What Happens When You Put Yourself Out There?
More on being vulnerable and forcing ourselves to focus on positives of an action instead of the negatives.
Hello, you!
How are you? Me, I’m excited about having a restful weekend. Also excited about new clothes and breakthroughs in and out of writing. Here’s a sneak peek with no context:
My father was a child when I met him the third time: blue eyes, red skin and babbles of incoherent words. It was a cool Wednesday morning, but my thighs and the neckline of my boubou were sweaty. “Papa, welcome,” I said to him, pressing my wet left hand into his cool face. He flinched, cupping my fingers in his. He stretched out his hands for me to lift him from the booster seat. I put him on my hips, and hummed Oliver de Coque’s “father, father”. His mother, Mary looked at me with squinted eyes, perhaps curious about the tune.
“He seems to like you,” she said, folding napkins into squares.
“Of course he does,” I said, stopping short of telling her that I saw my father's red eyes behind his big blue eyes floating in a milky pool. She smiled.
The Smith’s were new in the neighborhood; they had come from San Francisco. Her husband had gotten a job with the government, an advisor or something, and she was an engineer; she explained that she was working with computers, joining a bank’s tech team at the end of the summer. I’d nodded as if I understood. This was the night before, when their truck arrived in front of their two storey house just by my small drooping bungalow. Mary — alone — had stood by the low fence hollering, “hello there, hello!” waving frantically. I’d peered through the curtains and seen her pale white skin turn orange under the street light. She seemed ghostlike at first, with her blonde hair and faded pink Ankara dress. We spoke briefly. She told me not to call her Mrs Smith: “It’s such a common name. Too common. Please call me Mary. Everyone calls me Mary, including my baby who’s only nine months old and can’t talk.” I chuckled because I couldn't say that I found this unusual. I'd love to meet your baby, was all I eventually said to ease the small silence growing in a night full of crickets and chirping life.
Moving on to some thoughts:
I had a conversation with my friend, Tosin recently about writing creative nonfiction. We discussed the downsides: how creative nonfiction is like running naked in the marketplace, allowing people mock you, examine you, know you, intimately. And it’s not a lie. Years ago, I wrote ‘Home’ and it was so good that it was a Medium Editor’s pick — which was good. But it was also so bad — for me — that I got all sorts of negative comments which I often laughed off, unsure of what to do with them, believing that they were born from a place of ‘concern’. LOL.
This letter is not just about creative nonfiction. It’s about everything that allows us to be vulnerable, like writing this letter, or shooting your shot, or applying for a job that you’re not qualified for. What happens when we do those things? Of course, we know there’s the good part: the good news, the recognitions, the acceptances, and that there’s the bad or not-good parts: the rejections, the mockery, the eye-rolling, etc. But what's worth focusing on? I'd usually say both, but I've been thinking a lot about being positive and hoping for the best, knowing that even if the best doesn't work out, what works out, works out for your good. I'm still thinking; here are two scenarios.
Someone, let's say X told me a story about an old friend he had. The old friend is well known and wealthy. They hadn’t spoken in over three decades, but one day, very recently, the old friend called him and they got catching up. Then, the old friend told/asked X that he wanted him to be MD at the Nigerian branch of his company — a company in the field X specialised in. X was shocked; importantly he felt seen. All these years, he'd been putting in the work, with(out) a thought about receiving any forms of recognition and one day an old friend singled him out to do something very, very important. I didn’t see the big deal at first, but then he said something that stayed with me:
“Things can happen on your behalf that you don’t know about, that you haven't actively or specifically worked towards.”
— Favour is better than labour and other stories. But it's false, to say that these things happen in a vacuum.
I relate to this because only a week ago, I was nominated for a big award that I never, ever, ever would’ve expected I’d get on. I didn't know that the prize existed or it's magnitude until my friend, Aanu DM’ed to say “This is huge. American Society of Editors ffs.” I was still just a bit indifferent until the editor who worked on the story sent me a thousand exclamation marks, congratulating me — she hadn’t herself known that I/the magazine was being considered for the prize. WIUN.
It dawned on me later on when I looked at the other stories in the longlist; I was like YO, this list has a story by Pemi Agudu, stories from the New Yorker and Paris Review.
It might seem a little like sheer luck, but it’s not. There’s hardly any overnight success. I worked hard and put myself out there, knowing that the worst that could happen was a rejection, someone or more telling me I was a terrible writer, that I would receive criticism calling my work elite and unrealistic, etc. Not for once did I think of the upsides: everything that’s happened since the story was accepted about a year ago. Someone recently asked me, did you know it would blow like that when you wrote it? Of course I didn't. I was too knee deep worrying about rejections to bother about that.
So my likely resolution is: no, not what’s the worst that can happen, what’s the best that can happen? 2020 mood and beyond.
Ope’s Reads
Tonight, I started reading poetry by Rumi. Soul food if you ask me (and anything that'll give me inspiration to finish up the current story I'm writing is a YES.)
Did you know, “a huge part of life comes down to acting. You change your accent as you move up socially. You feign confidence when you feel none. Once you make it, you do the inverse: feign bashfulness and self-doubt to avoid ruffling” - more on “My Counter Advice For Generation Z”
I read a lot of fiction: Bear by Naomi Ishiguro, Diana Athill's, Don't Look at Me Like That, The Trip by Wieke Wang — a beautiful story that explores cultural differences in relationships, Han Ong's “Javi” where a young immigrant teams up with a solitary elderly painter, and the two give each other a new lease on life.
What happens when children start parenting early on? Read here. How do you go into a person’s personal space and invade it? Read how one photo did that here.
PSA: Valentine’s Day is coming — literally tomorrow or today, depends on when you read this (your luck, if it has passed by the time you read this). Don’t get hung up on it/depressed for the wrong reasons — I know I sound like your Yoruba aunty, but I'm serious. It’s just one of those capitalist days. IT’S NOT EVEN A HOLIDAY. Ew. If something spicy does happen tomorrow, I want ALL the deets.
Love and light, my friend. Talk soon. ♥️