s 1984 as a graphic memoir.