As an insecure millennial New Yorker, I once attended a rooftop party and wore (if memory serves) a dress shaped like a giant handkerchief and a scrubby sweater the color of burlap. It was a cold evening. There was a fire pit. I was talking with an acquaintance who, upon learning I wrote and studied poetry, asked me what I planned to do with that. 

I told him that I love the music of language, that I want to create poetry and share it with others through teaching. He said, “You know, I spend all week listening to people explain their reasons behind what they do, and it’s my job to interrogate those ideas and ask people to defend them. So I’ve gotten pretty good at telling a solid plan from one with no follow-through. And I’ve got to tell you, I don’t really believe what you’re saying.” 

I was stunned, perplexed. I probably said, “Wow” or “Yowza.” I may even have apologized for failing to wield my beloved language more convincingly. 

Later that night, when I found myself next to him at the fire pit, I said, “Hey, just wanted to check with you after our conversation: are we good?” 

“Yeah,” he said and took a slug of his drink, as if he’d already forgotten workshopping my ambition. 

Time has blunted much of the sting I felt that night and, in ways, proven the frank party man right. Nearly six years later, my existential questions about art and my role in it—simmering, no doubt, beneath my earnest justification—had metastasized. I had lost touch with the passion I spoke about and doubted if it was ever there at all. 

And so I did what any impressionable creative who likes yoga and Brené Brown would do: I picked up The Artist’s Way.

In the book (which I also wrote about here), author Julia Cameron asks you to designate a Monster Hall of Fame. You name the people whose criticism, meanness, or neglect has supplied a boulder or two to your creative blockage. 

When I initially inaugurated folks into my own Monster Hall of Fame, I didn’t think to include Mr. Fire Pit, but even now, I’m not sure he belongs. Although his words hurt, and this memory certainly haunted me through the years that followed, I don’t consider him monstrous. 

This was a person I barely knew, who stood to gain nothing from critiquing my motivations. I believe he spoke without venom and treated my words as I have sometimes treated those of my students and fellow writers: critiquing rhetoric or reasoning without cushioning my comments, forgetting that the recipient may receive them as insults. (The Apostle Paul’s encouragement to “speak the truth in love” comes to mind.) 

Cameron claims that we doubt and resist our artistic callings because we’ve lost touch with the child within, who creates beyond the dictates of reason or vocation.  

Children gravitate toward what they like. They’re far more curious and far less self-conscious than we are. They crave novelty, play, and creativity, while we adults—with our big, serious lives—tend to repel these pleasures, suffused as they are with silliness and risk. 

What Cameron (and your therapist) wants you to know is that you never stopped wanting these things. You just stopped pursuing them happily, or at all.

To reconnect with that artist-child within, The Artist’s Way asks you to—among other things—reflect on your favorite childhood pastimes, list “imaginary lives” you’d live if you could, and wish for 20 things as fast as your pen can fly.

Over the three-month course, my silly lists of favorites and wishes and coulda-shouldas began casting shapes, at once familiar and strange, in front of my vision. I untethered my stated desires from my actual ones, my actual life from my ideal life. Then, after some pruning, I began braiding those lives together again. 

I’d begun to wonder if “being a poet” was just an identity I adopted because I was decent at this undersung art form and needed a grown-up costume that fit. This is both true and untrue, as the non-monster man’s assessment was. 

I do love poetry. I wrote it spontaneously, joyously as early as kindergarten. But I could’ve chosen a few other pursuits, either in tandem with or instead of poetry, as a grown-up. Maybe I would’ve sounded surer that night if I had. Maybe not.  

That’s the real issue here. I couldn’t convince Colonel Whatshisname because a core of ambivalence runs through nearly everything I do. Like a river overtaking its own banks, this rushing stream has strengthened with age. I feel less sure than ever why I do what I do or want what I (claim to) want or like what I (claim to) like. Justifying my words or actions, however benign, can induce wild, ruthless second-guessing. 

How could I prove something to a veritable stranger that I hadn’t yet proven to myself? He exposed the uncertainty that gnawed at the word-drunk poet I was at my best moments.

To paraphrase Julia Cameron, certainty can be a costly illusion. And doubt, I’m finding, can be a kind friend. It was with me at that party. I doubted Johannes Rooftop’s receptiveness toward me, I believe, before I launched into my poetry defense. I doubted myself. I doubted poetry’s ability to support my dreams. 

And what happened next? I kept writing, poetry and otherwise. I read. I taught. In fits and starts, with much hand-wringing. With much joy.

A poet from my Hero Hall of Fame, Anne Carson, recently contributed to the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-a-Day email blast. “O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love,” beautiful and brief, lingered not nearly as long as Carson’s explanation for the poem’s origin:  

“I have not much to say. It’s one of my more self-evident works, and I don’t like covering things with a lot of exegesis. Although I do enjoy using the word exegesis. Thank you and goodnight.”

The next time I feel compelled to justify or defend my ambitions, perhaps I’ll just repeat this. Although I don’t love the word exegesis. I’ll pick one I like better. Flume. Brandish. Exit.