I used to write, 2 blogs a week every week for my mom to read.
Ha, i am kidding halfway.
I was blessed with the church lady fan club. The group of family friends from church who religiously read every blog I released.
They hugged me and kissed my cheek every Sunday and told me I would be someone important someday. “You’re a writer, baby. A good one”, they would add.
I’d capture moments with my new DSLR camera that I was determined to operate on manual and had zero + skills on using.
I was resourceless but full of stories, it’s like I spent my days minding my own business and the life God handed me purposed that I experienced a blog worthy moment.
So I spilled my guts.
My Dad would share “another hit from my baby girl!” on his facebook page and his friends from his small hometown would tell him “how proud he should be.”
But Social media evolved and I lost my mojo. The drive to share the stories and moments that popped up in my week and day and life. The moments that captured me so tight and didn’t let go until i released it from my fingertips into the ether abyss.
Yet I still felt inadequate to hear good feedback. I wanted the applause of strangers who didn’t know me instead. I wanted people who didn’t know me to see my words and think they were noteworthy. Maybe then i would feel like I was a halfway writer.
Once a lady commented on a blog, “I love your words. Cheers from across the pond!”
I was so proud I nearly printed it out and taped it to my wall. Finally someone besides my parents + their friends thinking I’m decent at this.
But the next day would come and the need for approval through this space seemed unsatisfied. The internet resources boomed and told me here is a million ways to be successful at all this. I would buy in and the same feeling would creep back saying that I really wouldn’t ever become anything with this blog thing. Blogs are so 2012.
What’s the point of a website, a story to write, a moment to share? Who really needs it?
I even revamped the website and let it sit idle while my feelings never stopped moving up and down and around with ideas that stories are good but the old soul in me was one that would die alone. The world is new and stories are for the old. The people without screens and buckets peas to pick. For those with rocking chairs and porches and nothing better to do but talk.
I recently moved to a small town. The town that raised my Daddy. To land that is rich with my native american ancestry. Un-fancy yet qualified to tell you who you are. A place where if the soil could speak it would tell you the war that Andrew Jackson ensued upon it. It would tell you the sheer devastation of the depression and the connection that the trauma gave back to a community who needed just an ounce, a glimmer of hope.
It may tell you about the families that built homes on it to survive with timber and dirt.
It might tell you about the day my grandfather fell asleep in the bathtub and nearly missed his own wedding.
It might tell you about the day my daddy was born. Or the day my grandfather cut his own hand off and ended up driving himself to hospital due to a passed out cousin driver traumatized by the “cut” on his hand or lack thereof.
It may tell you about church singings and family reunions that managed to last from the turn of one century to another because family roots run deep no matter how many “once removed’s” you are from one another.
Maybe it took moving here, living in a space of loneliness without my people and community from back home. Maybe it took driving the roads that normally just led me to my grandparents front door. Maybe it took lunch with my cousins here and the hours of stories we told about people we never knew to remind me… approval isn’t the point.
The story is.
The story that one person can be moved by, even if I share their last name.
Take it from me as I sit in a season so new and uncomfortable I cry nearly every day, we all need stories. Maybe we read them from screens now instead of while we pick peas on the front porch. But we need them. Because a story gives us the meat. But it also gives us the other side.
The side we all want to land on: HOPE.
I don’t know about y’all but I need it back.
So because of that, the approval need is gone.
The need for hope is here, I just pray God gives it to us—- one story at a time.
Let’s get back to it, folks!