What I Want Wants Me
Follow your bliss and all that jazz.
When I was young, as soon as I could talk, I made up stories and asked my mother to write them down for me. Most stories, still tucked away in my baby book, are only a couple of sentences long and always begin with Once Upon a Time. When I learned to spell, I began writing poems, first in a pink diary with a flimsy metal lock and key and then in a journal covered in stickers and friends’ autographs. My high school published one of my poems in our literary magazine.
Though I was an only child, I was never lonely. When my friends weren’t around, I spent time in an inner world that encompassed me. Even today I have a foot in two worlds, the one I live in inside my head and the one everyone else can see.
I also sang. Barbra Streisand and my six-year-old self belted song after song, keeping me company. A white cop murdered my father that same year. The way I processed it was by retreating to a safe cocoon spun with my words and my voice. Emotion discharged when I breathed out and created a melody. I started voice training when I was 10 years old and began performing in recitals. Some were successful, and some were humiliating.
My point is: I have been a writer and a singer my entire life. Unfortunately, I have also relied on outside validation to tell me what I should and should not pursue. So when Columbia University denied me admission to their MFA Creative Writing program, and I developed nodes on my vocal chords, this perceived lack of encouragement proved disastrous for me. I stopped doing the very things that sustained me because it felt frivolous to do so.
“How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumors and neuroses, succumbed to pain killers, gossip, and compulsive cell-phone use, simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to?” The War of Art. Steven Pressfield calls this “Resistance.”
That’s what it was like for me. For years, my life passed by with me tamping down my urges to write or sing like I tamp down bananas in my Vitamix. My life became a smoothy of deferred dreams, rage, confusion, depression, alcoholism, and self hate. When I sat to write, my chest would tighten, my mind would race and the words wouldn’t come. The same would happen when I would try to sing. Even when I was alone, I couldn’t take a deep breath and therefore I couldn’t make an agreeable sound. What was once my salvation now became my misery. Yet, a quiet voice within me would not let go of what I knew would help turn my life around.
Now, I sit here having lost agility as a writer and out of practice as a singer. Faced with the blank page, I flounder. But today I keep typing. Confronted with the sound of my voice, I shrink, ashamed. This is what I run from; this moment, here. But today I keep singing. Resistance tells me I have a limited vocabulary and boring phrasing; or my voice is too sweet sounding to be interesting. Repulsion and disappointment are like stones in the pit of my stomach. And, today, I keep writing and singing. No matter what.
I don’t think I’m alone in my struggles. I also think our deepest desires are the path given to us by God, Goddess, All That Is. My pen name is Risky Blossom because of a quote by Anais Nin, “And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” I want to make my living as a writer, songwriter and singer and I choose to show the work I do even when it isn’t perfect. And even if these passions don’t make money, I know I need to do them. For myself. Becoming good is a life long pursuit, so I hope you’ll read or listen with that in mind. But most of all, I hope you’ll join me by doing something you desperately want to do.
