On Fear and Making Space for Others

Nikki Giovanni’s early poetry inspires me.

It inspires me because I think it’s pretty bad. I have zero poetry books published myself, so take my assessment of her early work with a grain of salt, but I derive so much inspiration from the fact that one of my faves once published poetry that pales in comparison to what she would eventually produce. Yet and still, she is now a household name and poetry legend.

To quote the kids these days, she is #goals.

Recently, I’ve been reflecting a lot on fear and how facing my fears can open up space for others to do the same. My motivation for facing my own fears is intrinsic; while I certainly hope my journey inspires others, I’m still in the midst of it and so I am simply living through my own story right now. At the same time, the artists who are candid and vulnerable about their fears and how they faced them inspire me most.

Ooh child, things are gonna get easier / ooh child, things are gonna get brighter

After I went to see the Tupac biopic that came out last year, All Eyez on Me, I came home and went on an two hour Wikipedia dive into the life of Tupac. I think that biopics unintentionally show more than they think they do. People are multifaceted, and often hold contradictory beliefs, sincerely, as I do. I think making room for our heroes to be imperfect is immensely fascinating, liberating even. When we hold space for our heroes as flawed, we can better understand them as influential human beings. Still hugely influential, but real. Real enough to relate to, and all the more reason to emulate them. I know Tupac said “the truth is/ there ain’t no hope for the future,” but I’m not sure he really believed that. In college, we talked so much about nihilism in the black community during that era, but I don’t think that nihilism fully captures the zeitgeist of Tupac’s time. In his own words, he also said that he hoped to be the brain that sparked someone’s else’s genius, and in more ways than he’ll ever know, he was.

I fear that my words will not be meaningful. For us, black people in America, words have to mean something. I think of one of my favorite podcaster’s (Crissle from The Read) rightfully angry insistence that words mean things; if they don’t, what else do we have? We have been promised so much through words, we have had to take so much on faith, and as Martin Luther King, Jr. told us, not even necessarily on good faith, as our nation has repeatedly written checks that it cannot (or chooses not to) cash. To my people, words mean everything because they hold the promise of the future, shoot, a future at all. I know that my words hold power, and so to be a writer can be a scary calling.

In the face of all that, I’m reminding myself that the only way to get over a fear is to face it. Quite frankly, I’m tired of telling people that I’m scared of pursuing my writing career. To truly develop this nascent career into something that burgeons into something that might resemble success frightens the shit out of me, to use the common parlance. At the same time, I recently saw this quote that said “The grass is greener where you water it.” I spent two years of my life building a company out of nothing. Nothing! I just had a skillset and an idea and a whole lot of gumption to stand up in front of people and tell them that I was a real-deal consultant. And ultimately, it went better than I could have dreamed. The grass in that area of my life flourished because that was where I was watering it.

I’m finally ready to turn my attentions to attempting to be a writer for real for real. I was listening to Gretchen Rubin on a podcast once, and she said that she walked away from law when she realized that she would rather be a failed writer than a successful lawyer. It’s time for me to try and (maybe) fail. Ta-Nehisi Coates said that his dad used to tell him, “I don’t know how things will go when I get up. But I do know how things will go if I stay sitting down!”

I can’t control what the outcome of pursuing my writing dreams will be. All I know is that I want to be the type of person who makes the jump.